And those cheap boxes increasingly rival the more expensive Sun servers and IBM mainframes.
Much of the software infrastructure for IBM mainframes was developed in a collaborative model.
And those cheap boxes increasingly rival more expensive Sun servers and IBM mainframes with each new version of Microsoft's operating system or Linux clustering software.
Filipowski started with a small outfit that produced software for IBM mainframes, then went on to found an accounting and inventory-data software company called Platinum Technology.
For this new world of on-line databases, we'll need computers that are thousands of times faster than the fastest PCs, hundreds of times faster than IBM mainframes.
"It's a business problem - and people really have to take the bit between their teeth, " says Ray Muller, business consulting manager for CSSL, a Hong Kong-based reseller of IBM mainframes that will soon launch a consulting division to offer clients solutions to their Year 2000 problems.
"IBM wants to keep mainframes relevant, but you want to write software for the cheaper, more efficient new systems, " says Bill L. Veghte , vice president of Microsoft's Windows server division.
For those who say the iPod is in too narrow a niche to be a valid example, remember IBM and its dominance of mainframes.
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The subsequent rise of mainframes, in which IBM not UNIVAC proceeded to dominate, took IBM stock up over 400 percent over the following decade or so.
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On hardware, IBM essentially has a monopoly within mainframes which remains superior to x-86 servers in terms of reliability, utilization, security and throughput which will see an upgrade in 2013.
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This opened the door for Honeywell, which started to make mainframes that were wholly compatible with IBM's products but cost less, and eventually, for the appearance of IBM PC clones.
IBM's Adkins responds with the company's usual argument against those antitrust attacks: That because mainframes now compete with x86 and Unix servers sold by many vendors, IBM's mainframe monopoly is really only a small slice of a much larger enterprise computing industry.
Sony worked with IBM and IBM used a version of the chip that they build into some of their mainframes and super computers, but then they actually added enhancements to it.
Pre-Gerstner IBM kept adding key account sales people in hopes of keeping IT departments from switching out of mainframes to PCs.
The first was to rewrite an IBM database language called SQL into a form that would allow it to run on all kinds of computers, from mainframes to desktops.
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