IBM Corp is moving in the right direction for Open Systems Interconnection and chasing Digital Equipment Corp’s lead in the open architecture, according to industry analyst Mark Lillicrop. His comments follow IBM’s networking announcements for the mid-range AS/400 machine last week. Lillicrop, of consultancy Xephon Plc, says the networking announcements – support for TCP/IP, CPIC and OS/400 – mean that in terms of communications there is now little to choose between the AS/400 and DEC’s VAX. Traditionally the AS/400 has been seen as a weak machine in terms of communications, especially compared with the VAX. But support for CPIC, the Common Programming Interface for Communications from Systems Application Architecture is an important long term commitment to opening up IBM nets. CPIC will run on top of the (yet to be defined) Open Systems Interconnection distributed transaction processing standard – in fact IBM is submitting CPIC to be used as an OSI application programming interface. If accepted, CPIC applications would be able to run on both IBM’s proprietary Systems Network Architecture and other networks supporting the OSI standard. In the short term, says Lillicrop, TCP/IP support links AS/400 and VAX machines, and gives the AS/400 the potential to slot in to networks and become a node in DEC sites. However, although IBM analyst Anura Guruge believes that IBM is moving towards open systems, not least by stepping up work in its Open Systems Interconnection lab in Rome, he says that IBM is not going to bust a gut to implement OSI. Guruge points out that some 80% of IBM’s clients are Fortune 100 companies, and according to Guruge, 60% of those have not even evaluated OSI yet.
