The Blackmail Interview
Damn straight he's biased. IBM's Steve Mills gives a Mills-eye view of Microsoft, NT, and other indelicate subjects.

October 1998

Steve Mills General Manager, IBM Software Solutions

But he stresses that the debate on the relative robustness of NT is not what IBM's efforts are about. "The fact that customers can choose other systems to host different kinds of workloads does not detract from the value of a PC server running NT with our middleware". The big win, he says, is when customers use IBM middleware to effectively integrate NT into an environment that includes IBM 390, AS/400 or RS/6000 processors.

All of which explains why the public relations professional who scheduled Enterprise Development Editor in Chief Kevin Strehlo's interview with Steve in his Somers, New York office refers to this piece as "that blackmail interview." Most of the discussion focused on the robustnessor lack of sameof NT.

What follows has been edited for space and clarity but not to relieve anyone's discomfort. We hope Steve Mills and Theo Chisholm still take our calls. (Not to mention the folks from Microsoft's NT group.)

More important, we think Steve Mills did the right thing in frankly discussing one of the key concerns of the readers of Enterprise Development. If there weren't substance to our discussion, Microsoft would not be spending so much effort on improving quality of service in the upcoming release of Windows NT 5.0.

But calling it blackmail? Well, geeze, that's a little harsh, don't you think?

Enterprise Development: Why is NT so important as a platform to IBM?

Steve Mills: Our customers want PC servers. They see a good value proposition there; PC servers match a whole bunch of application needs. Our business motivation is no more complicated than that. Our challenge is to get people to say that when I want to do that kind of work on my PC server with NT, I'm going to turn to IBM. What IBM adds is a superior infrastructure, including middleware, on top of PC servers.

ED: So it's not really a competition of Microsoft versus IBM or of NT versus or OS/400 or AIX.

SM: It's not IBM versus Microsoft. We're motivated by customers. But it is sometimes an operating system competition where we're dealing with a view presented by Microsoft that NT is the answer to all prayers.

ED: NT is the answer to all prayers?

SM: All prayers. And we saywhoa, time out. You know, from a customer standpoint, server systems are chosen based on a quality of service issue. The PC server has a nice value proposition in terms of offering good capability at a good price, but it is not the most scalable thing in the marketplace, by any means, nor is it the most reliable. Let's say you want to run classical departmental applications, basically a ten-hour a day operation. You're not logging on at 4:00 in the morning and that kind of thing. An example is a bank branch, where teller stations are only running while the bank is open and the amount of concurrent load activity is modest in nature. That's a very compelling environment to put a PC server into. Other kinds of environments with significant workloads, multiple applications running simultaneously, a substantial number of users banging away at it, a lot of variability of transaction loads, and after hours work...well, that might not be suitable for a PC server. There are different classes of systems. You get what you pay for. The PC servers that IBM produces are not as reliable as our other servers.