Seeking to further distance itself from its former semi-free life as a mainframe system vendor and to make more money than it currently does trying to sell mainframes against very aggressive IBM Corp and Hitachi Data Systems Ltd, Fujitsu’s wholly-owned Amdahl Corporation subsidiary today announced two new operating divisions working under the Amdahl name. The first, Amdahl Global Solutions, will seek to tap into the burgeoning demand for services among large enterprises short on talent and long on problems to tackle. Amdahl/GS, the shorthand moniker for the services unit, is comprised of various classic services businesses that already exist within Amdahl, such as maintenance and field operations. Amdahl/GS will complement high-level consulting services already being offered by Amdahl through its DMR Consulting Group, a Canadian firm that Amdahl purchased in late 1995 after a bidding war with IBM Canada. Amdahl says that DMR will help companies come up with their strategic vision, and Amdahl/GS will help them implement it. There are no plans, it says, for consolidating the operations of these two services arms. Amdahl/GS is being headed up by Alan Bell, most recently senior vice president of Amdahl’s worldwide field operations. Bell has held numerous positions at Amdahl since coming to the company in 1977, including lots of executive and senior-level management jobs. The second new division, the Amdahl Technology Group, is also comprised of several existing Amdahl units that design storage, network and other kinds of peripherals for Amdahl’s lines of OS/390, Unix and NT servers. ATG was formed to bring synergies to bear on peripheral design, and presumably will also lower development costs for Amdahl. While it hasn’t ruled out selling peripherals and other devices on an OEM basis from other manufacturers — as IBM does with much of its network and printing equipment — ATG for the moment will be focused solely on pushing Amdahl’s own technology and that which it gets from parent Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems. ATG is being headed up by Bill Flanagan, who started out with Amdahl way back in 1973 with a job in manufacturing after working at Varian Associates and Control Data Corporation. Flanagan, who has been a VP of manufacturing and the senior VP in charge of products in his 25 year stint with Amdahl, now has the task of developing Amdahl’s products and helping Amdahl/Global Services sell them to customers.
