They're the first ones to break the 200,000 transactions-per-minute benchmark, and that's critical. They're now able to offer a lot more applications performance for lower price configurations.

It now goes beyond just being a tool for a system manager and will allow a business-line manager to remotely monitor Web storefront traffic, look at real-time sales database information and so on.

On a very low processor count, IBM now has performance benchmarks that are really going to put HP and Sun in a quandary, because they're going to have to match them.

That capability from IBM really came about because they were able to build an architecture that had a much lower processor requirement with very extreme levels of performance. That gave them a tremendous price-to-performance advantage in that market versus their traditional competitors, HP and Sun.

Essentially what they've done is added the ability, through a Palm Pilot, to have real-time access to sales reports, orders, revenue.

This technology not only helps to lower the cost of operation, but it also allows you to make changes to the architecture in a rolling upgrade fashion without having to bring the system down, so you can still have that high level of availability.