China pulling the plug on foreign mainframes, software

BEIJING - E-commerce companies and banks in China are scrapping hardware and uninstalling software for mainframe servers made by American suppliers in favour of home-grown brands said to be safe, advanced and a lot less expensive. The move has taken special aim at products made by the American companies IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and EMC Corp., all of which have deep roots in corporate IT departments across China.

Domestic rivals of these companies such as Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd and Inspur Co. Ltd. are winning contracts from State company and bank IT departments at an accelerating rate. Some companies, such as e-commerce giant Alibaba group, have been building internal computer networks with open-source software and commonly available hardware. www.webershandwick.con (ATI).