Lee -
The position taken by Jim Kelley is also Intel's position - the "high end market" is a certain machine performance range. It is obviously in the interest of both companies to have this be the standard. CPQ has been trying to get that definition accepted since they introduced the SystemPro in 1989.
But PR does not change the reality of the market. I spend a lot of time with CIOs of major financial and insurance companies, and they have no confusion about the market segmentation. Sun Solaris and equivalent Unix machines are in, Intel based machines are out.
Your characterization of this as the old "minicomputer" market is pretty accurate. In fact, real Minicomputers like VAX and AS400 still play a role there. The market is more defined by the usage model and application requirements than machine horsepower.
DELL (and CPQ in their Intel lines) do compete with Sun in some markets - the low end general purpose servers in Sun's lines can be replaced by Intel based machines, and increasingly are. There has also been some erosion of Sun's workstation business, but not nearly to the extent predicted 2 years ago.
In the webserver market, the trend is much more pronounced but the winner is CPQ, not DELL. DELL has had roughly 5% of that business for a while. IBM and HP are at 9-10%. In 1997, Sun had 29% of the business and CPQ was #2 with about 13%. Now CPQ is #1 with 31% and Sun is #2 with about 13%. This is about as clear a market reversal as I have seen...
As far as Alpha goes, there is an excellent Gartner study at
gartner12.gartnerweb.com
I think the author, Tom Henkel, has the issues well defined but discounts the long term requirements for Alpha driven by the transition of the Himilaya line, which IMO will mean that CPQ supports aggressive development for at least 10 years. But the short answer is that Alpha will for sure be around at least through the next 2 generations and probably a ways beyond that - at least 7 years more. |
