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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ProDeath who wrote (47293)	6/28/2000 2:54:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Schmandel - While I understand your issues with MSFT products in major back-end applications, the economic arguments are gradually winning over even hardened Sun accounts. One of my clients is a leading Swiss financial firm which took over a major Boston-based US investment house in the early 90s. Both companies had bought into the prevailing architecture at that time, which was Sun hardware and Sybase. A variety of custom and commercial applications and a common fraternity of programmers and systems administrators in New York had largely locked in the Sun-Sybase combo for a 10-year run. After lengthy evaluation of Windows2000 and SQL 7, and now with beta versions of the next generation (7.5) SQL products, they have decided to replace all of those Sun based systems with the MSFT stack running on Intel-based servers from Compaq. Why? Well, the decline of Sybase had something to do with it but in the end it was pure economics. While the NT systems are more difficult to administer in the base product, Compaq has provided tools which pretty much even the playing field. Reliability of the systems was as good or better than the existing Sun-Sybase combination. The applications written for Sybase run virtually unchanged on MS SQL, allowing them to retain their investment in special software. And of course, the cost to maintain and upgrade their systems on a capital expenditure basis is about 25% of the cost with the Sun - Sybase stack. This is a major financial house with a big following in the technical community which supports Wall Street, and my sense is that this is the beginning of a number of shifts in that particular market.