It Looks like the doubts we expressed over the continued tie up between Amdahl Corp and Foster City, California-based nCube Corp were right on the mark (CI No 2,593). According to today’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X, the Sunnyvale company no longer sells the nCube hardware under its Xplorer 2000 brand name, and nCube has confirmed that it is now suing Amdahl over the aborted deal in Santa Clara County – Amdahl’s home base. Under the terms of the agreement, nCube was to provide the massively parallel technology, Oracle Corp its Oracle7 database and Information Builders Inc its EDA/SQL query software (UX No 480). Amdahl added mainframe support options and did the software integration. But according to one source, the agreement had barely got off the ground before Amdahl changed its mind and went to Cray Research Inc instead. Amdahl is now positioning the Xplorer 2000 name as a hardware-independent brand name, but admits it will apply the tag in the future to the Cray Superserver 6400, which it is already selling into the decision support marketplace against IBM’s SP2, still using Oracle and Information Builders Inc software, and apparently calling it the AS 6400, which doesn’t sound as if it will go down too well with IBM Corp. Amdahl spokesman Richard Williams said that the Sparc-based Cray hardware offered parallel processing without the hassle of massively parallel processing, and said there would be a 50% increase in performance later this year (to 90MHz from 60MHz SuperSparcs) and a further performance upgrade to UltraSparcs next year. The Crays also fit more comfortably with Amdahl’s lower-end Sparc-based symmetric multiprocessors it takes OEM from Sun Microsystems Inc. Amdahl sold only one or two nCube machines which are now being substituted with Cray hardware. It’s a company some have considered notoriously careless with its partner relationships – only last month Amdahl’s Encore Computer Corp storage subsystems deal also fell apart. NCube would say only that its suit against Amdahl was meritorious.
