The AS/400 market is a bit bigger and stronger than the opening story in the March issue of Infoperspectives International might have led readers to believe – but the Advanced System/36 has underachieved in a truly spectacular manner. After reading the newsletter, IBM Corp’s AS/400 marketeers took issue with some of our assertions. They then provided more concrete numbers that show we had underestimated the AS/400’s success: IBM sold about 48,000 AS/400 processors in 1994. In addition to the 48,000 whole new processors that IBM sold in 1994, IBM also sold another 12,000 to 13,000 CPU upgrades for existing processors. By the end of 1994, the cumulative number of AS/400 systems with unique serial numbers that have shipped since 1988 had grown to about 300,000. About 280,000 of those machines are still in daily use. (This is quite a bit larger than the estimates we had gotten from several other sources, which put the figure at about 215,000 systems.) A very small portion of the 280,000 AS/400s still in the field – a few thousand according to markey watchers – are in the inventories of equipment dealers. Since the product line’s introduction, IBM has sold about 67,000 AS/400 upgrades. The upgrade market was stronger a few years back than it is now. In the past, customers upgraded because it was a good way to protect their investment in AS/400 hardware. Today, most customers know that AS/400s will probably not hold value as well as they had in the past. So they tend to put a whole new box in when they need more power, either keeping the old box around for program development work or selling it on the open market. IBM figures that it has sold about 15,000 AS/400s since the beginning of 1995.
Only about 2,000 AS/36s
Most AS/400 watchers expect IBM to sell between 45,000 and 50,000 new systems in 1995. No one is willing to venture a guess on how many RISC CPU upgrades IBM will sell quite yet; that depends on IBM’s prices for the new processor boards and their availability. IBM sold only about 2,000 AS/36 systems. IBM is now shipping the AS/36 at a rate of about 50 machines a day. This sales volume is quite a bit lower than most IBM watchers, including ourselves, expected, and it suggests the System/36 base will move to either true AS/400s or other types of servers. – Timothy Prickett From the June 1995 edition of The Four Hundred, published by Technology News Ltd, 110 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 8JA, phone 0171 483 2681, fax 0171 483 4541. Copyright (C) 1995 Technology News Ltd. All rights reserved.
