IBM Europe is to market an RS/6000 version of Everberg, Belgium-based BIM NV’s Prolog-based development environment as an official IBM product, the $30m-a-year Unix systems integrator says. ProLog for AIX/6000 is based on the Prolog-based BIM system developed by the Belgian company for the Sun Sparcstation; this new version comprises a redesigned kernel, an improved interface to Oracle software, a new Motif-based interface and support for X Window. A pre-requisite for IBM was that the ProLog for AIX/6000 version should be at least as powerful as BIM’s ProLog for the Sparcstation: while BIM’s Prolog manager, Michel Grignet, accepts that using the same naive reverse benchmark that rated ProLog at 750,000 LIPS, Logical Inferences Per Second on the Sparcstation 2, the AIX/6000 ProLog does just 550,000 LIPS, IBM was clearly satisfied that, based on results of a number of other tests, its performance was at least equivalent. At the moment, the deal with IBM covers just Europe, where IBM’s Prolog-based development is carried out, but Grignet says BIM is talking with IBM Corp through its US subsidiary, BIM Systems in Los Angeles on the possibility of extending it worldwide.
