It was only a few weeks ago that IBM Corp’s RS/6000 division was still expecting to report a strong fourth quarter to make up for a dreadful Q3. However in the company’s year-end numbers showed RS/6000 revenue for the quarter was flat over the same period in 1995. While RS/6000 claims that for the full year it grew by 10% over 1995 – albeit less than the 20% it had hoped for – it says it simply couldn’t build workstations quickly enough to fulfill demand for its new servers and workstations announced last October at Uniforum, which only shipped in November. They’re built in Austin. Meanwhile it didn’t manage to ship its critical parallel system support program PSSP suite of parallelising software and management tools until November, meaning it still wasn’t able to ship even those SP2 orders it had deferred from the third quarter. SP2s are built in Poughkeepsie, the mainframe town upstate New York. 1996 simply ended too quickly, VP marketing Bob Dutkowski said. Even though Austin built more workstations in December than in the whole of the rest of the year we couldn’t ship at the rate we had hoped. He said a month of deliveries simply wasn’t long enough to make a significant impact on the fourth quarter, adding that if we want to count Asia/Pacific shipments in the fourth quarter they have to be on the boat by the 15th of December. (Even so, RS/6000 claims its Asia/Pacific business grew 33% in the year.) So Q1 should be storming? The question is will we be able to fulfill demand. The company’s investigating both price reductions and improved system configurations at the same price point to counter recent price cuts by Hewlett-Packard and DEC. รก
