By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Earlier this week, Amdahl Corp announced its Omniprise 1000 clones of IBM’s Planter Multiprise 3000 low-end mainframes. At the time, Amdahl said that it had applied to IBM for the Omniprises to be certified for special OS/390 software pricing called Growth Opportunity License Charge (GOLC) that significantly reduces the cost of OS/390 and related systems software (see related story).
Apparently, unbeknownst to Amdahl, IBM has already given that seal of approval but is secretly urging its salespeople to get in there first, fearing customers will prefer to go with Amdahl’s version instead. In a memo – seen by ComputerWire – sent by IBM to its S/390 salespeople, executives warn partners and sales reps to close their Planter deals now and to beware of Amdahl. IBM’s competitive information spies are putting together a profile on Amdahl’s kit and marketing efforts to push it. They point out that like the Planter, the Omniprise will be equipped with an Open Systems Adapter, a special TCP/IP card.
They also indicate that the fact that Amdahl lets customers choose memory configurations ranging from 512Mb to 8Gb will be particularly attractive to Multiprise prospects. The Multiprise comes with 1Gb, 2Gb or 4Gb of main memory depending if customers choose the 60, 113 or 211 MIPS versions of the box. IBMers say they have lost Multiprise deals already because customers wanted to add more memory as internal disk cache to speed up system performance, but could not. IBM also says that the fact that the Omniprise supports 128 peripheral channels rather than the Multiprise’s 56 will also help Amdahl win deals. Some potential Multiprise customers have already gone with other equipment because they needed more than 56 channels.
