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October 18, 1999 IBM Makes A Play For Internet StartupsNew RS/6000 platform provides turnkey E-commerce solution
 BM sells most of its Unix enterprise servers to a loyal customer base of mainframe and RS/6000 users. But the rise of Internet companies may help the vendor win accounts for its new RS/6000 S80 platform, which the company says is optimized for E-business applications that rely on enormous database back ends and front-end Web serving capabilities.Ibooks.com, an online distributor of digital reference books on IT, is the kind of new customer IBM is trying to attract. Last week, IBM said that it recently delivered a pair of top-of-the-line S80 systems to the 40-person startup. Each of ibooks.com's S80 servers contains six 64-bit, 450-MHz PowerPC RS64 III symmetric multiprocessor copper chips. The systems can each support as many as 24 CPUs. Ibooks.com needed a balanced system to run DB2, IBM's WebSphere Web serving software, and Java for a development platform. Availability and scalability are critical because its reference works are shipped over the Web in real time. "We'll have several hundred page hits per session, per user," says Amy Rudy, founder and VP of strategic partnerships for ibooks. com, in Austin, Texas. "Our decision came down to the ability to work with one vendor for the whole solution," adds Rudy. "We're a pure E-commerce company where time is critical, and we have a better chance to get problems fixed rapidly with the turnkey IBM solution." Ibooks.com evaluated numerous Intel Pentium servers and Sun servers before choosing IBM's S80. Brad Day, a Giga Information Group analyst, says technical innovation is helping make the IBM S80 a more competitive offering. But winning big in the market will depend on gaining customers such as Ibooks.com. Says Day, "Success will depend on new accounts."
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