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Being king of the hill has its drawbacks. IBM Corp.'s AS/400e server, once considered a washed-up proprietary system, is now being adopted by competitors targeting the midsize business market. With solutions servers and application service provider (ASP) strategies, other midrange server vendors, such as Sun Microsystems Inc., feel they can eat away at AS/400e's midmarket stronghold and push it off its throne.
Analysts, however, say defeating an entrenched player is going to be tough.
"The AS/400 pushed the solutions model back when people's main interest was reads, speeds and feeds," says Sam Albert, analyst at Sam Albert Associates, Scarsdale, N.Y. "Its turnkey features and applications set are a good fit for the hosting market." Even so, he says, "it's a wide open market and IBM will have to move faster to make the AS/400 win."
IBM, Armonk, N.Y., has its own plans for the ASP market. Tom Jarosh, AS/400 general manager, sees a good fit in IBM's e-business initiative, the ASP movement, and AS/400's mature roster of e- commerce, customer relationship...