Austec Ltd last week launched a value-added reseller programme that it expects will reduce hardware to the status of a commodity. A software developer or reseller joins the programme by choosing from one of three hardware categories and pays an annual fee in monthly installments for the Ace Cobol development environment tools, recently renamed RM/Master since Austec’s acquisition of Ryan MacFarland Inc. Category A includes single user machines that run Xenix, MS-DOS or OS/2; category B includes any non-proprietary Unix machines, 80386-based Xenix machines, or low-end proprietary machines; and category C covers all the large proprietary machines such as those from Pyramid Technology. The charge for Category A is $3,000 a year in the US and slightly more throughout the rest of the world; category B machines have an annual fee of $6,000; and category C, $10,000 per annum. Austec hopes to create its own value-added resellers through this programme, encouraging software developers to start their own businesses and port applications that they may have developed for particular vertical markets to a wide range of different hardware platforms. The message that Austec will be pushing as it starts a major publicity and advertising campaign for this new move is that applications are the important factor for users now and that the reseller rather than the hardware manufacturer is now the dominant player, – and increasingly so as hardware prices fall.
