Could the tide be turning for the Open Software Foundation? A couple of years ago, when the pretender to AT&T’s Unix throne announced itself in its very first guise as the Hamilton Group with the support of IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard et al, it seemed that many of the founders – particularly IBM and DEC – were interested only in slowing down the increasing pull towards open systems that Unix had been largely responsible for encouraging. Undaunted, the purists joined Unix International and boasted that their members were shipping by far the lion’s share of Unix-based systems. And aside from the small matter of OSF/Motif, Unix International appeared to be winning most of the marketing battles, coming out with an admittedly somewhat premature version of Unix System V.4 a year before the Foundation’s OSF/1 alternative arrived.
Plodders
Today, it’s getting harder to dismiss the Foundation as simply a spoiling tactic. A look at Unix World’s top ten Unix companies, published last December, puts Hewlett-Packard on top, DEC third and IBM fifth, with only Sun Microsystems and troubled Unisys Corp representing Unix International. And Hewlett-Packard’s launch of new high-powered workstations this week highlights another problem for the smaller Unix players. Vendors such as Pyramid Technology and Sequent Computer Systems, once the high-flyers amongst the proprietary plodders, are now finding it hard to keep up with the majors in the price-performance battle. In the good old days, those companies could compare their hot boxes against the performance of the expensive VAX-11/780 and laugh all the way to the bank. But since IBM’s landmark launch of the RS/6000 last February, the boot has been on the other foot. Big Blue, still remembered for the launch of one of the slowest Unix workstations ever in the RT, jumped straight to the top of the SPECmark chart with the RS/6000, and immediately had a success on its hands. Meanwhile, DEC had swallowed its pride and uncharacteristicly bought into the latest RISC processor technology from MIPS Computer Systems. The smaller companies, who originally jumped on the Unix bandwaggon because they could no longer compete in the world of proprietary systems, are now finding that they have again got heavyweight competition – right in their own back yards. Of course the whole strategy means that belts have to be tightened and rationalisations made all round.
By John Abbott
As we have pointed out many times in these pages, IBM and DEC are saying goodbye to the far greater margins won in the proprietary world as they embrace open systems. IBM appears to be the worse off in this respect: while DEC is now making inroads into the technical workstation business, IBM’s RS/6000 seems to be having greater success within its commercial heartland, at the expense of its AS/400 line. Software houses such as accounting specialist Systems Union in the UK are reporting that sales of the AS/400 are stagnating, while the RS/6000 booms. Although this must be causing it considerable internal pain, IBM looks as if it has bitten the bullet to ensure that it builds up a solid base for the future, and has even reportedly changed the commission structure of its sales force to give salesmen an equal incentive to sell Unix and proprietary kit. But the Foundation element increasingly looks as if it could be a trump card for the majors. They are capitalising on an increasing awareness from corporate customers and government departments that Unix by itself does not equal open systems. Although OSF/1 has not yet reached the end-user market, it has been carefully positioned as only one part of the Foundation’s computing environment, with OSF/Motif and the Distributed Computing Environment as the other elements. With the high profile Motif has built up, and the attractiveness of technologies such as the Computing Environment and Distributed Management Environment to the corporate market – both areas where Unix International has a long way to go to catch up – the Foundation option is beginning to look a lot more credible. On top of tha
t, Foundation vendors have been laying great stress on Posix and X/Open Co Ltd Portability Guide 3 compliance on both their Unix and proprietary ranges, in a bid to ensure they remain eligible for the short-lists of all the major procurements.
Schism
Unix International, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the Foundation’s tendency to force the market into a particular direction by choosing specific technologies, has reacted with its Open Systems Architecture strategy. This aims to establish application programming interfaces for each of the new components to be added over the next few years, which other vendors will be able to access for their own implementations if they wish. The danger with this is that, in comparison with the Foundation, it leaves Unix International’s efforts looking unfocused – by the time it is ready with its own reference edition of multi-processing extensions to Unix for instance, it looks increasingly as though most vendors will have already have adapted their own versions. Meanwhile, AT&T’s promised flotation of between 20% and 30% of its Unix interests has taken rather longer than expected, and may not be enough to convince the industry that it has sufficiently relinquished its control. So what does the future hold? The emergence of OSF/2 is still a long way off, but looks as if it could provide the most innovative technology when it does arrive. But in the nearer term, hints of a new morale boost to the Foundation fortunes look to be gathering. Was Santa Cruz Operation’s reluctance to commit to Unix System V.4 the first major crack in AT&T’s domination bid for V.4? It is not yet fully clear whether the Foundation will play any part in the Compaq, DEC, Santa Cruz, Microsoft and MIPS consortium announcement due on April 8 – but if it does, Unix International could have a major schism on its hands. Either way, the next few months are likely to see the swings and roundabouts of power within the open systems market wheeling at full pelt.
