Bull and IBM Extend Agreement for AIX Software and Systems - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Dec 27, 1999

Bull and IBM announced Monday an extension of their agreement related to Power processor-based UNIX systems and the AIX operating system. With this extension, Bull and IBM intend to continue their relationship for at least the next five years. The new agreement builds on those between the companies that go back seven years.

The Bull and IBM engineering collaboration will continue with work on the AIX operating system including multiple applications workload management, Web-based systems management, reliability and availability features to maximize applications uptime. Bull and IBM will focus on continuing to improve 64-bit processing performance.

Bull servers division president, Didier Breton, said, "We?ve had excellent success in growing sales and market share for high-end AIX and Power-based systems in Europe, and our engineering cooperation with IBM has been a major contributing factor. This new agreement reinforces our plans to continue rapid growth in mission critical, high-end AIX and Power systems."

IBM's vice president of server development, Doug Grose, said, "Bull is expanding the presence of AIX and Power-based UNIX systems and is an important development partner for IBM."

AIX is a cornerstone of the Project Monterey UNIX operating system being developed for IBM Power and Intel IA-32 and IA-64 processors. Bull is a member of the Project Monterey OEM Council, a group of leading hardware suppliers that support the Project Monterey initiative to develop a volume, enterprise-class, commercial UNIX operating system using technologies from IBM AIX and NUMA-Q brands, as well as SCO UnixWare.

Since 1992, the Bull-IBM relationship has received praise from software companies such as Baan, Oracle and SAP.