Hackles rise in Wolfpack gang as Digital and Tandem quarrel

The gang of seven Wolfpack members showed signs of disarray last week as Tandem accused Digital of selling the NT clustering system before phase one is even released.

Tandem also attacked Digital for being too close to Microsoft. The seven pack members are Digital, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard Tandem, Compaq and Intel.

Paul Davey, European marketing manager of Tandem, claimed that Digital had pitched a Wolfpack clustering solution to corporate customers.

He said: 'Digital is saying Wolfpack is a Digital product but that's not true. Microsoft agrees it's not. Although 99% of Wolfpack code is Microsoft code, algorithms were contributed by many companies.'

Davey said that three algorithms in particular came from Tandem. Microsoft had been pushing for software quality, he said, and that was why it had signed its partnership with Tandem.

'Digital is trying to pretend it has Wolfpack now but that's not true,' he alleged. 'It has a clustering product but it is not all Wolfpack.'

Ian Mackenzie, product marketing manager of NT at Digital, denied the allegations: 'That's deliberately misleading, Digital and Microsoft have a very close relationship. Anyone at Microsoft could confirm the depth of that relationship.

'We're the only people who have 64-bit NT. This is cross licensing and patenting of software rights.

'We helped Microsoft to implement the first clustering solution at Comdex 94. We're not saying that we have got Wolfpack, but we are saying we do know something about clustering.'

But another of the gang of seven hit out at Compaq for attempting to push the alliance into chaos.

'This is nothing other than hardware companies testing software. Compaq threw a complete wobbly when it discovered Digital was creating the clustering software for Microsoft,' commented a source at a member company, who did not want to be named.