Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
In an effort to return to growth and profitability, struggling high performance workstation manufacturer Sun Microsystems has gone all out to win back share using commodity server hardware solutions and price-based competition. Sun has unveiled three 64-bit x86 servers using AMD Opteron processors with price points designed to undercut the competition.
Analysts have been highly critical of Sun in recent years pointing
to its reliance on a revenue base from expensive proprietary hardware
and a failure to cash in on the trend to commodity x86 server hardware
systems.
Sun has had flat revenues for the past four years and last quarter made
a loss of US$217 million, prompting new CEO Jonathan Schwartz to
announce job cuts of 5,000. Another loss is expected in the current
quarter.
The new server trio includes a 16-way x64 server in a single 4U
chassis; a hybrid data server; and a blade server, all powered by AMD
Opteron processors
The servers, which are aimed at corporate data centers, because of
their commodity architecture will give clients the option of running
Linux and Windows, as well as Sun's Solaris 10 operating platform. The
hybrid data server in particular looks to be a cheap. storage option
with up to 24 terabytes of storage at US$2 per gigabyte.
While some analysts believe that the move to x86 processors will help
to revive Sun's fortunes, others are sceptical pointing to the
relatively small revenues generated from Opteron-based hardware sales
so far.
Long time Sun watcher, IBRS and former Meta Group analyst Kevin McIsaac
has said: "While Sun has moved into selling low-cost x32/64 systems
based on AMD’s Opteron CPU, most of its revenue - and margin - still
comes from high-end SPARC based servers. The margins on volume servers
are thin, compared to the margins on high-end SPARC systems." Consequently
Dr McIsaac does not see how a massive increase in sales of Opteron will
replace declining sales of high-end solutions. “While Opteron is a
positive move for Sun it will not resolve Sun’s fundamental problems.”
Whether the newly announced x64 product range can change Sun's fortunes
and put the company on the path to recovery remains to be seen.
David Bass
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