From October 1, IBM Corp’s Advanced Workstation Division becomes the Advanced Workstation and Systems Division, to reflect, the company says, the expansion of the RS/6000 range. IBM reckons that it is still on target for top spot in the league table of Unix system vendors by next year. Bill Filip, president of the Advanced Workstation Division, says RS/6000 business grew 50% in the first half of this year over the corresponding period last year, putting it right on course to achieve its target, he believes. Breaking the $2,400m the company reckons it will do this year, the Advanced Workstation Division says its direct sales force accounts for 64% of the RS/6000s shipped. 30% go through resellers, while OEM customers such as Compagnie des Machines Bull SA and Wang Laboratories Inc presently account for only 6%. Some 70% of models shipped are desktops, 27% desksides and 3% rack-mounts – although the last account for 15% of RS/6000 revenues, IBM says. It calculates that the commercial Unix market is worth some $9,400m right now, 25% of which is accounted for by transaction processing applications without a monitor, a further 2% by transaction processing with a monitor. It expects the commercial Unix market to grow to $20,800m – that number sounds IBM political and is likely to turn out to be be higher – by 1996 with 25% accounted for by transaction processing systems and a further 25% by transaction processing with a monitor, which explains the priority giving to getting CICS/6000 out. Independent software vendor support for IBM’s Encina-based transaction processing offering on the RS/6000 included Micro Focus Plc with Cobol for Encina; Redbrick Systems Inc with Gold Mine SQL Data Access and Retrieval database accelerator; JYACC’s JAM graphical user interface builder for Encina; AMS Accounting for DCE/Encina and Informix and Oracle for Encina/CICS.
