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To: techtonicbull who wrote (114699)	10/22/2000 11:41:20 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 186894

tec - I have studied the two companies closely over a period of about 10 years - I was first a SUNW shareholder in 1988 and CPQ in 1991. DEC as a whole had a lot of inefficiencies but their services organization was pretty strong - it was carrying DEC for the last few years before CPQ acquired them As to the notion that "With SUN's system the heavy lifting is done by the enterprise class servers and there is ample strength and scalability built into their OS's and servers, so there is less redundancy, or need for such support." - field data does not support your view. SUNW has a mediocre record with field availability. Their top two servers - the UE10000 and the UE6500 - have a field availability of only 98.5 which is about the same as ALL classes of NT based machines. CPQ will guarantee 99.99% on both their Alpha and Intel based servers. SUNW certainly DID expect that customers and their channel partners would do the heavy lifting - that is one of the reasons why their big systems have only average availability. They have also had some fairly serious hardware problems in those big systems - the I/O subsystem failures last year and the memory cache problems this year. I wonder how those customers felt about Sun's "strength" on those products? By way of comparison, HP's UNIX systems have better than 99% availability and CPQ's Alpha machines have better than 99.9%. While those numbers don't look too different, they make a big difference in the cost of downtime. 98.5% is 131 hours of downtime a year. Ask EBAY if that kind of downtime is expensive or not. 99.9% means only 8 hours a year down, and the 99.99% downtime guarantee that CPQ offers on a datacenter installation using the MSFT datacenter product and either 8-way or 32-way Intel-based CPQ products gives less than an hour downtime per year. Tandem offers systems which have 99.9999% availability - less than a minute a year downtime. I think you are mistaken in thinking that SUNW can continue to hold enterprise accounts when their big systems have so much more downtime than the competition.

To: techtonicbull who wrote (114699)	10/22/2000 11:52:14 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

tbull, we've gone around and around on this, and you're still dazzled only by Sun's YOY delta. Let's get more up to date. Right to the minute, their sequential growth was nothing. How do you know this isn't the start of the "new Sun"? Question: what did Sun say about next quarter? The release below said nothing except "This is a great beginning to our fiscal year 2001..." Intel forecast 4 to 8% sequential growth for next quarter. How about Sun? sun.com CPQ is saddeled with a DEC workforce, which is in excess from a labor cost perspective for the company. That's another old story. Word is that the DEC and Tandem buyouts have been well assimilated, and Compaq is on a major turnaround success story. It's been over 2 years, don't you think they'd get it done ever? Sun is "priced for perfection", like Intel was, except X2 or 3 PE wise. Look what happens when any glitch happens.