Dec3Written by:SuperUser Account
12/3/2010 9:55 AM 
By: Maureen O'Gara
Has spent years looking for ways into the very high-end server market
Microsoft has tucked some undisclosed - and from its point of view immaterial - amount of money in Paris-based TurboHercules SAS, the year-old open source mainframe project-turned-commercial emulator outfit whose antitrust complaint against IBM spurred the European Commission to open not one but two ongoing Justice Department-mimicking antitrust investigations of Big Blue.
Microsoft has spent years looking for ways into the very high-end server market and it has previously ploughed an unknown amount of money into companies like TurboHercules that have been trying to nibble at the edges of IBM's huge mainframe monopoly.
The software side of mainframes is estimated to be worth $25 billion.
Whatever money Microsoft put in TurboHercules for whatever exchange of equity, the start-up would still like to talk to other potential investors. Its widgetry can run mainframe apps on x86 machines.
Because of IBM restrictions - and its patent threat against TurboHercules - including a couple IBM swore it would never assert - the company has been limited to serving as a cheap governance-mandated disaster recovery vehicle for entities like state and local governments that can't afford a pricey back-up mainframe. It would like to do more, such as replace lower-end mainframes that are no longer supported.
It figures it can handle chores like mainframe education, training, demonstrations, pre- and post-processing, data preparation, archiving, development and testing as well as disaster recovery. It claims it's unlikely to dislocate IBM's mainframe cash flow.
IBM has blamed Microsoft and its "satellite proxies" like T3T, once the world's second-largest mainframe systems integrator and another Microsoft investment, for the pickle it's in with the regulators but one of the EC's investigations into what looks like discriminatory behavior toward competing suppliers of maintenance services is purely the agency's idea.
The EC is supposed to be investigating T3 Technologies and TurboHercules' charges that IBM illegally ties its mainframe hardware to it mainframe operating system.
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