An agreement which will see Unisys Corp’s systems integration group resell and develop applications for Tandem Computers Inc’s ServerWare database, OLTP and clustering software from the second quarter of next year is just the tip of the iceberg according to the Blue Bell, Pennsylvania company. The two are already discussing a broader relationship which could eventually see Unisys leverage the NT-oriented ServerWare software and ServerNet hardware interconnect across its own SMP server lines. The two are rumored to have been talking about such a deal for more than a year though nothing’s more than talk at this stage. Under the new agreement Unisys will develop applications using ServerWare technologies, and sell those applications, plus ServerWare, on the home-grown and third party NT-based Intel SMP servers it offers through its systems integration business. Unisys hasn’t actually licensed ServerWare technology from Tandem but says it will put the software up on its own servers, including the Pentium Pro Clearpath and other NT-based SMP servers where required. The deal is a development of an agreement signed in October which will see Unisys’ transport software packages being sold on Tandem’s massively parallel Himalaya systems, starting with the Customer Management System (CI No 2,974). The two companies are also discussing the joint development of solutions to support Tandem’s Internet Transaction Processing strategy. The Cupertino, California company is supposed to announce large scale data warehousing solutions as part of this strategy in the spring. ServerWare is the name Tandem is giving to the software it is stripping from its NonStop Himalaya range of parallel servers to run on NT servers. It does not require the ServerNet interconnect to be present. ServerWare products will include an NT version of the NonStop SQL clustered database, transaction services, the Message Switch Facility which will be used to distribute Java applets and other internet technologies, the object-relational DataBlade technology for use with Informix’s Universal Server database plus support for the Wolfpack NT clustering APIs Tandem is developing with Microsoft. Tandem has created a new ServerWare business unit to peddle ServerWare from the second quarter of next year. Unisys, the first solutions partner for Tandem’s new unit, says the deal gives Tandem’s software strategy initial visibility and that they’ll be doing joint sales activities too. Tandem and Unisys are migrating to Unix and Windows NT and are quickly making themselves inessential except to the extent that they can add sufficient original value to prevent their customers defecting to the vendor of cheaper Unix and Windows NT systems down the road. Unisys has already bought into Data General Corp’s ccNUMA design for clustering Intel servers running UnixWare; it hasn’t yet detailed a strategy for NT clusters and while it is attracted to Tandem, says it will license other products where they exist too.
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