IBM Arms Itself for the NT Market

ENT, March 4, 1998 by Thomas Sullivan

Microsoft Corp. basically owns the Windows NT market. This encompasses more than just the operating system; it also includes complementary back-end applications, such as Redmond's own BackOffice products. But IBM Corp. believes there is room enough for more than one computer giant in the Windows NT market, and is extending its market presence in different areas, including hardware, software and middleware.

Continuing its strategy to break out of the anti-Microsoft stance the company is renowned for, and subsequently break into the Windows NT market, IBM will release servers and suites designed to work with Windows NT. The most significant of these are the three back-end application suites IBM plans to release.

IBM also enable the AS/400 Model 170 to be NT-compatible, and will offer the AS/400e with an optional 200-MHz Integrated PC Server that runs Windows NT software applications. IBM accomplishes this by running NT on a coprocessor alongside the OS/400 OS.

Such action as IBM's comes as no surprise to industry analysts. "PC-oriented companies, in the last couple of years, have been delivering more complex solutions, and integrating hardware and software," says Peter Burris, analyst with the Meta Group (Burlingame, Calif.). "The issue here is whether IBM can parlay the market share it already has to become a bigger player in the NT market space."

Indeed, these products are not Big Blue's first foray into the NT market. "We started on the path of integration back in 1993 when we extended our middleware to run on NT," says Richard Sullivan, vice president of NT solutions marketing, IBM.

Since 1993 IBM has expanded its Windows NT-compatible product offerings even further. Lotus Notes and Domino, Internet Connection Server, and DB2 are all currently available for Windows NT. "We're making real inroads to the NT market, but most of these are with large enterprise corporations, and we want to continue establishing relationships there, but now we also want to target medium and small businesses because there's a real market there for NT," says Sullivan.

This spring IBM plans to release NT-compatible back-end application 8 suites. "The next logical step for IBM in the Windows NT Server market is to improve the installation of these products and make the buying easier as well," says Sullivan. "That's exactly what the suites are designed to accomplish."

These suites will compete directly with Microsoft's Small Business Server and Enterprise versions of BackOffice, and IBM claims the suites add more functionality than Microsoft's products. Included in the three suites are a version for small businesses, a version for departments within larger enterprises, and an enterprise version.

Emerald, the entry-level package, is targeted at small businesses, and will contain the Domino Notes Server and IBM's DB/2. With Emerald, businesses will gain messaging capabilities, a relational database and a Web server.

Rodin, the middle-level suite, ships with the same components as Emerald, and also features IBM's Comm Server for access to legacy IBM system across SNA networks. "Rodin is designed for access to legacy systems, instead of integration with legacy systems," says Sullivan.

On the other hand, Bartholdi, the most scalable of the new suites, is designed to integrate server-class applications at the data level across various platforms. Bartholdi will comprise all of Rodin's components and include additional components. The suite will also ship with the Transaction Series of transaction processing middleware. The Transaction Series includes the MQ Series, Customer Information Control System (CICS) and Encina, which is distributed CICS.

Before this release, the Transaction Series was not available for NT. "We think NT is going to be a very successful OS. It already is. We've talked to our larger corporate customers, and they either use NT or plan to implement it," explains Sullivan. "So we have to support NT to compete."

The Bartholdi suite will support MVS, OS/400, AIX, OS/2 and Windows NT. This cross-platform support is crucial. "Global 2,000 accounts still see AS/400 and UNIX as being very important to their business," says Meta Group's Burris. "I don't know of any enterprises that run only NT."

IBM also brings a few other successful products to the table in these three suites. "With [Lotus] Notes as the center, IBM has the most widely installed user base, and is combining that with impending technologies," says Burris. "IBM already is competing successfully with Microsoft in the Notes arena and the collaborative workgroup applications."

IBM is not alone in the effort to gain share of the Windows NT market. "We'll see in the next 3 to 6 months multiple initiatives to grab a piece of the system software market in the small and midsize business server market," says Burris. "Microsoft, IBM, NCR -- everybody's going to have a story."

But IBM offers what some other companies cannot. "IBM still knows more about middleware and enterprise support than just about anybody," claims Burris.