Kemble - I am consistently amazed by the posters here, such as yourself, and those on other DELL boards who believe that DELL has a credible case to move against SUNW, or that there is any evidence to support the idea that they could develop a competitive threat.
High end systems are not just a collection of parts. They are a collection of development and administrative culture, best practices, and overall systems and application design which take many years to grow.
The cost of the hardware and software in those systems is about 10% of the systems cost. DELL could have perfectly competitive offerings and GIVE THEM AWAY and it would only affect the systems cost by 10%... this is not enough incentive to overcome the cultural issues.
The notion that Linux is competitive with Solaris because it is a Unix variant is laughable. There have been capable Unix variants which ran on X86 since there was an X86, and they have never challenged the high end Unix products. Unixware was the ORIGINAL Unix!! Still, no one considered it as a Solaris replacement, because the rest of the high end Unix ecosystem was missing.
This is not anything like PCs replacing mainframe terminals, or any of the other fanciful analogies which I have seen proposed. SUNW required more than 10 years to develop the culture which made their rise in servers possible. Anyone who has worked in a shop which has developed around the Solaris / SPARC architecture would understand the deep and formidable barriers which even another high end Unix vendor would have to overcome.
DELL has none of the tools needed to attack this market. It requires deep technology investment with both the customers and the application development community, a broad and capable services organization, and the patience to pump money and resources into the segment for many years before it pays off. DELL is just starting down that road and has not shown the will to even go after the low hanging fruit, if it means changing the ultra-low R&D model. If they got serious today, DELL would not see a significant shift for many years to come.
SUNW sold 100,000 servers last quarter. They are growing server revenue MUCH faster than DELL... hard to see how DELL will take any business from SUNW any time soon.
I suspect that what DELL is actually doing is not going after SUNW, but instead working on new markets where the barrier to entry is less steep, and where their partners, Intel and MSFT, can do the heavy lifting. I think that the statements targeting SUNW are pure PR, designed to deflect comparison with the PC sector and give DELL some halo as at least a player in the high end. I just don't buy it. |
