Quality Software Products Plc, which still earns the larger part of its revenues from its suite of financial software for the mainframe, can now support Parallel Sysplex configurations of the IBM Corp System 390 for the first time. The support means that QSP can offer its bigger customers room for upgrades, or provide them with increased reliability through clustered mainframe configurations. QSP numbers airline, retail, financial and public sector companies with high transaction processing demands amongst its users. It says Office Depot, said to be the world’s largest supplier of office products, has already agreed to upgrade to the Parallel Sysplex version, and that others are following. QSP’s software runs on top of IBM’s DB2 database in its mainframe version, and uses CICS transaction processing software. Typical costs are between $300,000 and $1m, including large amounts of consultancy. QSP isn’t one of the first to support the Parallel Sysplex configurations – its competitor Walker Interactive Systems Inc has been there for some time. QSP also has Unix versions of its software supporting the Oracle database, but hasn’t marketed those versions outside of Europe as yet.