IBM Answers and Countersues NEON, Which Goes Right Back At ‘Em [Updated February 18]
February 18, 2010 (Technology News) By Hesh Wiener
Name-calling about name-calling, that's the story in the Federal District Court for West Texas. Neon Enterprises and IBM are really going at each other, litigating away, all over a lousy few billion dollars. The few billion is what Neon could cost IBM if its zPrime software catches on, says a source at Neon, declining attribution.
zPrime lets mainframe shops move work around inside a mainframe so that it lives in the low rent district instead of on Park Avenue. With zPrime, IBM's zIIP and zAAP specialty processors can do a lot of work that customers without Neon's product (or Neon's know-how) otherwise would run on general-purpose engines. Customers can save a lot of money this way, apparently much more than IBM expected when it came up with the idea of zIIP and zAAP engines. Mainframe specialty processors are ordinary mainframe engines dressed in microcode mufti and unmetered; once a customer buys the engine, there is no extra cost for using it. By contrast, all the work done by general-purpose mainframe engines is measured and the amount clocked by IBM determines the price a customer pays for running the jobs.
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