IBM acquires PSI

There was a small company called Plattform Solution. This company developed a Mainframe clone based on Itanium procs. And big IBM sued the small PSI. This could be a story of hate, legal dodges and the game of sueing and counter sueing. But the story ended differently: The big IBM simply simply swallowd the small PSI as reported by Computerworld for example.

Well ... where leave this the mainframe market. IBM took it´s nearest competito out of the game. This can lead to two developments in the future. You might think (and some industry analysts indeed do) that IBM will use the technology of PSI to build a new class of cheap mainframes. My personal opinion to that: Dream on and pigs might fly. IBM would canibalize it´s high margin mainframe business with such an offer and it needs the high margins to refinance the further development of the mainframe technology for a shrinking group of customers. And additionally: I heard on several occasions, that IBM uses laptops internally with mainframe emulation for test purposes. It would be easy for the large IBM to productize this emulation if they really want to do that. They don´t need to buy a company to do that (and more logical targets would be their own pSeries or xSeries and not an a somewhat strange Itanium server)

The more probable possibility is in my opinon a different one: They simply want to take out a competitor to protect their market share. And this would leave this acqusition as an interesting target for antitrust inquiries. But thats only my 2 cents, time will tell.