Sun: XServe No Competition


An interview with Sun Microsystems CTO John Fowler at OSNews reveals Sun does not see Apple's XServe as real competition.

"The XServe is a good job, but it is no competition for us. It targets a very specific crowd, Apple customers," Fowler is quoted as saying in the interview.

The Sun CTO also makes it clear that Sun is not about to go after the 'home server' market; nor is the company looking for a niche in the desktop market.

"Going after Microsoft in the desktop market, is just simply, impractical," Fowler said to OSNews.

The enterprise desktop is Sun's key target, for which they have partnered with Red Hat.

Analysis: Large education institutions are one area where Sun does compete with XServe. As Fowler notes, Solaris is licensed at a lower price to educational organizations, and larger schools are beginning to make room for XServe installations. Admittedly, managing very large, campus-wide databases are not what XServe was designed to do, but Fowler is off base if he thinks only Apple customers are interested in XServe. Price, features and the Unix underpinnings are also factors for MISs, and Apple's aggressive pricing of XServe has already paid off to some extent, with almost a 300% increase in server sales for Apple.

Sustaining XServe sales figures is the challenge Apple have to meet now. Once this, and steady sales growth is achieved, it will be a lot harder for Sun to argue that XServe isn't taking market share.