IBM SAYS COMMERCIAL ACCEPTANCE OF PARALLEL COMPUTING WIDESPREAD, STRONGER THAN EVER EXPECTED; Bass Brewers, Gillette, MCI, ShopKo Among New Users.

SOMERS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 23, 1995--IBM said today that commercial applications now represent the fastest-growing marketing opportunity for the company's POWERparallel information systems.

Businesses around the world, including AMR Corporation's The SABRE Group, Bass Brewers, The Gillette Company, MCI, Best Foods Baking Group, and ShopKo Stores, are among the nearly 200 commercial enterprises who have adopted IBM's Scalable POWERparallel Systems(a) SP2 for a host of critical business applications.

IBM explained that in the little over a year and a half the company's scalable POWERparallel systems have been generally available, more than 400 systems have already been shipped to customers worldwide. IBM said the shipments represent unprecedented acceptance in the marketplace for computer systems of this class and power.

The expansion from scientific/technical applications to commercial business computing has happened even faster than originally expected, IBM said.

From Research Lab to Retail Floor

IBM's POWERparallel systems were first introduced to traditional "power users" at national laboratories and university research centers. These research laboratories and universities continue to be a vital customer base for IBM POWERparallel systems, as well as great partners in pushing the state of the art in technology. Motivated by national initiatives around the world, such as the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative in the U.S., these laboratories and research centers have had as a major priority the transfer of parallel computing technology to the private sector.

IBM, after just 20 months of marketing the new systems, reports that more than half of all incoming orders for the high performance, scalable servers are now being placed by business customers.

"One reason for the accelerated growth of business applications for parallel computing is the aggressive technology transfer program scientific and technical customers initiated early-on with the business community," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager of IBM's POWER Parallel Division. "Long recognized as rigorous testers of new technology, these laboratories and research centers are an excellent source of ideas for improvement and share our priority to bring this new technology to the commercial sector as quickly as possible."

Ben C. Barnes, vice president of worldwide marketing for IBM POWER Parallel Division, said the systems are being used in a wide variety of business applications, such as high performance servers in client/server networks,and also are being employed in new, emerging business applications like data mining and decision support.

"Clearly another reason for the accelerated success in the commercial sector," Barnes explained, "is simply the strong demand by businesses of all kinds for high performance parallel computing systems that are reliable and realistically priced."

New commercial accounts -- from express shipping and air transportation to health insurance, financial investment, cosmetics manufacturing and retail distribution -- have adopted scalable, parallel computing to tackle entirely new classes of business applications.

Additionally, IBM is using the new computers internally to help re-engineer many of the company's own operations, development and business procedures.

POWERparallel systems are based on AIX -- IBM's "industrial strength" implementation of the UNIX(b) operating system -- and powerful RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processors. Early scientific and technical customers are being joined by major businesses in the U.S. and around the world, including:

- AMR Corporation's The SABRE Group

- Bass Brewers (U.K.)

- BellSouth Cellular

- Best Foods Baking Group

- FIAT Avio (Italy)

- The Gillette Company

- Intermountain Health Care

- John Alden Financial Group

- MCI

- National Semiconductor

- National Library of Australia 

- PCS Health Systems Inc.

- P&O Containers Ltd. (U.K.)

- Revlon

- Robeco Group (The Netherlands)

- ShopKo Stores

- Thyssen Informatik GmbH (Germany)

Parallel Systems Deliver Unprecedented Power

Parallel systems distribute the computing workload across dozens and even hundreds of individual processors that are operated as a single system. Not only can they deal with tremendous volumes of all types of information: text, audio and video images -- but calculations are performed on trillions of characters of information at blazing speed: billions of calculations a second.

Unlike some alternative high-performance computing architectures, IBM's POWERparallel systems are totally scalable -- meaning all elements of the system can scale, or grow: processing power, memory, interconnect bandwidth, and storage -- in near linear fashion. Systems can easily be upgraded to step up capacity and performance as workload or application requirements increase. And in doing so, computing power increases in direct proportion to the number of processors added.

Technology Transfer Drives Commercial Applications

These IBM systems are enabling entirely new classes of problems to be solved, which in the past would have been impossible either because the computing resources necessary were not available or were prohibitively expensive.

"What we're witnessing is a revolution in extremely sophisticated applications," explained Irving Wladawsky-Berger, "driven by the confluence of low cost, powerful technology and strong market demand. And IBM is helping to drive this dramatic change in the marketplace. "The problems businesses face may be different, but they are no less challenging than the large complex problems traditionally found in the scientific community," Wladawsky-Berger continued. "Not surprisingly, businesses have the same desire to acquire the most powerful, cost-effective computing systems available to solve their problems and improve their competitiveness. They want to be on the leading edge of what many refer to as network-centric computing -- a powerful resource in which all kinds of information worldwide are available to all users, everywhere."

Exciting Future for Parallel Computing

"With each new commercial order," IBM's Barnes emphasized, "customers are demonstrating their confidence that our scalable POWERparallel systems are ready for a wide variety of 'Prime Time,' high-availability business applications."

New entry-level POWERparallel systems introduced in February of this year start under $138,000 (U.S.), with larger installations priced in the millions of dollars. IBM's scalable POWERparallel Systems are an integral part of the company's IBM RISC System/6000(a) line, feature design and performance leadership, and offer exceptional reliability and versatility. IBM's POWER Parallel Division is headquartered in Somers, N.Y. -0-

Editors' Note 1: A FULL-TEXT VERSION OF THIS NEWS RELEASE, inlcuding detailed descriptions of a number of commercial customer applications, is available on request through TELEPHONE CALLS TO CONTACTS LISTED BELOW, or by accessing the POWER Parallel Division home page on the Internet, http://lscftp.kgn.ibm.com/pps/.

Editors' Note 2: The IBM home page can be found on the Internet at http://www.ibm.com.

(a) Indicates trademark or registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation.

(b) UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

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Andy Russell 

IBM POWER Parallel Systems

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Elizabeth Albrycht, [phone]

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