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Platform Solutions is supposedly close to an exclusive marketing deal with T3 Technologies for all of its non-direct business. An odd move, since it must endanger T3 Technology's relationship with Fundamental Software (T3 is the most successful of the FLEX-ES business partners) and possibly even its Partnerworld relationship with IBM - even though PSI has no immediate prospect of having a shippable product.
From PSI's point of view, however, T3 is probably the best partner available - with a track record of selling and supporting FLEX-ES and also considerable experience in getting software pricing out of IBM - no trivial undertaking.
T3 Technologies' business partners - such as SVA in Germany - have been serving the low end while IBM has been neglecting it. IBM has not produced a new low-end mainframe for well over a decade, and FLEX-ES provided a number of customers with the opportunity to move to current IBM technology. These opportunities provide little hardware margin, but the services and software drags make remaining in the mainframe market viable for many partners.
[As of December 2007 all trace of T3 and emulation solutions has gone from SVA's web site.]
A 75 MIPS machine such as PSI's P5210, however, is entering a different space. IBM is very actively selling z890 submodels positioned at 27, 50 and 72 MIPS. PSI's assertion that there is no competition in this space is very, very far from the truth.
Formal announcement of the PSI/T3 relationship was expected during the zSeries Technical Conference in Innsbruck but failed to materialise. In many ways this would be a strange arrangement - T3 derives significant revenue from its FLEX-ES business, yet it planned to announce a global exclusive agreement for what must be considered a major competitor. On top of that, Platform Solutions has no formal agreement with IBM for software pricing and their system will not ship in GA form until the end of the summer at the earliest. The "validation" machine installed in December 2004 - where the Enterprise Technical Architect is an ex-Amdahl colleague of PSI's Chief Technology Officer - was probably shipped to meet a year-end condition laid down by investors. Even the concept of a validation machine is strange in the light of PSI's claim to have access to Amdahl's intellectual property - Amdahl's validation engine was regarded as one of the finest in the world, so why not use it?
The answer, of course, is that it was sold to IBM when Amdahl closed down. One wonders what this "$500,000,000" of intellectual property is really worth when something as important as the validation engine is missing.
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