INTERVIEW-Sun Micro confident of strategy
Reuters Story - December 26, 1997 15:37 sunny story
%ELI %ENT %US %BUS %DPR %RESF SUNW MSFT INTC IBM HWP NCR SQNT CPQ DELL DEC SGI V%REUTER
P%RTR
Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of
Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
Jump to first matched term
By Samuel Perry
MENLO PARK, Calif., Dec. 26 (Reuters) - A senior executive
of Sun Microsystems Inc said the company is confident it can
compete with its own products against Microsoft Corp's
Windows NT system software and Intel Corp's upcoming
Merced microprocessor.
"We feel extremely comfortable with out road map," Ed
Zander, president of the company's Sun Microsystems Computer Co
computer systems division, said in an interview at the
company's offices here.
Zander forecast Sun would end calendar 1997 as the
industry's top-selling server business, although he declined to
provide details and he said new workstation products to be
unveiled on January 13 will take on the fast-growing market for
Intel-based Windows NT workstations directly.
"We will raise the bar considerably versus NT workstations
in both price performance and functionality," he said, arguing
that Sun hopes to continue to benefit from the shift by
competitors to NT-based desktop computers by offering its own
alternative.
Some analysts argue that, while Sun remains the leader in
the sort of high-powered workstation computers used by
engineers, it will only be a matter of time before the
company's workstation market is eroded by NT machines.
Andrew Allison, a consultant and publisher of the
newsletter Inside the New Computer Industry, projects that Sun
is currently about a year behind in feeling the pain of the
incursion of lower-priced Intel-based NT desktops.
"It's my guess that Sun is about a year behind the other.
(Unix-based) workstation vendors," Allison wrote in an
editorial released this week for his January issue.
Allison estimates that Sun saw a five to 10 percent decline
in unit volume in 1997 and this decline will increase to around
20 percent in 1998 and 30 percent in 1999.
Zander rejects this line of reasoning, arguing Sun will
focus the sort of specialized applications that would be more
costly to switch to than what the industry calls the "Wintel"
(Microsoft Windows and Intel chips) platform.
"Take a look at the companies that have switched to this
NT-Wintel argument and show me success," he said, listing off a
host of companies he said have agreed to offer such machines as
all or part of their product line.
These include International Business Machines Corp ,
Hewlett-Packard Co , NCR Corp , Tandem Computer
Inc, Sequent Corp , Unisys <>, Compaq Computer Corp
and Dell Computer .
"The only two companies that are actually doing reasonably
well in the Wintel camp are Compaq and Dell," in terms of the
financial performance generated by their Wintel-based products,
Zander said.
He also cited Digital Equipment Corp , as an example
of a company he said had committed to support too many
different computer systems at one point, confusing customers
and spreading resources too thin.
Zander would not elaborate on the January 13 workstation
announcement, although a cartoon invitation for the event
describes the new model lineup as looking like a PC.
"I think for people that design things, build things,
create things this is going to be a product they are going to
want to have," he said, a sign Sun may also be going after the
market of neighbor Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) , which is
about to add its own Intel-NT products.
SGI once dominated the graphics-intensive computer market,
with machines used in movie special effects.
Sun's new line "will challenge the entire NT workstation,
(Intel) Pentium family. We're going right after these guys,"
said Zander.
Next year, Sun will also offer a chip upgrade to its
top-end Starfire computers and achieve higher performance from
multiprocessor systems that will jump to clusters made up of
128 processors from 64-way machines.
Zander said a deal struck earlier this month with Intel in
which the two companies will collaborate to make sure Sun's
Solaris system runs on the Intel Merced chip due out in 1999
had been misinterpreted by some as a possible "hedge" against
Sun's own ULTRASPARC processors.
"Sun doesn't do insurance bets. It doesn't do hedges," he
said. "If anything, this was more of a reinforcement of our
alternative to NT' strategy, of the Java movement, of pushing
Sun as the company to deal with in network computing. I don't
think customers and software vendors like insurance bets, or
hedging."
Zander said he sees no reason why Sun would diverge from
its Solaris systems or UltraSPARC processors, while the Intel
deal will create a greater market for Sun.
"There is no other chip architecture that will touch
Solaris/UltraSPARC," he said, adding, "You are not going to bet
your company on NT in the years of 1999-2000.
Zander said there would be new licensees of the Solaris on
Merced platform, but declined comment. So far, NCR has agreed
to work with Sun on Solaris systems.
"Based on Sun's growth, Sun's revenue, I think we're going
to continue to execute on the strategy that's worked so far,"
said Zander, who was upbeat about Sun's December quarter
business, especially for its thrust into servers which run
computer networks, without providing details.
"Our server business is still progressing very nicely. I
believe at the end of this month we will be the number one
server company in revenue and units," Zander said.
|
