Fujitsu Ltd has struck a new agreement with Siemens AG for the marketing of Fujitsu’s mainframes in West Germany according to Newsbytes sources in Tokyo. The newswire claims that Siemens will this time market the M-series mainframes – with Fujitsu’s rewrite of IBM’s MVS operating system – under the Fujitsu name. Last time around, Siemens presented the machines as the top-end models of its 7.000 line and renamed the OSIV operating system BS3000. Fujitsu hopes to rebuild its business in West Germany with the new MSP-E20 operating system, which is its first pass at a system to match IBM’s Enterprise Systems Architecture and MVS/ESA (CI No 1,198). Siemens stopped offering BS3000 at the beginning of 1986 after it learned of the disputes between IBM and Fujitsu over the MSP-E20 release of the operating system, and subsequently merged its IBM-compatible business with that of BASF AG to create Comparex Informationssysteme GmbH. Now that the dispute with IBM has been settled at arbitrati on, Fujitsu believes that it has persuaded Siemens to return to the IBM business. Fujitsu will reportedly dispatch technical support staff to Munich to handle user support this autumn.
