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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul who wrote (67687)	9/16/1999 12:40:00 AM
From: Aitch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Hi Paul, RE: ....Linux and Solaris have the edge due to their robustness and scalability. Sun has many 1-2 cpu systems tarteted at this market and the venerable Ultra 2 is the workhorse of the small ISP.... This was posted on SI a week ago or so... infobeads.com What's your take?

To: paul who wrote (67687)	9/16/1999 10:45:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Paul - I do not follow Sun as closely as I do the other big players - I don't hold any SUNW. But I have been involved in a number of accounts who are users of the starfire systems and have had access to several good private studies on the sales profile of those systems. UE10000 sold about 400 systems through June of 1999 and was at a run rate which might get to 1000 systems / yr. Actual sales were probably closer to $600M in total through June. Pullthrough is of course a hard thing to quantify but the shift in SUNW's revenue base since 1996 (when 65% of sales revenues were workstation products) to current numbers (where less than 20% are in that category) reflects a big change in their customer base. I attribute most of that to the "halo effect" of starfire since Sun's other server products are not particularly compelling without the big system "magnet". The ISP market is an area I know a lot more about, having met with hundreds over the last year. There is certainly a tradeoff between ease of administration (favoring large systems) and low cost (favoring many small systems) but buying decisions have shifted heavily to server farms except for a few large sites, because of the compelling economics (about .35/1 favoring farms over fat SMP) and the improved reliability (DISA architecture, for example, provides more than twice the availabiltiy of 8-way or larger systems standalone based on real field numbers over the last 18 months). One has only to look at the numbers - CPQ has displaced Sun as the leading provider of web servers in the last 2 years, and they have done it with small servers and clean architecture. On a unit basis they are outselling SUNW about 4:1 in that space.