Their boards and their visions may be compatible, but their computers certainly aren’t: the announcement late yesterday that the Leeds Permanent Building Society is to merge with the National & Provincial to create – The Leeds sounds like bad news for one or other of the mainframe suppliers; the Leeds is a major IBM Corp ES/9000 user and is working on a massive DB2 project, and the National & Provincial is one of Unisys Corp’s biggest customers in the UK with an A17 and an A16, and a U6000 Unix machine – but the Leeds also has two A17s that run a financial services package.
