Sun Looks for a Sparc

"That's where the execution is going to come in and where the confusion could result," says Jeff Hewitt, research director at Gartner.

And many customers these days seem to be opting for servers that run standard operating systems like Windows and Linux.

Sun's T1 servers are "still a nichey kind of thing, in a market that's going seemingly ever more standardized," says Fred Hickey, editor of the High Tech Strategist newsletter, who has no positions on Sun stock.

But Sun contends its T1 systems will stand out because they're tailor-made for Web applications. Most online transactions are actually very simple operations that don't require very much raw computing muscle, says Sun's Yen. The bottleneck lies in handling the large volume of transactions typical of Internet environments. In designing the T1, Yen says, Sun's engineers did away with superfluous circuitry common to traditional processors, and focused on efficiency.

This Web-centric strategy could help Sun broaden its customer base, which analysts say is not as diverse as it could be. Although a Sun advertising campaign once boasted that the company put the dot in dot-com, Sun's customers are largely concentrated in the financial services, telecom and government sectors. Tapping into a new set of customers, whether it's today's crop of online firms or a new generation of companies creating the content and services for the growing base of Web-connected consumer electronic devices, would be a major victory in Sun's hunt for new customers.

According to Sun, more than 100 companies have tested prototypes of the T1 servers over the past six months. It's unclear how many of these companies have committed to becoming T1 server customers.

Sun's point is that "there are a lot of servers out there doing these workloads," says Gartner's Hewitt. "If there can be some benefit given to that area, then there could be a significant market appeal to that."

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