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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)

INTC 34.50

+2.6%

Nov 21 9:30 AM EST

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To: Joe NYC who wrote (158545)	2/12/2002 6:39:34 PM
From: milo_morai	Read Replies (3) of 186894

I got a copy of an Enterprise customer survey from Goldman and one of the items was the kinds of things that they are looking for in systems purchases and their priorities. This is similar to all the surveys I have seen over the past 10 years or so and it is my personal experience over that period as well. They are: 1. Reliability 2. Quality of Service and Support 3. Performance 4. Total Cost of Ownership 5. Compatibility with existing systems 6. Scalability 7. Reputation of Vendor 8. Ease of Administration 9. Initial Purchase Price 10. Interoperability in Multiplatform Environments The Microsoft/Intel/Linux hype is that they will knock Sun out of the box because of cost (Priority 9). The issue is that you need to have Prioities 1-8 in the bag before you are in the game. There is an implied priority zero item and that is that a systems solution, hardware and software, that can perform the customer's application adequately. Some Enterprise software does exist on Windows and less on Linux but it is hard to impossible to find all the stuff that a particular customer requires and can buy off the shelf in the Sparc/Solaris domain. Further, most of these systems have massive compute requirements and the only way to approach that requirement is with clusters. Clusters fail on reliability (particularly with the implied recoverability), total cost of ownship (outages can be catastrophically expensive) and ease of administration. Sun and similar Enterprise vendors sell clusters in fail over pairs for ultra reliabilty and they are problem enough when things don't go right. With Intel clusters, you have to go N+1 (N servers plus one spare) where N is a large number. That is very different and a far nastier animal to deal with. N+1 clusters just don't sell into this space period. If you look at customer support, in the Microsoft world it doesn't exist. This is an absolute show stopper. Same for Linux. Net, unless and until the Microsoft/Intel/Linux world solves priorities 1-8 their leverage with 9 is meaningless. I see nothing in any of these camps except possibly Itanium in the hands of IBM or Hewlett-Packard that can threaten Sun. Itanium's issue is item zero. Because it is a new interface, a critical mass of the Solaris shelf software has to be ported to it before there is a viable offering. My net is that IBM will do worse with Itanium/Mckinley than they do with Power and Hewlett-Packard will do worse with it than PA-RISC. Does Sun face competition? Sure. Is there risk in the stock? Absolutely. All tech companies are risky. Is Intel going to run over Sun? People who say that do not perceive the same customers that I do. Ken boards.fool.com So true. More from SUNW poster boards.fool.com Milo

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