It appears likely that IBM Corp’s RS/6000 division will take over the Power Personal Systems Division’s Peripheral Component Interconnect bus-based, PowerPC Reference Platform-compliant machines running SunSoft Inc’s Solaris Unix into its product line, which is currently comprises only Micro Channel Architecture, AIX-only machines. Such a move would fulfill the requirement that it have an equivalent server to market alongside the Solaris client system that its Power Personal arm is preparing. The machine or machines will need to be fitted with the PCI bus externally, as well as internally – current RS/6000s use Micro Channel and EISA data traffic systems. From Power Personal Systems’ point of view, putting Solaris on such a box will be relatively simple. It is currently finalising the OEM arrangement with SunSoft that has been in the making for some months which will allow it to market the Solaris implementation on its own PowerPC clients, and says there’d be little effort to get the operating system up on a PCI bus RS/6000 server. And, presumably, all the other operating systems the Power Personal arm is preparing, among them Windows NT, OS/2 and Taligent, could follow just as easily too: it was assistant general manager for worldwide RS/6000 marketing Jeff Mason’s desire for Solaris that led to the talks with Sun Microsystems Inc in the first place. And, as IBM will get rights to Solaris source code under the agreement – which is now expected to close around the end of the month – the company could, if it wished, put a Solaris implementation up on the Micro Channel-based RS/6000s too. SunSoft certainly wouldn’t have any bones about that. As you’d expect however, the situation is more complicated at Big Blue. The Power Personal Systems Division is all about hardware. It is putting all the software it can up on its boxes to make them more attractive. The RS/6000 unit, on the server side of the company, is still saddled with AIX. Only if AIX were spun out or otherwise disengaged from the hardware business model could it pursue the same kind of any-operating system-you- want strategy, IBMers theorise.
