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The following content is from an older version of this website, and may not display correctly. Less than one week after IBM announced its new mega-powerful mainframe server zEnterprise, European antitrust authorities launched two investigations into accusations of infringement on antitrust rules in connection with IBM conduct in the mainframe-computer market.
The European Commission started one of the two separate investigations following complaints by emulator software vendors T3 and Turbo Hercules that IBM had allegedly broke antitrust rules by tying its mainframe hardware to its operating system for mainframes, according to the commission's news release. The plaintiffs said this practice had shut them and other emulator software companies out of selling users the capability to use non-IBM hardware for critical applications.
Emulator software is used to emulate a particular piece of hardware so that software written specifically for that piece of hardware can be deployed on a different system. Turbo Hercules' emulator product, for example, is deployed between a mainframe OS and a non-mainframe OS, enabling a non-mainframe OS to run mainframe applications on a variety of hardware.
The commission launched the second investigation on its own initiative. Investigators suspect that the vendor may have attempted to foreclose the market for maintenance services "by restricting or delaying access to spare parts for which IBM is the only source."
The commission cited an estimation that most of the world's corporate data lives on mainframes, a market that last year generated about Ôé¼8.5bn in revenue worldwide and Ôé¼3bn in the European Economic Area.
The European Commission started one of the two separate investigations following complaints by emulator software vendors T3 and Turbo Hercules that IBM had allegedly broke antitrust rules by tying its mainframe hardware to its operating system for mainframes, according to the commission's news release. The plaintiffs said this practice had shut them and other emulator software companies out of selling users the capability to use non-IBM hardware for critical applications.
Emulator software is used to emulate a particular piece of hardware so that software written specifically for that piece of hardware can be deployed on a different system. Turbo Hercules' emulator product, for example, is deployed between a mainframe OS and a non-mainframe OS, enabling a non-mainframe OS to run mainframe applications on a variety of hardware.
The commission launched the second investigation on its own initiative. Investigators suspect that the vendor may have attempted to foreclose the market for maintenance services "by restricting or delaying access to spare parts for which IBM is the only source."
The commission cited an estimation that most of the world's corporate data lives on mainframes, a market that last year generated about Ôé¼8.5bn in revenue worldwide and Ôé¼3bn in the European Economic Area.