ICL?s golden egg turns into a goose

Goldrush fever is over at ICL and Megaserver sales have all but dried up, just three years after shipping.

ICL has privately accepted that the massively parallel processor Goldrush Megaserver was a failure in sales terms and never lived up to its name.

The vendor has drawn a line under Goldrush and has revealed that worldwide sales barely ran into double figures after its 1994 launch.

Including ICL sites running Goldrush for data warehousing services, there are currently only around 20 in use worldwide.

There was cause for celebration when Newcastle University this month announced it would buy a Goldrush for research ? although ICL is funding part of the #1.3m costs.

Peter Slavid, ICL?s high-performance systems business strategy manager, said: ?We don?t expect any significant new shipments. It has not turned out the way we expected.

?It?s taught us a lot about this market. But in terms of capital revenue generated from hardware shipments, it has been disappointing. ICL has been moving away from capital revenue generated from hardware sales.?

The company?s target commercial market failed to materialise as companies baulked at the high capital outlay for limited use.

Interest instead focused on ICL using Goldrush to supply data warehousing services ? and the company is currently in discussion with dozens of UK customers.

The company was also pleasantly surprised by interest in the machine as a media server delivering video on demand, leading to five sales.

Slavid claimed technology has moved on since Goldrush and the idea of building specialist systems ?is no longer realistic; the future is based on commodity chipsets and operating systems?.

?Our strategy is to move the technology away from the Goldrush hardware and software systems into the more standard Intel, Unix and NT environment,? said Slavid.