IBM Corp’s general manager of the RS/6000 division has been touring Europe to try to convince customers that in spite of speculation in the press to the contrary, the company’s RISC-based RS/6000 server line and its AIX variant of Unix has a real future and is being developed and geared for growth, at least until 2001. Mike Borman said the company has a very strong product road-map up to 2001, which is as far as any product could sensibly predict at the moment. He says the high end server market is growing at around 12% a year, and is an important area to be in. The company has added two SP nodes to the RS/6000, he said, and the product has beaten competitors such as Sun Microsystems Inc hands down in recent decision support benchmarks. Borman also pointed to recent US government system wins, including a 10 teraflops system for controlling nuclear systems. Borman says the company has outlined and is absolutely committed to its RISC-based microprocessor roadmap until 2001, which benefits in terms of volume by being used for both the RS/6000 and the AS/400. It has also unveiled its HA50 clustering (CI No 3,413), and, he says, proven to customers that it is totally committed to both the RS/6000 and AIX. The company’s reorganization of its sales force, whereby sales people are rewarded for selling any of the company’s server range, including AS/400, RS/6000 and the Intel-based Netfinity servers, has, according to Borman, put an end to the traditional in-fighting within IBM divisions, seen particularly in the last couple of years between the RS/6000 and AS/4000 camps. Now, Borman says, the sales team really do sell the best system for the customer’s needs. If the customers wants Unix, they’ll sell the RS/6000, if NT, then the Netfinity range, and if the customer wants an easy to use, robust system for a single system such as manufacturing, the AS/400 may be the best solution. The RS/6000 also comes into its own for scientific and technical big, floating point applications, large web serving applications, and as a front end to the S/390 mainframe where that is being used for very large transaction processing systems. With regard to the future of Unix, Borman acknowledges there has been lots of fallout already in the Unix market, and believes there will be more fallout to come, but it won’t be us. IBM is totally committed to AIX, he says, although it is not fighting Windows NT either. If customers want NT, we will sell it, Borman says. He claims IBM is particularly focusing on developing seamless interoperability between NT and AIX. The company, which is becoming evangelical about having ‘Java everywhere’, has also released a new Java development kit and optimized Java for the RS/6000, and claims it has achieved performance improvements of some 37%. Both the RS/6000 and AIX will grow strongly, and be there in three years time, Borman says with confidence. But then his job depends on it.
