Wall Street brokerage Merrill Lynch & Co believes IBM Corp has now won more than 160 users from other mainframe systems, including Hitachi Data Systems Ltd’s Skyline, to its new G5 series S/390 processors which began shipping this month. It thinks IBM’s next generation S/390 G6 mainframe will deliver a 50% performance improvement to roughly 225 MIPS per processor when introduced around mid-1999. G5 sales could contribute $1bn in sales to Big Blue’s third quarter. Meantime the brokerage figures HDS will offer a mid-life kicker to its Skyline II about 18-24 months following first customer shipments in the third quarter of next year.