Compaq now boasts lead over Sun

Compaq last week claimed to have taken the lead in the UK workstation market only five months after launching its first products. The claim provoked a public spat with rivals Sun Microsystems.

Analysts Dataquest said that Compaq's Professional 5000 NT workstation had secured a 23.5% market share in the UK workstation market in the first quarter of this year, putting it ahead of traditional workstation vendors such as Sun, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

'This is highly misleading,' said Chris Sarfas, Sun's desktop marketing manager. He said Sun had increased its market share in the Unix market, squeezing companies with a dual NT/Unix strategy such as HP and IBM .

'The only people who buy Compaq's workstations buy them to run Excel spreadsheets,' he added. Sarfas said Compaq's sales were mainly into the financial market. 'This isn't the workstation market,' he said.

Compaq disagrees. 'We have stolen customers from Sun and in this market people are moving to Pentium Pro and NT workstations,' said Compaq's network products manager, Hugh Jenkins.

Sarfas challenged Compaq to come up with any customer who had bought a Compaq as a genuine alternative to a Sun Unix workstation.

Compaq's riposte was swift. The derivatives arm of wholesale bank Credit Suisse is replacing all 500 of its Sun workstations with Compaq boxes running NT 3.51.

Steve Long, managing director of IT at Credit Suisse Financial Products, said: 'The development environment is better, applications are developed first for NT, and the underlying hardware is a half to a third cheaper'.