IBM Corp’s AS/400 architect Frank Soltis is on the stump in Europe this week, bringing with him news of exactly what is going on inside the new dedicated server models announced on Tuesday (CI No 2,248) – and it certainly appears that so long as it is able to market the things, it has got them just about right, creating machines that are not locked into the standard AS/400 pricing because AS/400 users can’t simply unplug their existing machines and install servers – if they are cheaper and expect them to perform like their old machine did; the key essential that IBM needed to ensure was that any AS/400 server sales were incremental and did not cannibalise the existing base, and it seems to have achieved that.
