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

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (35225)	9/12/2000 11:39:20 AM
From: E_K_S	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Hi Charles - From my take I believe HWP see's a new consistent and growing revenue stream from "service and consulting revenues". It is interesting that HWP is willing to pay so much money for this added revenue stream. They must feel that the long term return on their investment is worth it. I would like to see SUNW further develop such an organization, perhaps by acquiring many smaller companies and consolidating them into a large service, development and consulting division that specializes in IT "solutions" and build-out. Specifically, the first acquisition they should look into is a group that can design and build environmental IT rooms that (1) have the proper cooling controls, (2) handle total IT power requirements and surges, and (3) provide for easy and fast component upgrades and hardware additions (ie. those new SUNW storage arrays). This way SUNW will have total control of the customer's "IT environment" that in the past have caused some of the systems to crash (due to heat problems). There is only so much you can do "in the box" and these other external environmental issues can be easily controlled by such a SUNW division. Other, service and consulting divisions might include, storage array farms (design, construct and maintain/upgrade), network monitoring (off site network testing w/ real time hardware and component monitoring; perhaps using JINI type devises), and many other IT "out source" functions that our customers may rather contract to SUNW than develop internally. Remember, CEO Mc Nealy stated he would like to develop a company similar to the Telephone company, boring (seamless to the customer) but very profitable. There are many more other revenue streams available to SUNW than just selling hardware. EKS

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (35225)	9/12/2000 2:55:49 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Hi Charles, I think you're right on both counts. It's sad. HWP used to be a prime engineering company. Now they're moving down the food-chain to consulting and systems integration. Very sad, but great news for SUNW shareholders. Yes, everyone needs "consulting" to help customers with their sophisticated computing systems. That's why Wintel is falling flat on their faces (one reason why). But paying $18B to get it????? I don't think so. SUNW has had consulting services for years & it's tied in with SunService & their Sales department. HWP is going nowhere with this strategy if their goal is to sell more iron. My take is they are looking to ease their way out of the computer business to become a strictly service & printer organization. Carly clearly thinks there's a huge market for integration and certainly IBM has picked up that theme and run with it. The unfortunate truth (for HWP), however, is that their reps are going to be integrating software on SPARC processors mostly running Solaris.