InformationWeek

Amdahl Powers Up

By Martin J. Garvey

mdahl Corp. broke with its tradition of keeping product strategy close to the vest when it outlined plans for future generations of mainframe computers, the first of which will ship in the first quarter of 1998. Last week's announcement came at a time when many analysts believed the vendor was moving its focus away from mainframes in favor of Windows NT-based systems and services.

Instead, Amdahl is banking heavily on being a leader in CMOS processor technology. The forthcoming CMOS-based Millennium 700 series scales from a single 75-Mips processor to a 12-way system. Amdahl plans to ship the first 100-Mips CMOS processor, also available in a 12-way configuration, in 1999; it expects to boost processor performance to 150 Mips by the year 2000.

Amdahl officials say they want to assure current customers that they won't be abandoned despite the vendor's recent efforts to establish a presence in the NT market.

Carol Stone, Amdahl's manager of processor product marketing, says the Sunnyvale, Calif., company promises better performance using the same CMOS circuitry as mainframe rivals IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. Stone also says Amdahl will offer variable partitioning within each Millennium 700, as well as its QuickAvailability data access technology for providing fast connections to storage, memory, and system channels.

Colin Rankine, a senior analyst with Giga Information Group, an IT advisory firm in Cambridge, Mass., believes Amdahl will continue to be a viable mainframe vendor if it stays focused on being a low-cost alterna tive to IBM mainframes. Rankine says Amdahl charges customers $1,000 to $1,500 less per Mips than IBM.

Alan Hutton, president of Star Data Systems Inc., a financial information provider in Markham, Ontario, says that as a current Amdahl user, pricing does not have to be the sole differentiator. Star Data Systems bought two Amdahl Millennium 535 mainframes in January over comparable systems from IBM. Ultimately, he says, the pricing turned out to be about equal. Hutton says he likes how easy it is to increase the capacity of the Millennium 535.

Hutton also says Amdahl demonstrated a better understanding of his business. "Amdahl was the low-risk alternative, which is not a message IBM likes to hear because they only expect they can lose on the price," he says. "When we compared the performance of the equipment and competency of the support staff, Amdahl won."

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