Last week’s folding of Siemens AG’s US computer business into Amdahl Corp (CI No 3,775) will broaden both companies’ product range, but won’t affect its existing relationships with storage vendors such as EMC Corp.

Steve Weller, until recently VP of Siemens Computer Systems’ North American operations, and now head of the Siemens unit within Amdahl, said the merged business’ chief priority is to manage the existing customer base, which means selling Siemens products and services as before. Weller’s sales team are now being trained to offer the RM MIPS-based Unix servers, the Primergy Intel servers and PCs, all produced by Fujitsu Siemens Computers, plus Amdahl’s Millennium S/390 mainframes.

As for the storage attached to the servers, Primergy boxes are offered with Siemens’ proprietary PXRE libraries, while the RM line is sold with Symmetrix from EMC attached (CI No 3,766). The Millennium mainframes come with proprietary Amdahl storage, and Weller also foresees his team selling Amdahl’s LVS libraries into open systems environments, though not as an alternative to Symmetrix when bundling with a server offering, but as stand-alone sales.

Siemens had already said, even before merging SCS with Fujitsu, that it would be supporting the RM line through 2002, and Fujitsu Siemens has unveiled its offering into the Unix marketplace, namely Fujitsu’s GP7000 series. However, there are currently no plans to use Amdahl as the distributor for that line in the US market, Weller said, as Amdahl is already doing business with Sun Solaris boxes.

Amdahl enjoys systems integrator rather than just reseller status with Sun, which adds $200m from service revenue to the $200m annual server sale revenue to Amdahl’s business; not something Amdahl can afford to walk away from. Furthermore, the GP7000 currently only offers an 8-way model, and is therefore too small to represent a viable alternative to the Sun line. But with 32-, 64- and even 128-way versions promised during 2000, the equation may change.

As one observer put it, a systems integrator gets a better discount [from Sun] than a reseller, but there’s still only so much margin you can squeeze out of such a relationship, and you always get a better gross margin selling your own product.

Last week’s folding of Siemens AG’s US computer business into Amdahl Corp (CI No 3,775) will broaden both companies’ product range, but won’t affect its existing relationships with storage vendors such as EMC Corp.