F O R I N T E R N A L U S E O N L Y COMPETITIVE ACTION - WEEKLY UPDATE FEBRUARY 18, 1993 Welcome to the new Competitive Action Weekly. If you need more information about these articles, please send an HP Desk message to Competitive /HP6650 Include your name, non-telnet FAX number and the NUMBER THAT PRECEDES THE ARTICLE YOU NEED. If you would like to be added, deleted or you have changed locations, please send a message to Competitive /HP6650. Include your HPDesk address. Competitive Action is posted to HP-UX notes in the group hp.marketing. The string is entitled "hp.competition for ". BC = Beyond Computing BW = Business Week CC = Corporate Computing CW = Computer World DNR = Digital news & review EN = Electronic News IW = Information Week MS = Midrange Systems NC = NCR Connection OST = Open Systems Today RSM = RS/Magazine SO = Sun Observer SJMN = San Jose Mercury News SW = Sun World UGX = Unigram-X UR = Unix Review WN = Workstation News WSJ = Wall Street Journal Editor, Nadine Halsted ************************************************************** AMDAHL ARTICLES ************************************************************** 150. ** PCMs READY RESPONSE AS IBM SHIFTS GEARS (CS, 2/15/93, pg. 10) Amdahl revised its product line; it will add four models in June and boost performance by up to 28% next month. It reduced the list price of its eight-way 5995-8650 from $30 million to $21 million. ************************************************************* DATA GENERAL ARTICLES ************************************************************** 151. ** REVAMPED DG ON REVENUE REBOUND (CW, 2/8/93, pg. 85) A restructured Data General Corp. is rebounding, having posted its second consecutive profitable quarter. The slight rise in DG's fortunes are attributed to dramatic staff cuts completed last year and more recent gains achieved in the open systems arena. 152. ** MARKET ROUNDUP (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 7) DG is expected to reveal the addition of a standalone 20Gb tape array system to its Clarion series of storage subsystems on March 17th. ************************************************************* DIGITAL ARTICLES ************************************************************** 153. ** DEC NEARS MIXED VMSCLUSTERS SUPPORT (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 14) DEC is ahead of schedule in its efforts to provide mixed VMSclusters support, but several holes exist. In the new release VAXs will not be able to access Alpha tapes and vice versa; cross architecture booting is not possible; and volume shadowing and disk striping will not be available until years end at the earliest. FDDI will also be unavailable in this release. [ Editors note: Full management capability of a VMS cluster - the ability to manage from one single location - will not be available until early to mid 1994. For commercial production environments, Alpha will not be a viable solution because of the lack of high reliability and OLTP monitor. HP-UX and MPE-iX has this functionality today.] 154. ** NT IS "GREAT WHITE HOPE FOR DEC" (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 4) Jesse Lipcon, charged with running DEC's NT interest, characterizes NT as the "Great White Hope". Most of DEC's long term growth will come from NT and it will drive DEC's resurgence. The first task is to get the applications for N T- on-Alpha. DEC is trying to entice the top 100 PC applications over as well as VMS, OSF, and Sun programs. 155. ** MARKET ROUNDUP (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 7) DEC has announced a rack-mounted version of the 160Mhz DEC AXP 4000 distributed or department system launched at its bet-the-company Alpha RISC blitz back in November. The one or two processor Futurebus+-based Model 610 is rated at 132 SPECmark89 as a uniprocessor and comes with up to 512Mb memory - 2Gb by year end. ************************************************************** HP ARTICLES ************************************************************** 156. ** MIDRANGE: TOUGH AND GETTING TOUGHER (NC, 2/93, pg. 7) According to InfoCorp, HP has been experiencing sharp growth, having moved up to the number two slot, passing DEC in revenue for the first time. InfoCorp attributes HP's revenue growth to its non-proprietary Unix operating system. HP is currently the number one Unix midrange vendor. 157. ** HP EXPECTED TO EXPAND SNA LINKS (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 16) HP is expected to announce Release 2 of HP SNAplus family of products that connect Unix based systems, servers, and workstations to IBM SNA networks. Enhancements include support for Token Ring and SNA over X.25 connections and support for IBM 3270 Motif interface. 158. ** HP PAYS A VISIT - EXPO SEEN AS FERTILE GROUND FOR HARVESTING MIGRATION CLIENTS (MS, 2/9/93, pg. 1) Attendees to the Midrange Expo in Anaheim, Calif. will find a new and interesting twist: IBM's arch rival HP has been added to the starting lineup. In a bold foray into Big Blue's Turf, HP has set its sights on System/36 users who may be unconvinced that the AS/400 is the migration alternative of choice. [ Editors note: Universal offers a migration program for S/36 users to HP-UX. To receive a joint HP - Universal data sheet contact Bill Hodges at (408) 447- 7041 or Universal Software at (310) 575-4873. HP also intends to participate in the Atlanta, Chicago, New Jersey and Toronto Midrange Expos.] 159. ** HP SEEKING PINK FUTURE? (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 3) HP is casing the industry for new directions - a process witnessed by the winding down of its New Wave interface efforts - and is now thought to be closing in for a piece of Taligent, the Apple/IBM joint venture on object- oriented operating system technology. HP has been very quiet about its ballyhooed tie-up with Sun on the Distributed Object Management Framework (DOMF). 160. ** TAIWANESE GOVERNMENT BODY TAKES HP SOFTBENCH (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 4) Taiwan's government research arm, the Institute for Information Industry has licensed SoftBench, HP's CASE integration framework. The pact gives SoftBench its first toehold in the Far East. The Institute made the selection i n preference to Sun's ToolTalk and DEC's Fuse. [ Editors note: Congratulations to HP Taiwan.] ************************************************************** IBM ARTICLES ************************************************************** 167. ** IBM IS PROJECTING MINICOMPUTER LINE WILL TURN AROUND (WSJ, 2/17/93, pg. B6) IBM announced 14 new AS/400 models and said they offer an average of 26% more computing power per dollar. In the minicomputer business, IBM had 1992 hardware sales of about $3.7 billion and operating system software sales of $700 million. Adding related revenue from other IBM units - including financing, applications software, and accessories - minicomputers contributed about $13 billion in sales. [ Editors note: Check the Competitive Hotline subject IBMAS2 on Monday, 2/22/93, for further details on this announcement.] 168. ** STUCK BETWEEN IBM AND A HARD PLACE? (CW, 2/8/93, pg. 47) Although many mainframe customers say things are still fine on the support front, others report some glitches. Things will likely get even more confusing for customers as they fight their way through an ever-changing IBM bureaucratic maze. 169. ** WHAT'S IT GONNA COST? CUSTOMERS UNCERTAIN AS IBM DROPS HOST PRICE LISTS (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 10) Under the new "customer value pricing" IBM will negotiate with each user based on the total package of hardware, software and service needed. Users said that negotiating with IBM without some sort of understood starting point will add some unwanted complexity, if not confusion, to their dealings. 170. ** ON THE HORIZON (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 10) IBM will be the price/performance leader of all host vendors. By the second half of the decade, IBM will switch to a less expensive chip architecture for it s parallel commercial computers. IBM will continue to add software to MVS to enable it to play in the open system and client/server worlds. 171. ** DESKTOPS TAKE LION SHARE OF IBM'S EUROPEAN UNIX BUSINESS (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 4) Revenues from European sales of its RS/6000 machines rose by 28% during 1992, accounting for some 43% - $1 billion- of its worldwide Unix market. North American sales accounted for 40% of the worldwide market. Japan and Asia Pacific, which provided 13% of revenues, is the fastest growing Unix market. 36% of sales were direct, 34% came through value-added resellers and 30% from other IBM agents. The company projects 1993 channel figures at 40%, 30% and 30% respectively. 172. ** BATTERED, BLACK AND BLUE (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 110) IBM is expected to announce that it will cut even more employees than originally planned from its North American sales organization. The original target was 4,000 to 6,000. The new estimate is 7,000. 173. ** MARKET ROUNDUP (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 6) IBM subsidiary Cadam is forsaking its Blue only bailiwick and porting its CAD Micro Cadam software to Sparcstation and planning to ship in December. 174. ** OFF THE SHELF (EN, 2//8/93, pg. 19) More details are emerging on IBM's semiconductor rep strategy. Handling the line in northern California will be Nexus, while Centaur in Irvine will cover southern California. IBM Technology Products essentially had its nationwide rep network in place back in November, but public disclosure has been stalled over difficulties in enlisting industrial distributors. 175. ** IBM FORMS PARALLEL PROCESSING TEAM (EN, 2/8/93, pg. 16) IBM moved to hasten its parallel processing market effort by forming a joint venture between its Enterprise Systems and Advanced Workstations and Systems (AWS) lines of business. The new venture, called Power Parallel Systems, is aimed at leveraging AWS's RISC processor technology, Enterprise Systems' large-computer expertise and System/390 architecture into offerings for AIX and MVS operating environments. All of the new RISC, including the SP1 parallel machine, will be offered to OEM accounts. 176. ** MARKET ROUNDUP (UGX, 2/15/903, pg. 7) Those 64-bit Rios 2 multi-chips IBM is planning on using in boxes due by the end of the year from its new Power Parallel Systems unit reportedly incorporate more instruction-set parallelism than Rios 1 does. The new Rios 2 will do eight operations per instruction cycle, have a larger cache and additional buses . 177. ** MVS AND CICS/6000 APPS WILL RUN UNDER NEW TUXEDO SYSTEM (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 5) USL announced a new release of its Tuxedo transaction processing system. Extensions include a COBOL migration API for recompiles of IBM COBOL based MVS and CICS/6000 applications so that they can run on Tuxedo-based systems. Also included is an X/Open compliant transaction processing application programming interface , XATMI, an enhanced message queuing system and dynamic link libraries. ************************************************************** NCR ARTICLES ************************************************************** 178. ** NCR USERS CRY FOUL OVER I SERIES GLITCH (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 72) Several disgruntled NCR users claim the operating system software has caused a phenomenon called "silent death" to occur where, for no apparent reason, the system comes to a halt, causing data corruption and file loss. 179. ** 3450, 3550 DO WELL IN TPC BENCHMARKS (NC, 2/93, pg. 1) The 3450 and 3550 client/server platforms achieved some of the least expensive tps. The TPC-A benchmark results had the NCR 3450 costing $7,924 per transaction. This is very aggressive if you look at the results of HP and DEC specifically. NCR did not do any testing in TPC's TPC-C benchmark. [ Editors note: NCR is claiming 230 tps in a client/server environment for the 3450. However, the Teleprocessing Council has not audited these results.] 180. ** DCE FOR SYSTEM 3000 GOES TO BETA SITES (NC, 2/93, pg. 4) The first NCR customer beta sites began testing the Open Software Foundation's (OSF) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) on the System 3000 in December. General availability of the DCE Application Support and Core Services is expected by the middle of the year, with pricing to be announced at that time. 181. ** NEW DISK SUBSYSTEM STORES UP TO 20GB (NC, 2/93, pg. 23) NCR announced that its 6298 Disk Array Subsystem, with redundant disk array controller is now generally available. NCR is the only vendor currently shipping a storage subsystem with the redundant controller feature. The 6298 offers customers concurrent access to combinations of RAID 0,1,3 and 5. 182. ** MARKET ROUNDUP (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 6) NCR released StarPro, a distributed computing electronic mail and messaging system Three products are available: MessageCentral 400, a mail box and internet gateway: OSI/TCP, a network conductivity package; and Open Connect400, a gateway to dissimilar LAN E-mail networks. StarPro supports Motif and Windows. ************************************************************** SUN ARTICLES ************************************************************** 183. ** NATIVE NETWARE ON SPARC - NT TO FOLLOW? (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 1) Striking out for volume, Sun is unbundling its machines so the channel can offer other operating systems. Sun has turned to native NetWare as the obvious first choice for new non-Unix business. Novell has claimed an installed base of 22 million nodes and will port NetWare to Sparc, with Sun providing device drivers and other hardware specific code. Sparc will be the third architecture - after Intel's iAPX-86 and HP's PA-RISC - that Novell will have native NetWare 4.0 on. 184. ** MARKET ROUNDUP (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 7) Sun Microsystems will be raising prices on all its old boxes 20% to 30% in mid-March. Sun apparently wants to move its base to Sparcstation 10s and Tsunamis [MicroSPARCs] and the price hike threat should help clear out inventory. 185. ** COMMENTS (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 8) SunSoft is planning on giving away free Solaris Developer Packs for Solaris- on-Intel or Solaris-on-Sparc at next month's Solaris Developers Conference. Of course it costs $700 to attend. ************************************************************** UNISYS ARTICLES ************************************************************** 186. ** MARKET ROUNDUP (UGX, 2/15/93, pg. 6) Unisys is porting its Mapper fourth generation language tool, which supports a range of databases, to IBM RS/6000, Sun Sparc and SCO Unix-based platforms: Unisys claims 5,000 users of Mapper worldwide on its mainframe and Unix platforms. ************************************************************** OPERATING SYSTEM ARTICLES ************************************************************** 187. ** OSF RESTRUCTURES AS MEMBER FIRMS CUT BACK (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 1) The changes could allow DCE and DME to be better integrated. Users familiar with the OSF's operation viewed the management restructuring in a hopeful light but stressed the importance of the OSF getting its technologies into users ' hands as soon as possible. ************************************************************* OTHER ************************************************************** 188. ** NEXT KOs WORKSTATION LINE (CW, 2/15/93, pg. 2) Jobs announced plans to scrap his slow-selling workstations and focus solely on software. He could not allow the struggling firm to remain "a second-tier hardware company". Jobs unveiled a radical restructuring that included the dismissal of 280 of Next's 536 employees.