High-End Unix Systems Overpowering Ibm Mainframes - Company Business and Marketing

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, May 29, 2000

Research Note Published May 23 Highlights Threats To IBM, Opportunities For Users

New, large, powerful Unix systems are threatening IBM and its mainframes, just as PCs, local area networks (LANs) and the Internet did in years past. As the business world moves increasingly to e-commerce, such enterprise-class Unix systems are increasingly surrounding and supplanting IBM's venerated mainframes, according to new research published by the Robert Frances Group (RFG).

In its new Research Note "The Duel for Data Center Dominance," RFG, based here, said that IBM still owns the lion's share of the market for installed mainframes. However, in just the past two years, the company has ceded supremacy in the enterprise data center and traditional mainframe spaces to the major Unix vendors - and IBM apparently fails to grasp the nature and seriousness of the challenges, RFG said.

While IBM's installed base is still the largest by many measures, shipments of mainframe-class platforms appear to be growing significantly faster for HP, Sun and other Unix vendors than for IBM.

RFG cites information from sources within IBM itself, as well as from Sun and other public sources, to show that enterprise customers are increasingly running mainframe-class enterprise applications on high-end Unix servers. When compared with mainframes directly, these servers offer more power at less cost than IBM mainframes, RFG found. This fact, and the shift to e-business, is increasingly spurring users to deploy enterprise-class Unix systems alongside or instead of traditional mainframes, according to RFG.

Ignoring conflicting vendor claims, RFG focused its analysis on the amount of computing power shipped by IBM and its competitors, expressed in MIPS or "millions of instructions per second." Despite the difficulties of direct comparisons, RFG found that Sun sold more than twice as many MIPS than IBM did in 1999. "Both HP and Sun appeared to deliver far more mainframe servers and server MIPS than did IBM" during the same period, according to the RFG Research Note. Compounding the problem is the "cost per MIP" of IBM mainframes, which is more than twice that of systems with equivalent power from Sun, RFG found.

"While long perceived as the largest, most successful data center mainframe vendor, IBM has lost that position through an apparent lack of focus. Their view of the market was overly complacent," says Ed Broderick, Senior Analyst at RFG, principal author of RFG'' new Research Note. "The new champions are not Amdahl and Hitachi, IBM's traditional mainframe competitors, but Hewlett-Packard and Sun, market-leading Unix vendors that have developed mainframe-class servers with which to knock Big Blue out of its leadership position in the data center space."