The mainframe market of the 1990s is beginning to look such a low growth business to IBM that the company’s top medium range planning priority is to find additional ways of generating revenue from its customers. The SuperVendor concept described in CI No 1,004 gives an idea of the company’s thinking, but before it goes the whole hog, the company is likely to make a pitch for the small but fast-growing disaster recovery business. Soundview Financial, the former Gartner Securities, certainly believes an entry is likely, and the move would be relatively uncontroversial in the US because there are only two substantial players, Sunguard Data Systems, whose main business it is, and a division of Comdisco Inc. Between them, they have the lion’s share of the estimated $150m a year US business. More controversial is that accepting service from IBM would mean that Armonk would gain an even more intimate insight into the customer’s business – after all, the back-up applications have to be run occasionally to prove the system, and IBM would quickly see where an extra million bucks of equipment would ease a bottleneck. Gossip is that IBM is thinking in terms of linking the customer to disaster data centres via T-1 or even fibre optic lines for dumping the updates over there – and these days, disaster recovery is a very different business from the one first conceived, which was very much batch-oriented. The users who need it most today are those with enormous transaction processing loads who will be out of business if the system goes down for long.
