On Wednesday, the European Commission said IBM will now make spare parts and technical information "swiftly available" to independent maintainers of IBM's System z mainframes, under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. These commitments are legally binding, it noted.

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International Business Machines Corp. will reach a settlement with European Union antitrust regulators next week to end a probe into mainframe software, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The European Commission intends to accept an offer made by IBM in September to resolve a dispute over anti-competitive behaviour that may have blocked rival mainframe software makers, said the people who couldn’t be identified because the talks are private.

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Before tablets, smartphones, and PCs became prominent, "big iron" mainframes led down the path to computing, becoming a staple of enterprise business worldwide several decades ago. Rather than going the way of the dinosaur as PCs and the client/server model emerged, mainframes remain stalwarts in heavy-duty transactional applications. "The mainframe is alive and well and still powers the global economy," says Dayton Semerjian, general manager for mainframes at CA Associates, which focuses on mainframe technologies. He notes that 80 percent of the Fortune 500 still use them.

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IBM has made good on its promise to deliver Windows integration with the IBM mainframe via the zEnterprise System.

When IBM introduced the zEnterprise in July 2010, the company also announced plans to deliver additional general-purpose blades for the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension including IBM System x-based blades running Linux in 2011. IBM also suggested it would support Windows, and in April 2011 it confirmed its plans to deliver Windows support on z/Enterprise.

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By now, most companies have discovered that software constitutes a major expense and a drag on mainframe growth. There are several ways to manage this cost, including delayed hardware upgrades and small processors (sometimes called “penalty boxes”)used exclusively for expensive software packages. A promising path is to do away with the expense entirely through the use of open source software on mainframes.

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Today QSGI, Inc. ("QSGI") announces that a case was filed in the United States District Court, Southern District, on August 3, 2011 with QSGI as the Plaintiff and IBM Global Financing, a Division of International Business Machines Corporation ("IBM") and IBM, parent to and/or d/b/a IBM Global Financing as the Defendants. This action for damages was brought pursuant to the Florida Antitrust Act of 1980. The action claims QSGI operated in direct competition with IBM Global Financing in the resale of used mainframe computers in the open market.

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Three companies that manufacture IBM-compatible mainframe hardware and software have agreed to drop antitrust complaints filed against IBM in the U.S. and Europe. Big Blue remains the subject of antitrust probes by the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.

T3 Technologies and Neon Enterprise Software both have withdrawn their actions, IBM said in its most recent quarterly report. A third company, TurboHercules SAS, which develops open source mainframe emulation software, has also dropped a complaint against IBM, according to Bloomberg.

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Three companies that had accused IBM of anticompetitive behavior in its mainframe business are dropping the complaints they had filed with the European Union.

According to a recent regulatory filing by IBM, two of the companies—T3 Technologies and Neon Enterprise Software—either have or will withdraw their complaints with European regulators. Meanwhile, officials with a third company—TurboHercules—said Aug. 3 they were no longer pursing their complaint against IBM and its mainframe business.

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IBM's iron grip on its big iron business just got a little tighter. Three small companies that have been trying for years to carve out little niches in the System z mainframe market have all withdrawn their complaints with the European Union's antitrust authorities.

The most interesting of the dropped complaints against Big Blue with the EU came from TurboHercules, the French company established in September 2009 by Roger Bowler, the creator of the open source Hercules mainframe hardware emulator. TurboHercules was founded by Bowler to commercialize the Hercules emulator, which allows mainframe operating systems and applications to run on x64 and Itanium processors running Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris as the host environment for Hercules. The Hercules software can emulate the System/360, the System/370, the ESA/390, and the z mainframe hardware architectures.

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Antitrust pressures on IBM in Europe eased following news that the three companies whose complaints prompted a European Commission investigation into the US group’s mainframe computer business have dropped their protests.

Although the Commission still has the power to press ahead with both of its probes into IBM, one of which was prompted by the complaints, the decision to withdraw grievances raises the chance of IBM being handed a reprieve in at least one of the cases.

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