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Since its introduction in 1988, IBM Corp.'s AS/400 midrange system has been a rare, undisputed success story for the vendor.
While the mainframe, PC and software divisions have been plagued with falling sales, unprofitability or plummeting market share, the AS/400 has held its own, beating out competing midrange-market products such as those from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Digital Equipment Corp.
The phenomenon is ironic, considering that the AS/400 continues to be a proprietary system in a world undergoing a change to open systems.
This year's Vision Awards prove that the product continues to be a hit with resellers, as 45 percent of resellers polled by CRN nominated the AS/400 as the best midrange system of 1994. HP came in second with a respectable 29 percent, while DEC's VAX 4000 was cited by 10 percent.
The reasons resellers gave for the AS/400's popularity are its modularity, dependability and strong collateral support from IBM. "IBM has done an excellent job of positioning it as an alternative mainframe," said Raju Shivdasani, president of the retail banking division of Fiserv Inc., in Orlando, Fla.
Resellers also give IBM high marks for its re-selling, or, in IBM parlance, re-marketing programs, which have boosted the share of AS/400s going through the channel to around 50 percent, according to Buell Duncan, vice president of sales at the AS/400 division at IBM,...