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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JEFF GREGERSON who wrote (22636)	3/19/1998 11:44:00 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 97611

The proprietary nature of the AS400 (and the close linkage with a community of vendors and developers who have produced complete environments based around the AS400) has been its strength (like system36 and 38 which were the AS400's forerunners). The user base has been very loyal. Despite high prices and mediocre performance, the AS400 has done the job for its users. HP's approach was based around HP-UX but also involved picking certain key applications and porting them, then providing a great deal of handholding and customer support. HP focused on a narrow slice of the AS400 business. The program was not wildly successful but I believe they got about 5% of their target market, better than anyone else was able to do. Sun has taken a different approach, but also based their attack on key applications. Most of the easy targets have been hit. Now the remaining customers are the ones you refer to - someone will have to be willing to basically replace their whole environment to move. CPQ with DEC may be in the best position among these vendors to take on that task, since DEC has both enterprise capability and the service organization to help the customer base move. I think that the AS400 market is around $15B so it's a big prize - bigger than all of Dell's sales, for example.