With both Fujitsu Ltd and Amdahl Corp losing money, the pressure is on to reduce their cost bases. The closer liaison between the two and ICL Plc (CI No 2,177) increases the likelihood of cross licensing of hardware products, which may see ICL selling Amdahl hardware and Sparc systems being traded between the companies, something ICL and Fujitsu already do. Furthermore, peripherals used by each are likely to be drawn together into a single, compatible product line and Fujitsu is expected to take over more responsibility for the development of ICL and Amdahl’s mainframe CPU architectures. In some areas we have complementary products and some overlap, explained Amdahl chief executive officer Joe Zemke. He expects the effort to eliminate duplicated research and development efforts and enable resources to be transferred to the development of middleware technologies. For its part, ICL hopes the initiative will speed up the delivery of systems management tools and other components for mission-critical Unix applications. ICL’s current DRS/NX version 7 is ICL’s multiprocessing implementation of Unix System Laboratories Inc’s uniprocessor Unix System V.4.2. When Unix Labs delivers System V.4.2 MP, that will become DRS/NX 8 or 9.
