Long standing Microsoft partner Amdahl said today the battle between it and IBM has hardly commenced. Charlie Abrahams, European MD of the newly spun off global services group, confirmed that NT is not as scaleable as customers might have wished but in certain circumstances can be "tweaked" for blue chip customers. Amdahl, the clone IBM mainframe company, now owned by Fujitsu, struck a deal last September after six months hard negotiations with Microsoft, Abrahams said. Fujitu's interim results are out this week. The deal allows Microsoft to come into Big Blue accounts, because Amdahl has access to those ones too, because of its clone IBM status. It gives Microsoft access to some top accounts. But Abrahams and his cohorts denied that just because it had struck a deal with Microsoft that meant it would necessarily recommend NT as a solution. For example, it is the second biggest reseller of Sun boxes in the known universe. It is a matter of relationships. Amdahl said it will recommend Linux in necessary cases to its large corporate customers. Those include Barclays Bank, British Airways, and a raft or host of other blue chip customers. Said newly appointed UK head of global services, Malcolm Fleming: "We would advise people to use non-NT servers, such as Linux, if it made sense." He added there were versions of NT that could be tweaked for customers, if they wanted it. This, of course, is not what Microsoft says on the record. Abrahams said: "Microsoft is very adversarial. The battle is between SQL versus DB2 and Exchange versus Notes." Amdahl, insisted Abrahams, was platform neutral. ®