NEWS & ANALYSIS

EU Commission initiates formal investigations against IBM in two cases of suspected abuse of dominant market position

by Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission

(26 July, 2010)

The European Commission has decided to initiate formal antitrust investigations against IBM Corporation in two separate cases of alleged infringements of EU antitrust rules related to the abuse of a dominant market position (Article 102 TFEU). Both cases are related to IBM's conduct on the market for mainframe computers. The first case follows complaints by emulator software vendors T3 and Turbo Hercules, and focuses on IBM's alleged tying of mainframe hardware to its mainframe operating system. The second is an investigation begun on the Commission's own initiative of IBM's alleged discriminatory behaviour towards competing suppliers of mainframe maintenance services.

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BowlerRoger Bowler Responds to IBM Patent Attack on Open Source

by Roger Bowler Creator of Hercules and Co-founder of TurboHercules

(Posted in News & Blogs section of turbohercules.com on 6 April, 2010)

As many of you know, the company I founded to promote the Hercules open source mainframe emulator, TurboHercules SAS, has filed an antitrust complaint against IBM with the European Commission in Brussels. We are not asking that IBM be subjected to punishing fines or anything like that. We simply want IBM to agree to allow legitimate paying customers of its z/OS mainframe operating system to deploy that software on the hardware platforms of their choice – including, should they so choose, on low-cost servers using Intel or AMD microprocessors and Hercules.

I want to make clear that we undertook this action reluctantly, and only after a long period of reflection during which we reached out to IBM to see if there was some way to resolve our differences amicably. I regret to report that IBM rebuffed our efforts at conciliation, and even added fuel to the fire by launching accusations against Hercules. I would like to take this opportunity to respond to some of those charges.

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The Issues of Competition in Mainframe and Associated Services in India

by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations and Indicus Analytics

Very little is known about the extent and nature of competition in the mainframe and associated services market in India. This is the first study to analyze competition and related issues in the Indian server market, with an extensive focus on mainframe computing.

Download the report PDF (4MB)

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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Monday
Sep012008

Mainframe Migration Project - The State of North Dakota case study

DateSeptember 1, 2008

The State of North Dakota Information Technology Department (ITD) contracted with Software AG in 2005 to migrate legacy computer software applications running on the IBM mainframe computer to a more cost-effective, Linux-based environment on HP Blade servers with AMD's Dual Core Opteron 64-bit CPU. The production COBOL/Natural server is a BL45 blade with 4 Dual Core Opteron CPUs and 16 GB of memory. The production Database servers are BL25 blades with two Dual Core Opteron CPUs and 8 GB of memory. The project came to completion when the final application was migrated on August 9th, 2008.

The State of North Dakota and Software AG have documented their mainframe migration from start to finish. The resource links below are valuable for any organization comptemplating a mainframe migration and highlight many of the challenges inherent in moving critical applications from a mainframe  environment to a non-mainframe environment.

The State of North Dakota Information Technology Department Mainframe Migration Project home page.

Software AG's Mainframe Migration Project Plan pdf (2006)

Software AG's "Migrating off the Mainframe" PowerPoint presentation (2008)

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