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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (27632)	2/11/2000 3:03:00 PM
From: Lynn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

SUNW news posted to MLs web site 2 minutes ago: Analysts Impressed With Sun Micro's Focus On Revenue, Market Share FEB 10,2000 NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Sun Microsystems Inc. bolstered optimism about its prospects among company watchers at its annual meeting with Wall Street analysts this week, participants said. Following three days of meetings with Sun in San Francisco, analysts issued sanguine research notes, and at least one upgraded the stock. The company excluded reporters from the meetings. Perhaps on investor reaction to the meeting, Sun (SUNW) shares have risen sharply this week, gaining 5.2% on Wednesday alone. "Sun is riding a tidal wave of demand in the network/Internet sector," wrote Jay Stevens, an analyst with Buckingham Research Group. "Current quarter business is again very strong." The mean estimate of 21 analysts surveyed by First Call/Thomson Financial puts earnings for Sun's fiscal third quarter, which ends in March, at 23 cents a share. Stevens, who has a per-share earnings target for the quarter of 24 cents, said he anticipates an "upward bias" to that number. Executives said during the annual meeting that the company will pursue higher revenue growth rather than wider profit margins because Sun sees an opportunity to snatch market share from such rivals as International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HWP). Company watchers currently expect Sun's revenue to grow 26% to 27% this year, but Stevens said the figure could rise by closer to 30%. Noting that demand for its products remains robust, Sun executives at the meetings outlined a long-term strategy that involves three big gambles about the future of computing and the company's place in that future. First, Sun is investing heavily in developing servers with "massive scalability." That means building machines, designed to run Web sites, that are capable of handling the expected explosion in Internet traffic, once computers and wireless devices are wired with beefed-up bandwidth. Sun is also betting on something called "stacks," which means selling a total package of all software, hardware, storage and services. Essentially, Sun wants to become a "one-stop shop" for computing infrastructure, Milunovich said. The gamble is based on the notion that eventually so-called middleware - software that connects a corporation's internal servers to its Web servers - will meld into operating systems. "That allows software to be delivered over the Net," Milunovich explained. Finally, Sun wants to focus on "continuous" computing, which means making machines reliable enough to handle a network that is always on. "They're not gimmes," Milunovich said of the three strategies. "Sun's still out there, but that's where they've always wanted to be." -Scott Eden; Dow Jones Newswires Copyright (c) 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Lynn