The French unit of Compagnie des Machines Bull SA has priced its products, the Escala range, to undercut IBM Corp’s tags by up to 17%. Joined at the hip on the symmetric multiprocessing development work, the two have cut loose from each other to produce and market the technology. Bull is pitching a dual-processor minitower Escala M201 with 64Mb RAM, 2.2Gb disk and a two-user AIX 4.1 licence with a guaranteed PowerPC 604 upgrade at $37,800, about 17% less than IBM Corp’s G30 functional equivalent which costs $45,300. A similarly-configured two-way Escala D201 deskside is $59,700, against IBM’s $70,500 J30, while a rack-mounted Escala R201 drawer, with the same memory configurations, is $76,000 compared with IBM’s $84,000 R30. European pricing will reflect the same price differential, Bull says. The company says it will offer a greater range of Escala upgrade opportunities from its re-badged RS/6000 DPX/20 line than IBM plans to offer its own RS/6000 base. Bull is depending on three things. Firstly its ability to turn its OEM relationships into volume sales, secondly, the build-up of indirect channels and thirdly differentiation from IBM, especially in the US, where it is at the same time cutting back in an attempt to regain profitability.
