The Texas district court that will hear Neon Enterprise Software's antitrust suit against IBM for monopolizing the mainframe market - an issue that has both the European Commission and the Justice Department investigating Big Blue - was looking over its calendar the other day and - lo and behold - sua sponte found an opening and moved the trial up nine months to next June 6.

Neon, whose lights must be twinkling about now, had wanted to get into court early next year. The court's move pretty much gives it what it wanted.

The tighter schedule should make the pricey process cheaper for the little Texas ISV and give IBM less scope for displaying its entire repertoire of lawyer tricks.

IBM never tried to get the case dismissed presumably on the assessment that it would lose and expose a weakness customers could take advantage of.

Neon has charged IBM with monopoly maintenance in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and conditioning sales to mainframe users on their promise not to buy from a competitor in violation of the Clayton Antitrust Act.

Neon named names in its amended suit and claimed IBM threatened retaliation against Honda, FedEx, Daimler-Benz US, Swisscom, Sainbury's HuK Coburg, Home Depot, Wells Fargo and Experian if they used its zPrime software to offload legacy DB2, CICS, IMS and z/OS workloads onto the so-called mainframe specialty processors that they buy from IBM thereby saving themselves billions of dollars in exorbitant monthly licensing fees.

IBM, which has countersued for damages of all descriptions and an injunction, claims Neon's technology is "illegal" and that mainframe users are contractually restricted from running anything but IBM-authorized workloads on the zAAP and zIIP specialty processors Neon exploits.

If IBM loses it could be forced to disgorge a billion dollars or more of its profits on software licensing fees for violating the Lanham Act and hundred of million of dollars more in damages - which, under antitrust rules, could be trebled.