Bull SA says it has spent six months re-building the North American sales channel for its Unix servers and says Motorola Inc and Hitachi Data Systems Ltd remain OEMs. Bull is making over its RS/6000-based Escala line with IBM Corp’s 64-bit technology and the 64-bit PowerPC 620 it’s getting from Motorola. Bull counts General Automation, Sun Data and SystemHouse among key VARs. All hardware planning and development is based at its Paris headquarters. Bull, which recently renewed its technology development agreement with Big Blue on development of PowerPC and AIX system technologies, couldn’t say whether it will also work on IBM’s port of AIX to Intel Merced, but advised us to pay close attention over the coming weeks (see separate story). Bull claims that its installed base of Unix servers is over 55,000 worldwide with double digit growth in 1997. It has over 7,000 installs in the US. It says Unix system ships grew by 65% in 1997 over 1996, and by 16% in the first half of this year over the same period in 1997. Bull, which says its bread and butter GCOS mainframe business is now declining, reports MIPS shipments have increased recently in line with the industry trend. It says shipments of the DPS 9000 (GCOS 8) MIPS increased by 110% in 1997 and that MIPS shipments by it alone increased by 30% in the first half of the year. DPS 7000 (GCOS 7) MIPS shipments increased by 60% in the first half. Bull has 3,100 GCOS systems installed worldwide; 75% of them being GCOS 7 midrange systems versus GCOS 8 large- scale. 2,400 of them are in Europe.
