In searching for a partner to establish the low end of its PowerPC product line, Groupe Bull found Motorola Inc offering better price-performance than IBM Corp, which led Bull to conclude its recent agreement with the former, said Armand Malka, Bull’s vice-president of Unix systems. For me, this accord was intended to define the low end of the product line, and I consulted with a certain number of companies, including IBM, Malka said. I had already established a number of criteria for these products, including configurability, price and manufacturability. The strategy of Motorola for low-end systems was deliberate; they had decided to put all of their resources into them, including their PowerPC platform. They were determined to increase volume. Malka says Motorola has targeted low-end PowerPC sales of between 350,000 and 500,000 units next year, adding that if Motorola pushes this strategy of making the PowerPC a commodity business system, the market will take off. The price-performance differential between Motorola and IBM showed up in the prices for their respective low-end systems, which were introduced at Unix Expo in New York last week. Motorola came in at $3,480, while IBM’s P40 had a tag of $3,990. Furthermore, Malka indicated that Bull’s strategy with IBM for the PowerPC version of the RS/6000 will depend on what PPS [Power Personal Systems] does with low-end systems. Obviously, if they don’t build low-end systems, they won’t be building low-end servers. We wanted to be able to invest more on the mid-range systems and we needed somebody to commit themselves to the low end, he said. Bull’s accord with Motorola goes further than its simple OEM pact with IBM, which has Bull supplying symmetric multiprocessing components: I can buy whatever I need from Motorola, components, boxes, boards, whatever I need, he said. Bull and Motorola now plan to work on mid-range product development together, he said.
