I questioned PSI's choice of Itanium in the very first PSI analysis I did: http://www.isham-research.co.uk/platslns.html
Now that discovery in the court case has blown away some of the mist and smoke, we can see the game plan. It was impossible for PSI to build a support structure like the old PCMs had - there just isn't enough gross margin in the market, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Fundamental (via T3 and CSI - and originally Intelliware) used IBM Business Partners and sold Flex-ES mostly on IBM hardware. It was obvious right from the start that this route wasn't ever going to be available to PSI. Competing for the partner as well as for the customer? HP was the only company in the enterprise market with a suitable support structure. And it seems the guys at PSI wanted to get rich quick by talking up the product and market, and then selling to HP at what I can only describe as a ludicrous valuation. The lawsuit gave HP cold feet - and the loss of HP caused a major problem. Itanium is fundamentally an HP design - Intel is merely the foundry and Itanium has virtually no role to play in any Intel roadmap. But PSI was up a gum tree with its code dependency on Itanium - so it went to NEC. A good product, but a very different support model. HP is on every street corner in Europe - in Germany, for example, there is only one main NEC office. When PSI lost HP, it lost a LOT more than the hardware platform. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
