NEWS & ANALYSIS

Maureen O'GaraNeon Sues IBM for Antitrust

by Maureen O'Gara

No sense pussyfooting around anymore trying to sidestep the legal equivalent of nuclear war.

Texas ISV Neon Enterprise Software, accepting that it’s in a fight to the death with IBM over mainframes, ripped the kid gloves off late Wednesday, amended its pre-Christmas suit against its giant nemesis for tortious interference, business disparagement and unfair competition and charged Blue with antitrust violations.

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Why Choice Matters for Mainframe Customers

OpenMainframe.org Position Paper

The recent news that the US Department of Justice is investigating the IBM mainframe market has resulted in numerous stories and blog posts both for and against the investigation. However, many of the arguments have not addressed the most important question: what do mainframe customers want?
This paper addresses the key issues that impact the users of mainframe technology and why the resolution of these issues is critically important to mainframe customers.

Download the position paper PDF (147K)

Steven FriedmanThe T3 Technologies story

by Steven Friedman, T3 Technologies

For over 15 years, my company was a successful IBM Business Partner. I used to have a thriving company with over 50 employees, nearly 1,000 customers in 28 countries (including 200 customers in 15 European Community states) and a profitable revenue stream earned through selling mainframe solutions to IBM customers. However, now our company is effectively out of business due to the direct actions of the company I used to be closely aligned with: IBM.

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Roger BowlerThe case for opening up the mainframe market

by Roger Bowler, mainframe professional and creator of “Hercules”

I have been following the legal battles between IBM and Platform Solutions Inc. (PSI) and T3 Technologies (T3) over the last couple of years with great interest. As the founder of the Hercules open source mainframe emulator project I feel that we are impacted by many of the same issues that put both PSI and T3 out of business. As a mainframe IT professional, it bothers me that there is no longer any competition in the mainframe platform space.

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« IBM-Neon Fight Flares: IBM Countersues, Neon Thumbs its Nose, Dares IBM To Prove its Claims | Main | IBM Strikes Back at Neon »
Friday
29Jan2010

IBM countersues Neon over zPrime accelerator

(The Register) By Timothy Prickett Morgan

With mainframe revenues off sharply and likely to be so until the System z11 mainframes ship much later this year, IBM can ill afford to look the other way as Neon Software peddles its zPrime tool for offloading mainframe workloads to much cheaper specialty engines on Big Blue's mainframes.

So it has called out the lawyers and countersued Neon Software, which sued Big Blue for anticompetitive practices back in December.

…IBM is seeking compensatory damages, punitive (triple) damages, and lost license fee revenue recovery in its countersuit, and says the suit is "not about stifling innovation" or a "purported 'monopoly'," as Neon Software has called it. The lawyers can, and may, argue about who is stifling what, but it is completely asinine to say that IBM does not have a monopoly on mainframes that run its systems software.

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