Posted on 12/09/2001 1:40:56 PM PST by Bush2000
The server market plunged 30 percent in the third quarter of 2001, with No. 1 IBM the least damaged and Hewlett-Packard edging to within a fraction of Sun's lead in the key Unix server segment.
The total server market dropped from $15.2 billion in the third quarter of 2000 to $10.7 billion in the third quarter of 2001, research firm IDC said in a report Friday.
In the overall market, IBM sales dropped 6.1 percent to $2.8 billion, but its market share rose 6.5 percent. Much of that gain took place at the expense of rival Sun Microsystems, which lost 6.3 percent of market share and saw revenue plunge 53 percent to $1.3 billion, according to IDC.
Servers are the powerful computers that handle chores on corporate networks such as keeping track of all the sales of airplane tickets. The systems are expensive, with top-end models often costing well over $1 million, and sales of servers tends to tow along sales of a company's other products and services.
Sun, which specializes in the Unix servers that make up the largest part of the overall market, had been ascendant in 2000, but lumbering IBM mustered a response and now is carving back sales from Sun.
Meanwhile, HP, once the top Unix server seller, is fighting back as well, and IDC said the company is within a hair's breadth of reclaiming the lead.
In the Unix market, Sun had 28.8 percent of the market in the third quarter, with sales of $1.33 billion. HP had 28.5 percent with sales of $1.31 billion, IDC said. IBM, in third place, had $960 million in sales for 20.9 percent of the market.
In the overall market, Compaq Computer was in second place with 16.3 percent of the market and a revenue drop of 34.7 percent to $1.75 billion. HP was in third place with 15.2 percent and revenue that dropped 29.7 percent to $1.64 billion. Dell, in fifth place with 7.9 percent of the market, had a revenue drop of 5.8 percent--the smallest of the top companies--with revenue of $847 million.
McNealy and Sun cackled gleefully every time they drove some workstation marker out of business. They celebrated their "business acumen" as they took advantage of being in the right place at the right time with the cheapest most vanilla package around. Now those same dynamics are crushing UNIX under Windows... And Sun is thrashing and acting more absurd than any of the old timers they drove into the dirt... What goes around, comes around.
Mark W.
The other workstation makers treated the Unix workstation market as a "cash cow", knowing that it was only a matter of time before the PCs became capable enough to take on workstation jobs. Sun fought back for a time with low cost workstations (and the network computer) but eventually shifted focus from workstations to servers.
You are right that the same scenario is playing out, except that this time Sun will be challenged from below by the Intel McKinley and AMD Sledgehammer commodity servers. So they are busy going upscale and trying to attack IBM's mainframe business, as well as push a server consolidation strategy. I doubt that it will work.
It'll be interesting to see how many Sun suits show up at our meeting this week. It's a clear indication of trouble when a computer company starts sending a lot of suits to sell "solutions"; it means they aren't getting orders for hardware.
This development is going to rock lots of worlds - particularly those hosting companies that have long term committments for datacenter floorspace.
I've never owned a Sun machine. I'm not a 'Sun' backer at all. What does this have to do with me?
IBM is also a big backer of Java than Sun. HP, Oracle, and about a thousand other companies. Sun could go away tomorrow. Wouldn't matter to me.
I think their machines are *highly* overpriced. Sure, they're serious computers, but for the money give me an Intel PC running Linux over a Sun machine.
Hello guys.
Oh, I know. The desperation is obvious.
They've jumped on a bug in FTP software to try and claim it was a Linux security hole, jumped on a bug in JSP that can *sometimes* show image directories and claimed it was a security hole, and now are looking for any excuse possible to try and point a finger *away* from Microsoft's criminal activities.
MS is just getting so much bad press, I think they're willing to manufacture some bad press about their opposition if there isn't really any.
Nah, it's just like VM, where it appears to the user that he has his own machine... his own disk, printer, punch, reader, etc... he IPL's his own OS (usually CMS) and he's off and running. He can't affect anyone else, and if he crashes he can just re-IPL.
I'd love to play with one of those beasts running Linux. It's been a while since I've touched a mainframe.
You've got that right. I once worked for a small multinational that had a network of Xerox 8010 "Star" workstations. By the early 90s, at first, nobody believed the price comparisons I drew up explaining how Macs or PCs could equal or exceed the functionality for many thousands of dollars less. But, when I actually documented the numbers, the IS VP contacted Xerox and said we were considering shopping around. Our Xerox rep did about a half dozen presentations stressing how they were a "complete solution" to our document needs, rather than just a hardware or software vendor. It was _almost_ sad watching the reps try to make their case. (They didn't, and we ended up swapping out the Stars for PCs. Being involved with the corporate "death" of a giant company like Xerox was all-in-all an unpleasant experience, but I did get to work with the historic Star machines for a while. That was interesting.)
Mark W.
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