Talking about its server business at a recent Merrill Lynch & Co technology conference Hewlett-Packard Co claims an installed base of 1.3 million HP-UX systems worldwide. It claims it has done 5,000 mainframe migrations and sold 15,000 MC Service Guard high- availability solutions. Server demand, it says, is being driven by data warehousing and internet growth. The bank thinks HP is regaining share in the high-end server market with its V2250 system, which was introduced last November. HP was late to market with its new high-end box and lost some market share to Sun Microsystems Inc. Sun outgrew HP with 50% year-over-year server order growth last quarter compared with HP’s 25%, though both are expected to pick up market share from second-tier vendors. Merrill Lynch thinks HP’s ability to integrate NT could yield a long-term advantage relative to Sun’s Unix-only posture. HP is expected to spend $40m on marketing its Unix servers this year, up from $13m in 1997. The company says that most of its customers are deploying both Unix and Windows NT solutions for investment protection.
