880125 Honeywell Bull

This document, "competitive update" (Volume 7, Number 7, January 25, 1988), is an internal publication for Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital/DEC) sales and support teams, providing competitive intelligence on major competitors' products and strategies, primarily Honeywell Bull and IBM.

Key sections and their summaries:

1. Competitive Support Team and Hotline: Announces new contact numbers (including a toll-free 800 line) and relocation for Digital's Competitive Support Team and Hotline, emphasizing its role in providing strategic/tactical competitive information and consulting to improve sales outcomes (e.g., higher win rates, shorter sales cycles). It stresses that this service is "FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY."

2. Honeywell Bull Systems – A Competitive Positioning: Details the recent corporate reorganization of Honeywell's Information Systems business into Honeywell Bull, now jointly owned by Groupe Bull, Honeywell, and NEC. It provides a breakdown of Honeywell Bull's large-scale (DPS 8, 88, 90, 8000), medium-scale (DPS 7, 7000), and small-scale (DPS 6, 6 Plus, XPS-100) systems, including MIPS, memory, and price/maintenance data. The article highlights potential customer challenges with Honeywell Bull's diverse operating systems and migration paths (e.g., DPS 7/7000 being EBCDIC vs. DPS 8/8000/88/90 being ASCII), identifying the CP-6 operating system's vulnerability as an opportunity for Digital's VAX/VMS.

3. ALL-IN-1 Versus IBM's SolutionPac, Office Series/VM: Argues that Digital's ALL-IN-1 office automation suite directly competes with IBM's comprehensive SolutionPac (which includes PROFS, DW/370, AS, SQL/DS), not just PROFS alone. The document warns against IBM's tactic of initially bidding PROFS (a subset of SolutionPac) to appear cheaper, then later proposing SolutionPac. It emphasizes ALL-IN-1's advantages in modularity, compatibility across all VAX/VMS processors, customized vertical offerings, and long-term strategic commitment, contrasting these with SolutionPac's limitations and perceived tactical nature.

4. A Digital Assessment of Sierra Group's Report on "Cost of Ownership 1987": Critiques an independent report that compared office automation costs across vendors (Digital, IBM, Wang, Data General). Digital argues that the Sierra report is limited by focusing only on initial acquisition costs and IBM's "minimally configured" systems, failing to account for true comprehensive cost of ownership. Digital highlights its significant advantages in long-term value, service offerings (e.g., DECsupport's higher level of support vs. IBM's), and particularly system staffing costs, where Digital systems consistently require far fewer personnel than IBM equivalents, leading to substantial overall savings over time.

5. IBM 9370/60 Performance in Scientific Computation Environments: Presents Digital's benchmark results comparing MicroVAX 3500/3600 with IBM 9370/60 for scientific workloads. The analysis concludes that MicroVAX 3600 is 1 to 1.3 times faster than IBM 9370/60 in floating-point benchmarks. More significantly, MicroVAX systems demonstrate superior multi-user performance and price-performance, supporting more concurrent users due to their larger virtual memory capabilities (up to 512 MB for VAX vs. IBM 9370's 16 MB limitation), which prevents the IBM system from handling large scientific problems.

6. Terminal Server Competitive Analysis & Comparison of DHV/DHQ11-Compatible Products: Discusses Digital's DECserver products and DHQ11-compatible offerings against competitors like Emulex and Able. Digital asserts its terminal servers provide superior functionality and integration with VAXclusters through the LAT protocol, ensuring better load balancing and multiple sessions. While competitors may offer lower prices or multi-vendor protocol support (like TCP/IP), Digital emphasizes its "added value" through comprehensive service, one-stop shopping, extensive product qualification, and tight integration, which ultimately lead to lower overall implementation costs and better performance in true networking environments.