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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (37516)	1/4/2001 9:10:52 AM
From: phil	Respond to of 54805

I do quite a bit of work with Sun products for both brokerage houses and some ISP's. It is a hard for me to say they are a gorilla, because most applications written in C or java can be ported to any other Unix platform, by recompiling. However I think there certainly is a great deal of stickiness and pain in moving platforms. Here is why. 1. If you have homegrown applications, you have to recompile them. To do this you need the source code and someone who is familiar with it. It is doable , put takes time. Testing on the new platform also takes alot of time. 2. Vendors usually port their products to Sun platforms 1st then other platforms. Due to a larger mass base. For the same reason , it is more likely to be debugged 1st on Sun platforms then others. Since there are more Sun boxes , support staff for the applications will be better on Sun platforms then others, just because they are exposed to problems on Sun platforms more. I have found this true with Veritas products, which is a MAJOR unix vendor. 3. Your own support staff ( eg.. Unix system administrators) Are more likely to be familiar with Sun then other Unix platforms. Although, then can support other platforms such as Linux , HP etc.. there is a learning curve. 4. It is much eaiser to have support contracts and stock parts for a single vendor then multiply vendors. All these reasons give a great deal of stickiness to Sun products. As an examples in the real world, most to the brokeage houses are SUN based, ML, Goldman, Morgan S, MP Morgan. When I was at Psinet , Sun was the only platform we supported for Unix customers, even though we had a very tight relationship with HP for the PC side. Regards Regards, Phil