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notes from
SPARC market
history
During the peak days of the SPARC systems market
this was the most heavily trafficked page in the
SPARC Product Directory.
You
can still see archived pages from those earlier years by following the links
below. (They don't look exactly right because of the technology used in the
wayback engine - and changes in browsers
and screen sizes. I'll try and restore backups from that time later. But pages
shown in the links are 99% of what a reader saw at the time. And you can follow
the links too - for an interesting ride down memory lane.) |
| See this SPARC
VAR page as it looked in:-
1997,
1998,
1999,
2000,
2001,
2002,
2003,
2004,
2005,
2006,
2007 | |
At the peak of the dotcom
market at the end of 2000, our online US SPARC VAR directory (this page)
included over 300 companies which actively sold and promoted Sun compatible
workstations, servers, notebooks or other hardware. I estimated that was about
half the number who would have counted themselves as Sun VARs, but our list
included the active half. (BTW - our international SPARC VAR database reached a
peak of approximately 1,500 companies.)
In the following 5 years (2001
to 2006) - the SPARC systems market declined in revenue by 50%, and 95% of the
OEMs which had once made SPARC computers had exited the market. As a result the
number of active Sun VARs has declined sharply too.
the Golden Age
for SPARC resellers - 1989 to 1999
Sun VARs played an important
part in the 1st decade of the SPARC market opening customers' eyes to the
unknown / or little known - Sun Microsystems. (Before they became known as "the dot in dotcom".)
As
technical manager of a VME-bus systems integrator in the real-time Unix
business I signed up my company as a Sun VAR in 1987, and later as an oem for
the SPARCengine 1. Every time we converted a customer to Sun and sold them
their first SPARC systens - the Sun sales guys would come along and say "this
is now a strategic account - go and find someone else."
So I
empathized with the experience of Sun VARs when I set up my
publishing company
in 1991 to compile and research the buyers guide which was later
endorsed by Sun and
SPARC International as the "SPARC Bible."
Those were
exciting days at an exciting time in the computer market - when affordable
parallel computing servers changed from a customized system which an
integrator had to build from integrating disparate blades (we called them SBC's
"single board computers) and multiple operating systems - to a cheap
commodity which you could buy at a click of web cart.
I'd like to
thank the all the content contributors, advertisers and readers who made this
possible during an exciting period in the enterprise computer market.
Zsolt
Kerekes, editor and publisher
PS - the torch for igniting momentous
changes in the computer market has now moved on to the
SSD market. Join me there -
if you're interested - on StorageSearch.com. | |
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