sunflash-Distributed to mailing list sun/NC/north-carolina sunflash-Send requests, problems to owner-sunflash@suntri.east.sun.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash HOT OFF THE PRESS (November 1993) SunFLASH Vol 59 #28 November 1993 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 59.28 HOT OFF THE PRESS Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation's Public Relations' newsletter. Statistics about Sun and its market and news from the Sun 'planets' ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation --------------------------- HOT OFF THE PRESS --------------------------- Recent News November, 1993 Published by SMCC Public Relations ________________________________________________________________________ Contents: STATE OF THE BUSINESS MARKET SHARE STATISTICS DID YOU KNOW... THE OFFICIAL COUNT Successful Sun Installations Customer Quotables - Rightsizing at Work SUN'S MOMENTUM SUNCONNECT HIGHLIGHTS SUN MICROSYSTEMS COMPUTER CORPORATION HIGHLIGHTS SUNSELECT HIGHLIGHTS SUNSERVICE HIGHLIGHTS SUNSOFT HIGHLIGHTS SUNSOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS RECENT SPARC NEWS World Cup 1994 ________________________________________________________________________ Subject: STATE OF THE BUSINESS * Sun's Q1FY94 revenue was a record $960.5 million, a 12 percent increase over the $855.9 million reported in the same period a year ago. * Net income for the quarter was $16.6 million, or $.16 per share. * Revenue per employee for the last 12 months was a record $347,000 - the highest revenue per employee of any computer company utilizing a direct sales business model. * Sun's FY93 revenue was $4.31 billion, up 20 percent from the $3.6 billion reported in FY92. * Net income for FY93 was $156.7 million, or $1.49 per share. Sun is ranked #139 on the 1993 Fortune 500 list, moving up from #146 last year. * Total number of employees is 12,693 (as of September, 1993). * Nearly half - 44.4 percent - of Sun's total revenue in Q1, FY94 came from non-U.S. sales (Europe: 22.6%; rest of world: 21.8%). Subject: MARKET SHARE STATISTICS * SMCC remained the workstation/server market leader in 1992, with 38.7% of worldwide workstation/server shipments, according to IDC reports. (HP: 17.3%; DEC: 12.2%; IBM: 7.4%; SGI: 4.9%) * SMCC also lead the industry in terms of system revenue in 1992, with 31.8% of worldwide workstation/server revenue, according to IDC reports. (HP: 17.5%; IBM: 9.6%; DEC: 9.5%) * SPARC-based systems are the highest-volume platform in the RISC workstation/server market, with SPARC having 57.2% of the worldwide installed base, according to IDC reports. (MIPS: 17.6%; PA-RISC: 8.3%; IBM Power: 7.7%) * Sun is the leading hardware supplier for UNIX RDBMS solutions, according to IDC reports. Sun experienced a 47.9% growth in RDBMS from 1991 to 1992, giving Sun a 24.9% share of the market (HP: 19.9%; IBM: 19.6%; DEC/Ultrix: 6.0%; and NCR: 4.6%). * SMCC servers accounted for the largest share of the "as sold" workstation server market in 1992 with 39.8% of the worldwide shipments, according to IDC reports (IBM: 20.9%; DEC: 13%; SGI: 6.2%; HP: 5.6%). * Sun remains the technical market leader, according to Dataquest reports: - Sun is the leader in the MCAD market, with 33% of 1992 worldwide MCAD unit volume (HP: 23%; IBM: 8%). - Sun leads the industry in the EDA market, with 60% of the worldwide EDA shipments (HP: 25%; IBM: 2%). - In the CASE market, Sun leads with 62% of the worldwide CASE market (IBM: 14%; HP: 5%). Subject: DID YOU KNOW... * As a result of its re-engineering and rightsizing efforts, Sun has: - cut its cycle time from 274 days to 139, - reduced days sales outstanding from 67 to 45 days, - increased inventory turns from 5.5 to 11.6, - added approximately $1 billion to its balance sheet over the past three years. * The changing role of the mainframe is not just a phenomenon happening in the U.S. The major mainframe companies in Japan are all planning "escape routes" for their customers that center around RISC and UNIX systems. For example, it has been reported that Fujitsu has chosen the SPARC architecture and is developing a parallel RISC system due to be available in 1995 or 1996. * Sun workstations were rated one of the best products for higher education. The readers of Higher Education Product Companion selected Sun SPARCstations as the best workstation in the magazine's annual product survey. * The installation of the SPARCcenter 2000 servers that will run the entire information system of the World Cup USA 1994 has been completed. The SPARCcenter 2000 servers will eventually support a vast network of nearly 1,000 Sun workstations and 15 Sun servers distributed across nine cities. Subject: THE OFFICIAL COUNT * SMCC shipped 47,500 units in Q1. Cumulative installed base is more than one million units. * More than 7,800 SPARC hardware and software solutions are currently available from more than 3,330 vendors. * More than 1 million SPARC chips have been shipped to date by all SPARC vendors. * More than 34 vendors are currently shipping SPARC-compatible products. * SunSoft has distributed more than 1.4 million Solaris licenses. * ONC networking technology has an installed base of more than 4 million nodes worldwide and is available on major operating systems including DOS, MVS, VMS, OS/2, MacOS, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, A/UX and DEC OSF/1. More than 200 hardware and software vendors have licensed ONC technologies. * SunNet Manager has an installed base of more than 12,000 users. In addition, there are more than 62 SunNet Manager Partner products available for SunNet Manager from 90 vendors. * SunService supports more than 880,000 systems in 125 countries and employs the most UNIX-experts in the world, at 550 specialists. SunService also has 250 service partners and supports 100 education centers located in 20 countries. Subject: Successful Sun Installations PRECOM, an advertisement collection company, sells ad space to customers in a pre-determined set of newspapers and/or newspaper editions. The company collects the ad text and electronically transfers it to its central headquarters for logging and billing. When ready, the ad text that has been collected throughout the day is then transferred over another network to the newspapers for printing. For tracking the daily stream of advertisements, the company replaced a minicomputer system with two SPARCserver 1000 servers and 93 SPARCclassic desktops. This November, Precom, with the help of French software developer Xmedia, will implement an entirely new solution based on Sun and a Sybase relational database management system (RDBMS). The new system will enable sales reps throughout the area to take orders over the phone, log ads directly into the database and run a spreadsheet of sales information simultaneously on their desktop workstations. The company expects to improve productivity, and thus increase sales, due to the windowing and multitasking capabilities of the SPARC machines. Subject: Customer Quotables - Rightsizing at Work "In a mainframe shop, when you add that one user who exceeds the capacity of the mainframe, you have this huge functional cost increase. With an open client/server architecture, you have the relatively minor cost of upgrading a machine on the network or adding another machine." Jim Stikeleather, Director of Systems Development, Kash n' Karry Chain Store Age Executive, October, 1993 "Cornell believes that most of our future server development will be UNIX-based, and that the focus will be on distributed computing. Because of these trends, we'll be able to grow with our Sun equipment and not hit a brick wall." William R. Turner, III, Senior Project Leader, Library Technology Department, Cornell Library Advanced Imaging, September, 1993 "For the workstation hardware, Bill Schimoler, VP and trading room manager, [Chase Manhattan Bank], says the bank took very close looks at Sun's competitors in the UNIX workstation world - including the likes of Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett-Packard and IBM. In the end, he says, the bank concluded that the vendors leapfrog one another every six month in terms of `bang for the buck' (meaning processing power as a function of cost). All things being thus equal, Schimoler says Sun won out on the basis of one `overwhelming' advantage in a different arena: `the lion's share of trading-floor-specific applications software was written to run on Sun.'" Bill Schimoler, VP and Trading Room Manager, Chase Manhattan Bank Trading Systems Technology, November 1, 1993 "Moving [information services at Burlington Coat Factory] from mainframes to a client-server system was like `taking a monkey off our backs...It opened up the floodgates of capability and gave us tremendous price/performance advantages. I can process more data faster and turn the results around quicker, and I can better afford the computing power to do it.'" Mike Prince, Director of Information Services, Burlington Coat Factory Today's Retail Technology, November, 1993 "Small, powerful workstations in a client/server configuration are key to our efforts. They provide not only graphics, but also the number-crunching capabilities required in any modeling scenario. Previously, such power was very costly and available only through much larger computers. Equally important, the workstation network gives us access to information generated by other researchers. Overall, we are able to proceed almost 50 times faster because of the workstations." Richard O'Connell, Professor of Geophysics, Earth and Planetary Sciences Harvard University T.H.E. Journal, October, 1993 Subject: SUN'S MOMENTUM Subject: SUNCONNECT HIGHLIGHTS * SunConnect and SunNetworks, Sun's network integration service, have been chosen by McCaw Cellular Communications, Inc., to provide the network management and integration services for its Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) network, a key component critical to McCaw's customer service mission. CDPD is an open specification designed to enable customers to send computer data over an enhanced cellular-based packet data network. Subject: SUN MICROSYSTEMS COMPUTER CORPORATION HIGHLIGHTS * SunIntegration Services, an organization within SMCC created to develop and implement rightsizing solutions for customers worldwide, introduced tool and technology packages that help organizations move from a mainframe-based to a client-server computing environment. These packages - the Sun Enterprise Toolset - were originally developed to assist Sun Microsystems in its own migration to client-server computing. These tools and technologies are available in a variety of packages, each including a software core that is sold "as is" and can be customized, based on an organization's specific requirements. * Home Shopping Network, Inc., executive Scott Cooper has been awarded the second annual "Information Systems Visionary of the Year" award, bestowed by SMCC. Cooper has overseen the development of an innovative SPARC-based Pay-Per-View/Video-On-Demand (PPV/VOD) system that will "instantly" provide households with top-rated box office movies by simply dialing a toll-free number. Cooper plans to grow Home Shopping Network's existing $1.2 billion television retailing business by using its technology infrastructure to expand into new services and increase revenues. Subject: SUNSELECT HIGHLIGHTS * SunSelect signed an OEM agreement with Wall Data, Inc., to market RUMBA for PC-NFS, a version of Wall Data's Windows-based connectivity software designed specifically for PC-NFS users. RUMBA for PC-NFS is designed to give PC-NFS users access to IBM mainframes via TCP/IP. It gives users the ability to view, access and transfer host data and applications quickly and easily from Windows. RUMBA for PC-NFS joins other SunSelect enhancement products for PC-NFS, including SelectMAIL electronic mail and the PC-NFS Programmer's Toolkit. Subject: SUNSERVICE HIGHLIGHTS * "Sun's service history is one of the better comeback stories in the industry. As little as three years ago, Sun's service offerings had few friends. Beginning in 1990, though, the company began a serious effort to upgrade its service offerings. Today, Sun is being cited as the kind of service provider that other workstation vendors ought to emulate." (SunExpert, September, 1993). Subject: SUNSOFT HIGHLIGHTS * Unisys Corporation has made the Solaris 2 software environment available on its Intel processor-based Unisys U6000 Series of UNIX systems, including the Unisys U6000/DT desktop systems and the U6000/100 and 300 uniprocessor servers. Subject: SUNSOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS * SunSolutions introduced ShowMe 2.0, the industry's first complete, easy-to-use desktop video conferencing solution that enables workstation users to collaborate interactively, in real time, with a full range of video, audio and screen sharing tools. ShowMe 2.0 broadly expands the capabilities of ShowMe 1.1, adding video, audio, application sharing and enhanced whiteboard features to the shared whiteboard facility of the previous version. Users can display, discuss, edit or annotate documents and images, display or send video, and share applications through a graphical user interface that is simple and intuitive. The ShowMe software product was the result of a technology transfer agreement between SunSolutions and Sandia National Laboratories, a U.S. Department of Energy multiprogram R&D laboratory. By using Sandia technology as a base, SunSolutions developed its application sharing software years faster than if it had conducted development on its own. The ShowMe product competes in the desktop video conferencing market, which market researchers say will reach $5 billion by 1997. Subject: RECENT SPARC NEWS * Cray Research Superservers introduced the world's fastest and most expandable SPARC/Solaris-compatible systems, the CRAY SUPERSERVER 6400 (CS6400). With up to 64 processors, the CS6400 systems are extremely expandable and can scale with customers' data processing needs. The systems are offered with 256 megabytes to 16 gigabytes of central memory, 1.3 gigabytes per second peak memory bandwidth, and more than two terabytes of online discrete disk storage. Pricing for the CS6400 begins at under $400,000 (U.S. list) for the four-processor version, and at $2.5 million for the top-of-the-line 64-processor system. SMCC's SunIntegration Services is a proposed reseller for the Cray CS6400. Subject: World Cup 1994 Information on World Cup USA 1994 Technology: The 1994 World Cup, soccer's ultimate competition, is being hosted by the United States for the first time in history. World Cup USA 1994 expects to stage the most successful World Cup to date, using more sophisticated information technology than has ever been applied to such a huge event. World Cup USA 1994's three exclusive technology suppliers - EDS, Sun Microsystems and Sprint - are each providing a critical part of this advanced information and communication system. EDS is managing and developing the applications for the system; Sun is the computer supplier; Sprint will provide long-distance voice, video and data communications. Recently, the installation of the SPARCcenter 2000 servers that will run the entire information system of World Cup USA 1994 was completed. These systems will drive the vast network of nearly 1,000 Sun workstations and 15 Sun servers that will be used for the mission-critical event management functions developed by EDS, including accreditation, results, security, logistics and media database systems. The systems will be employed in nine World Cup venues and World Cup offices to insure distribution of information to a cumulative television audience of 31.2 billion viewers in more than 170 countries and to more than 3.6 million spectators across the United States. "Firsts" at World Cup 1994: * The largest client/server environment ever for a single sporting event. * The first time that game sites will be instantaneously linked by all-digital fiber-optic technology. * The first broad use of digital multimedia technology (standard data as well as video images). * The most sophisticated badging and security system ever in use at World Cup (allows badges to be reissued at any venue regardless of where they were originally issued). * Instant access to information for journalists around the world. * The first use of user-friendly, interactive software applications. ********************************************************************** For information about SunFlash send mail to info-sunflash@Sun.COM. Subscription requests should be sent to sunflash-request@Sun.COM. Archives are on draco.nova.edu, ftp.uu.net, sunsite.unc.edu, src.doc.ic.ac.uk and ftp.adelaide.edu.au For Gopher and WAIS access: sunsite.unc.edu. 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