Rich Heritage In Mainframes & Open Systems

The founding of PSI can be traced directly to Dr. Gene Amdahl, the legendary founder of Amdahl Corporation. While at IBM, he was the principle architect of the IBM System 360 series of mainframe computers, which is one of the greatest success stories in the computer industry and a precursor to IBM's mainframe success today.

Dr. Amdahl envisioned tackling increasingly higher-end computing tasks. In 1970 he left IBM and formed Amdahl Corporation to drive new innovation more rapidly into the mainframe market, and to present IBM a new type of competition. Rather than compete with a different architecture, Amdahl Corporation created an entirely new product category that offered customers a new choice and a novel value proposition. These new systems, offering superior price performance, fully supported all the same software available for the IBM mainframes. Customers literally could unplug an IBM machine and replace it with a new Amdahl system by simply plugging it in. The new Amdahl computers became known as "plug compatible machines."

Over the next quarter century, Amdahl and IBM competed aggressively, with Amdahl gaining as much as 20% of the worldwide mainframe market. In 1997, the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu, which had been an early investor.

In 1995 a team of Amdahl engineers, led by Ron Hilton, began collaborating with Intel Corporation on the system design of Intel's new 64-bit IA-64 microprocessor architecture. Several years later, as Amdahl was consolidating a number of its engineering operations, Mr. Hilton approached the company and proposed spinning out a startup specifically to design a new generation of mainframe computers compatible with the IBM z/OS. These new systems would incorporate the highly evolved Amdahl systems architecture and Intel Itanium 2 processor technology. PSI would add new features, compatibility and value.

Mr. Hilton and his team orchestrated the spinout of PSI in the Fall of 1998, acquiring from Amdahl a license to his group's previous work efforts and certain other assets in exchange for an equity interest in the new company. They believed the continued growth in mainframe computing, the rise in more powerful open systems technologies, and PSI's unequalled PCM insight and expertise would provide the new company a rare opportunity to meet customer's needs for true choice and flexibility in mainframe computing.