Suns share of the workstation market has dwindled dramatically over the past four years, from 20.7 percent in 2000 to only 8.4 percent in 2003, according to Anthony Kros, an analyst at Gartner Dataquest.
"Sun has been struggling in recent quarters, save for a decent quarter here and there, due to the current migration away from expensive, proprietary-based systems over to more cost-efficient x86-32 and x86-64 solutions," Kros said. By sticking to its SPARC platform, he said, Sun has been limited to selling into what he calls its "entrenched base."
Meanwhile, more and more of the applications that traditionally required the horsepower of RISC processor-powered Unix "pizza boxes" have become manageable on cheaper and increasingly powerful desktop PCs.
Ironically, to save its workstation business, Sun has embraced the PC model—both the architecture and some of the business model—that brought down that business.
"I dont think the industry will get back to where it was in 2000," said Brian Healy, Suns director of workstation product marketing. "But these systems will give us a bump back in that direction."
"This is a good move for Sun," Kros said, "as it can now offer a price-competitive, x86-based solution to new customers with a need for 64-bitness, or existing customers who are thinking of making the move away from SPARC-based systems." But how well Sun gets that message out to customers is key, he added, "lest they go the way of [Silicon Graphics]."
The Sun Java Workstation W1100z and Sun Java Workstation W2100z, as reported by eWEEK.com Monday, are single- and dual-Opteron processor systems, respectively.
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