As part of a plan to upgrade technology throughout its branch operation, Barclays Bank Plc is understood to be buying over 2,000 – and possibly as many as 3,000 – RS/6000s from IBM, to be used in its high-street branches across the UK. As well as mar-king the RS/6000’s breakthrough into the corporate sector of the market, the order will make the bank the largest user of IBM’s AIX Unix variant in Europe. According to Apt Data’s IBM System User magazine, the RS/6000s, in server configurations, will form a major component of Barclay’s four-year Branch Platform Project, and will be at the sharp end of its operation, running app-lications to deal with customer enquiries via X-terminals located in each of its UK branches. Centrepiece of the project will be a standard graphical user interface under which all applications will run. The OSF/Motif graphical user interface will be used on the RS/6000s, with IXI Ltd’s X.desktop manager running on user terminals. The interface technology, customised specifically for Barclays, and compatible with IBM’s Common User Acc-ess standard, is currently in test at one of the bank’s development sites near Manchester. The systems will likely be networked using the the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment, which Barclays – now a Foundation member – has publically endorsed. News of the order, the value of which has not been disclosed, broke during the week that Barclays slashed 5,000 jobs after reporting 1990 pretax profits off 56% at UKP760m.Dutch foods and domestic products giant Unilever Group Plc, we hear. Unilever has, like Barclays, endorsed the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment technology, and is believed to be completing a similarly large order for RS/6000 systems as part of an effort to mig- rate its information technology in frastructure across to open systems.
