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

To: Marvin Mansky who wrote (28053)	2/21/2000 11:36:00 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Re: Platform independence I can't really agree with that characterization. SUNW cares very much about its platform Solaris running on UltraSparc machines. While Java is great PR they make no money from it and McNealy and company have belatedly admitted as much after having previously touted themselves as being a "software company". Aside from its PR value, Java is useful to SUNW only to the extent that it can help drive additional sales for large Solaris boxes--it's the big iron that really pays the bills (see biz.yahoo.com for details). All IT companies are platform companies and EMC is no exception--they want to sell their platform, not someone else's. The same is true for all of the processor vendors. The dilemma for a processor vendor is this: Storage demand is growing much faster than processor demand and hence over time the bulk of IT hardware spending will be on storage, not processors. Forrester estimates that storage will account for 75% of IT hardware spending by 2003 and I think that's a pretty reasonable target. So SUNW along with IBM, CPQ, and HWP are compelled to provide storage offerings to avoid slipping into irrelevancy over time. However, all of these companies are approaching storage from a processor-centric viewpoint. SUNW cares passionately what their storage is connected to (as well they should). The chances of a SUNW storage salesperson recommending an IBM processor to a prospect are equal to that of an IBM storage salesperson recommending an HWP processor, etc. Storage-centric architectures thus represent a "disruptive technology" to all processor vendors. It is the central challenge they will face over the next five years.