Just a few weeks later than expected – the hold-up was at the Japanese end, we understand – Fujitsu Ltd and its Amdahl Corp and ICL Plc affiliates yesterday formally announced a new technology alliance which they say will result in a common Unix operating system environment supported on their respective Unix system products (CI No 2,180). That includes their respective (yet-to-be-announced in Amdahl’s case) Sparc RISC-based systems plus Amdahl’s IBM Corp System/390-compatible mainframes. Little is new to what we said at the start of June, but in view of the recent changes in the Unix world, which have seen Unix System Labs subsumed within a new Novell Inc Unix Systems Group, the three are positioning their agreement as a strategic safeguard for the future development of commercial Unix at the and high end of the industry. The three intend to cross-licence value-added elements of their respective Unix offerings – ICL’s DRS/NX, Fujitsu’s UPX and Amdahl’s UTS mainframe Unix – and develop a common set of interfaces that will enable developers to create one version of an application that will run on all the trio’s Unix system products – including Amdahl’s mainframes without modification. The resulting system software will run all existing applications unchanged. First releases of the enhanced Unixes, built around Unix System V.4.2 MP, aren’t expected until the back end of next year. The three commit to maintain conformance with Unix System V.4, Sparc International SparcWare and X/Open Co XPG standards. Fujitsu president Tadashi Sekizawa said the aim is to develop the leading open systems environment for the commercial marketplace. The alliance is a means for the Fujitsu stable to apply much-needed cost reductions and start to eliminate duplication of effort. As such, cross-licensing arrangements are likely to follow in other technology areas, the development of a common, compatible peripheral range being one obvious target; Fujitsu is also expected to take more responsibility for development of ICL and Amdahl mainframe CPU architectures. An important codicil to the announcement – and one not contained in generally released material – is that the three are now expecting to try and broaden the alliance to include other manufacturers.
