The view on high-end commercial symmetric multiprocessing and massively parallel processing solutions from the customer bench is that these solutions are being employed primarily in the transition of businesses from a product marketing focus to doing customer-focused marketing. Doing his best not to upset people, John Trustman, senior vice-president retail systems marketing at Fidelity Investment – also a customer of half a dozen of the high-end symmetric-massively parallel processing vendors present at last week’s parallel processing conference in New York – said that while symmetric multiprocessing is very difficult to employ for most high-end requirements, every vendor it uses has some technology that is best in its field, and that no shoe currently fits all sizes. But he admitted that the company had previously searched for the one perfect partner for three years without finding it. He said Fidelity had already covered its two-year old investment in massively parallel processing through the savings it had made in postage and paper alone. Moreover, he claimed that within a year to 18 months at least six or seven massively parallel processing vendors would have the kind of full-service solutions on offer that Fidelity could use.
