HP's Superdome to target Unix shortfall

Hewlett Packard is looking to the launch of its upcoming top-of-the-range Superdome system next month to boost its flagging fortunes in the high-end Unix market.

Hewlett Packard (HP) is looking to the launch of its upcoming top-of-the-range Superdome system next month to boost its flagging fortunes in the high-end Unix market.

While overall results for HP's third financial quarter were strong, with turnover up 15 per cent compared with last year to $11.8bn and net profits increasing 23 per cent to $1.05bn, analysts raised concerns that it is losing ground to rivals Sun Microsystems and IBM in the Unix server arena.

"The early indications are that Sun has overtaken HP in Unix server sales in western Europe during the second quarter of 2000," said Kirsten Ludvigsen, an analyst at research firm IDC.

In May, HP told financial analysts that its Unix revenue would grow 26 per cent, but it only delivered a 13 per cent increase. Low-end and mid-range sales increased, but overall figures were affected by a drop in high-end sales. HP blames the slowdown on customers waiting for the new server.

"At the high-end, revenue continued to decline in anticipation of our Superdome product. With this launch, we're delivering a value proposition that extends way beyond the box and changes the competitive landscape," claimed chief executive Carly Fiorina during a conference call to announce the results.

Rakesh Kumar, program director at analyst Meta Group, said: "Superdome will be critical to HP regaining confidence at the high-end. The product looks extremely good; it has strong technology, scalability, good partitioning capability and flexible purchasing schemes that will make the financial justification for buying big hardware easier."

Superdome is expected to offer a choice of 16, 32 and 64-bit processors, with hardware-driven partitioning initially and software-driven partitioning later. HP will sell the servers on the increasingly popular 'pay-on-demand' basis, where customers can install more processors than they need, and only pay for them as they are used.

First published in Computing