John, a few comments on that article:
But the real story is growth: While Compaq's server business increased 31 percent last year based on revenue, Dell grew 57 percent, figures from researcher International Data Corp. show. Based on units shipped, Compaq grew 38 percent, compared to Dell's 82 percent increase.
1. Dell does well in the very low server end. Compaq, OTOH, gets 80% of the 8-way business, 50% of the 4-way. There are servers, and there are SERVERS! Not only that, but Compaq gets a royalty payment on every 8-way Xeon-based shipped by Dell (if they have them), HP and IBM because Compaq has patents on the Profusion chipset along with Intel. Compaq helped design it.
2. In spite of 1., Compaq obviously wants those lost sales back, even if they're low margin 1 and 2 way servers.
3. Compaq has a new Unix server called Wildfire that competes with (and easily beats) Sun top of the line Unix servers in terms of transactions per minute. Dell has nothing like that.
4. Compaq storage is very big for them, but that's another story.
Tony |
