INDUSTRY

IT system manufacturers are facing a turnaround in climate. “The customers are again addressing themselves to new projects, indicating that the hardware industry can look forward to enjoying fuller order books in the foreseeable future,” is the resumé of Dieter Weisshaar, the CEO of transtec AG, at the end of the transtec technology talks this Monday in Stuttgart. The prevailing mood among the customers attending the event of the transtec road show in London was said by Syd Cochrane, transtec’s country manager in the UK to be good. Subjects such as “Away from proprietary and expensive systems towards standards” and “Total cost of ownership (TCO) as the new investment driver” met with a particularly positive reception at the meeting. Using a series of customer examples, it was demonstrated that standardisation of the infrastructure secures potential cuts in the TCO of 20 to 60 percent. This trend is fuelled by the departure from proprietary UNIX systems, because the development and maintenance costs for processors, hardware and operating system have to be shared by far fewer users than with standard 32/64-bit architectures. Having said that, the availability and performance of clusters based on 32/64-bit technology have today already made a large ingress into the segment of large symmetrical multiprocessors. This traces out the route into the niche market for proprietary systems, as in the past with mainframes. Top-class representatives of leading IT companies, such as Intel, Seagate, Oracle, Microsoft and SuSE-Novell presented the current IT trends of the year at the transtec technology talk 2004. At the forum held Europe-wide, the IT experts discussed the prospects of the turnaround in climate forecasted for the IT sector by market researchers and pollsters, and the entry of 32/64-bit architectures into central computing centres. The specialists’ forum was accompanied by a large exhibition of products from renowned manufacturers.