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

To: JC Jaros who wrote (31460)	5/1/2000 11:45:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

JC - I have been putting about 20 hours a week for the last 9 months (which is about all I work anymore <gg> ) into consulting on architecture for several large ASPs - including Exodus and Digex. I have had almost no interaction directly with MSFT in the ASP business. So my opinions come from recent experience in the trenches. You misquoted my post - I said that the ASP space was driven by applications, not "applications providers". There are 3 key business areas developing in the ASP space. They are: 1) Infrastructure provisioning. SUNW obviously has a big stake in that, but so does CPQ, IBM, HP... and the type of provisioning is obviously driven by what application the ASP wants to host, and what hardware that requires. 2) Content delivery and bandwidth management, moving the access closer to "the edge". Obviously a number of players are working on cache schemes, content migration, and the like to remove bottlenecks. Several players are working up more complex architectures to add profiling and intelligent applet migration to the mix. SUNW is just another company trying to define how that will go. 3) The hosting task itself. Here again, there is a wide range of business models, from "vanilla" hosts who just want to provide the "tiles", all the way up to "full service" hosts who will do the billing, service, take trouble calls, or manage and administer the applications. As far as how many involve MSFT products, I have yet to work with a single ASP who does not have some MSFT stuff in the stack, although in some cases the proportion is pretty small. re: Your characterization of MSFT being a player, having a plan, or being on par there is no more accurate than your characterization of Sun having competition from the likes of CPQ or HWP. Here again, you are putting your own words into my post - I challenge you to point out anywhere in my post where I said that MSFT was a player or had a plan. I said nothing of the kind. MSFT gets drawn into those deals because of the desire of customers to use products in the MSFT stack, not because of any proactive involvement from Redmond. But as far as CPQ and HWP being involved, on a revenue or units basis either of those players outsells SUNW, and likewise they have some pretty significant architecture influence. I believe that SUNW has about 23% of the new business in the ASP space. But that market is still in its infancy and it's anyone's game at the moment.