ECS International UK Ltd, the leasing subsidiary of Societe Generale, won the contract for the installation of an IBM 3090-120S with the insurance and financial services company, General Portfolio Group Plc – until now, a System 38 and AS/400 company (CI No 1,340). ECS won the the four year lease after a tender process that involved two other companies, and the bundled deal that General Portfolio negotiated with IBM is a mixture of old and new equipment. It includes 3480 tapes, screens, peripherals, and second user disks from an unnamed broker, apparently at a very competitive rate. According to Keith Walker, General Portfolio’s information tech-nology director, the mixture of old and new equipment saved the company around 30%. Both ECS and General Portfolio were unwilling to disclose the terms of the lease, but ECS acknowledges the acumen of General Portfolio’s negotiators, and says that the company has a fine appreciation of how to get the best deal from both manufacturers and lessors – a useful skill to have in days of cut cost deals and frequently expensive upgrades. General Portfolio say that the decision to install a 3090 machine was made after an internal review of its computer systems. It established that the most effective software for the company’s activities was Capsil, a life and pension fund administration package from Capsco Software Europe Ltd, based in Guildford, Surrey. Moving to the 3090 was necessary partly because Capsco didn’t have an AS/400 version of the software, although it has since revealed that Citicorp is its first AS/400 client. General Portfolio insists that it hasn’t abandoned the AS/400, but it seems more likely to increase its 370 investment since it’s already at the top of the AS/400 range, and IBM seems to be in no hurry to address the needs of former System 38 users already running out of steam on the AS/400 Model 70.
