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Technology Stocks : HWP -- Hewlett Packard -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale J. who wrote (2653)	9/11/1998 4:40:00 PM
From: Dale J.	Respond to of 4722

Sun, HP Top Workstation Ranking (09/08/98; 8:14 p.m. ET) By Joe Wilcox, Computer Reseller News Facing a market in transition, the rankings of workstation vendors went up and down like yo-yo's during the second quarter, according to one market researcher. Sun Microsystems (company profile) regained the top revenue position from rival Hewlett-Packard, but HP held the top spot in terms of systems shipped, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Dataquest. Peter ffoulkes, principal analyst for Dataquest, credited Sun's success to revenue gains from the low-end Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 workstations released in January. Sun increased Unix workstation shipments for the past four quarters, steadily gaining ground over other Unix vendors. "The market for Unix workstations isn't going away," ffoulkes said. "If you get the mix right, the price right, there's still a growing marketplace, although obviously it is not as strong as it used to be. Sun is showing it can play in the game, whereas some of the other vendors are tending to back away in favor of NT." ffoulkes said HP (company profile) shipped more systems than any other workstation vendor for the quarter by drawing on Windows NT systems and single-processor workstations. On the Intel/Windows NT front, HP dominated competitors with 46.5 percent share out of 188,543 units shipped for the quarter, followed with 16.2 percent share by Dell Computer (company profile), which moved up from third place. ffoulkes said Round Rock, Texas-based Dell gained from its ability to get new products to market quickly following Intel's release of its Xeon processor. "At the moment, they've been the only workstation company actually shipping a Xeon-based product," ffoulkes said. "And they were first to market with 350-MHz and 450-MHz workstations." In the NT workstation space, HP also captured the top spot in revenue with 36.4 percent share followed by IBM (company profile), with 19.7 percent share. Dataquest credited Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM with beating Dell in part to shipping more heavily-configured graphics systems. IBM took the number three unit position with 13.8 percent share and Dell the number three spot in terms of revenue with 13.7 percent share. Compaq Computer (company profile), in Houston, fell to fourth from its number two position with 10.6 percent share of units shipped. Compaq, which also placed fourth in revenue with 11.2 percent share, suffered from having too much inventory in the reseller channel and delays going to its next-generation, proprietary Highly Parallel Architecture, ffoulkes said. "That's not necessarily meaning Compaq is in any trouble in any way, shape, or form," ffoulkes added. "I believe Compaq will see a much stronger end of the year than this last quarter, just because of the inventory and architecture issues." Compaq will also get a boost from Digital Equipment (company profile), which it acquired in June. Digital placed fifth overall in both revenue and units, with 5.5 percent and 5.6 percent share, respectively. Analysts said the next two quarters would continue to be volatile as Compaq and IBM pick up share from recently released single-processor workstations. HP has been winning in a one-horse race shipping 50,000 to 60,000 single-processor Kayak XA workstations a quarter. Dell is also expected to release a low-end workstation into the same market space, but the company has no plans to offer a single-processor system. "These are not PCs," a Dell spokesperson said. "We're not selling them as PCs or rebadging PCs as workstations," he said. Like other workstation vendors, Dell designs its own workstation motherboards, and is expected to reduce production costs by using the same motherboard as its Workstation 410, analysts said.