Information source: IBM U.S. Info from 12. November 1996 (Premier CLub Mailing WW3)
page index:
(red) US Navy (1)
(blue)
Sumitomo Japan (2)
(green)
Banca Commerciale Italiana (3)
(magenta)
QBE Australia (4)
(brown)
US, NationsBank (5)
IBM Software Premier Club
OS/2 Warp Plans: Commitment, Competence and Communication
Unquestionable Commitment
Forget the innuendoes, misinterpretations, and speculations. The IBM Corporation is fully committed to the OS/2 Warp brand of products. The commitment to OS/2 Warp stems from IBM's commitment to its customers to protect their investments in IBM products. OS/2 customers depend on OS/2. Many OS/2 commercial customers have bet their business on the reliability, as well as the viability of OS/2.
Businesses continue to show confidence in OS/2. In the third quarter, international businesses such as QBE Australia, Banca Commerciale Italiana and Sumitomo Japan chose OS/2 Warp over NT. In the US, NationsBank began their second regional rollout of its OS/2 Warp-based Model Banking System. Even more recently, the US Navy chose OS/2 Warp for over 400,000 workstations. How can we possibly let OS/2 die when these new customers depend on OS/2 being around for a long time? And we certainly can't abandon our long standing, loyal customers either.
Obviously our commitment to our customers comes first; but, it also makes business sense to keep developing and supporting OS/2. OS/2 has significant and measurable successes and there are numerous indications that momentum is continuing to build at a healthy rate. October, 1995 was OS/2 Warp's best month ever -- two months after Windows 95 finally made it out the door. This is on top of a strong track record: *Shipping 4 million copies of OS/2 Warp in its first year *Increasing the market share in retail from 0% to 20% in three months *Shipped more than all UNIX variants combined in the last 12 months *Outshipped Windows NT for clients and servers by significant factors in 1H95 per IDC.
LAN Server 4.0 and OS/2 as application servers both are doing well in the market. The LAN Server 4.0 market share has nearly doubled this year, going from 9% to 15%, while OS/2 ranked number 1 in the application server market in 1H95 with 24% of the market share. We're building more and more OS/2 business partners too. We are shipping OS/2 Warp preloaded on PCs built by major computer manufacturers such as Vobis, NEC, Compaq and IBM PC Company. During 1995, over sixty ISVs committed to build and to ship over 180 new applications for OS/2 Warp. These vendors include Oracle, Sybase, and PictureTel. So it's not only IBM that's committing to OS/2. Businesses around the world are showing their confidence in the OS/2 Warp brand of products.
Proven Competence
There's never been any question that the OS/2 Warp brand of products are technologically superior to other products. The plan is to continue building on our areas of strength and competence to widen the technology gap even further between OS/2 Warp and its competitors. The main area of focus is now network-centric computing. OS/2 Warp's award winning history of open, integrated connectivity solutions is the foundation for the network-centric computing for individuals, clients, servers, groupware, and future distributed applications. For individuals, the Internet access capability within OS/2 Warp opens the door for the quickly emerging consumer commerce opportunity. Merlin, the code name for the next OS/2 Warp client release, serves the connected client in both the home and business markets. This reduces the number of OS/2 Warp versions, thereby simplifying channel logistics. Merlin answers the twin challenge posed by Windows NT and Windows 95 by creating a secure, robust computing environment that is easy and intuitive to use. We are making many enhancements to appeal to connected consumers. First, it's new user interface will set the state-of-the-art interface standard. Besides adding more surprises in the BonusPak, we're improving the multimedia and game capabilities. It will also include a network aware shell that will let Internet users connect to their favorite Web sites faster and more easily than using a quick list. To get started with OS/2 Warp more quickly, Merlin will include the upgrade advisor to simplify the preparation work for installation.
Merlin will please power users and corporate customers too. OS/2's next release will correct the problems associated with the I/O queue and enhance resource management capabilities for better support of plug and play adapters. Corporate customers will find it includes new levels of security enablement that will get them to full C-2 security by adding one of several inexpensive, out-of-the-box security applications. Both corporate and independent developers can take advantage of new APIs for creating advanced 3-D, compute intensive, speech and telephony enabled applications. Developers can also change from writing difficult-to-maintain and debug, monolithic applications to writing small, functionally rich, compatible OpenDoc components. With the delivery of Developer Connection Volume 9, our goal of making it easier to write multi-platform applications falls in place with support of OS/2 Developer API extensions. This set of APIs lets developers create one code base for OS/2 and Win 32 applications. Merlin is the first OS/2 release to support these APIs. At this time, we have no explicit plans for supporting Win 32 binaries. However, we've done enough work developing and including the more than 700 Win 32 APIs and 300 messages in the OS/2 Developer API extensions that we know for sure that we can do it, if we need to.
The plans for OS/2 Warp servers follow the integration path so successful in the OS/2 Warp Connect product. Following on the heels of OS/2 Warp Server, currently in beta, we will offer specialized, integrated application servers. These servers include database, transaction, Internet, systems management, Lotus Notes, and communications functions. The point of all these integrated solutions is to simplify installation, operations, management, and maintenance. This reduces client/server computing costs, as well as complexity for customers, resellers, and system integrators. These servers have an open architecture. Customers can keep the applications that they use today but have a truly open platform to build on in the future. The first of these tightly integrated servers is the directory and security services server, now in beta. Focused Communication Both our commitment to OS/2 Warp and our future product plans becomemeaningless without effective communication. Our goal is to build on the current awareness of OS/2 Warp. We have retail channel promotions and brand television advertising planned to reach the connected consumer segment. We will gear our media campaign primarily to MIS and business influencers through the PC, MIS, networking and reseller press. From a statistical perspective, we expect to reach 75% of the business influencers at least three times a month and 95% of the MIS community at least six times per month. In general, we will match our product advertising investments to the different target audiences. We had a strong presence at Comdex from OS/2 Warp Connect advertisements on hotel room keys, publisher roundtables focused on the OS/2 Warp products, and the giving away of thousands of Just Add Warp kits. We'll kick off the new year with a worldwide TeleSeminar communicating our messages and commitment to OS/2 Warp. Many factors combine together to make a product set successful. Continued success requires commitment, competence, and communication. That is, commitment to customers and to the product, competence in delivering the right products and leaving no doubt in anyone's mind of your intentions. IBM has every intention of continuing the success of the OS/2 Warp brand of products.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen
Team OS/2 Deutschland Headquarters
http://www.teamos2.de/hq