Coupled with the company’s energetic efforts to fit out its machines with all the kinds of services that mainframe operators take for granted, Hewlett-Packard Co’s new top-end HP 9000 and HP 3000 machines with their new Precision Bus architecture (not Buffer, which crept into yesterday’s story as a result of a transmission error – CI No 1,926) look like the most alarming threat yet to IBM Corp’s bottom line: even last year, before the company had the new machines, it says that more than 100 IBM accounts replaced their IBM mainframes with Hewlett-Packard business servers or shifted their applications from an IBM mainframe to a Hewlett system, according to the company.
