Executives at Data General Corp were elated this week at the release of the IDC’s 1998 NT server market figures. Not only did DG dominate the still relatively small ($122m) $100,000 to $250,000 NT server segment with a 56% share, it also took the overall lead in the wider $25,000 to $250,000 segment which was worth $1.08bn last year, IDC said.
In the larger segment Data General took 22% of sales last year, ahead of NCR’s 17%, Compaq’s 15% and IBM’s 12%. A performance that shows we have claimed the high ground in the NT server market claimed Linda Mentzer, DG’s Aviion marketing vice-president. Good news for long-embattled DG, but perhaps not good enough to convince Microsoft it should pick DG’s NUMA multiprocessor architecture as the first platform for partitioned Windows NT ahead of Sequent’s rival NUMA-Q offering.
John Pattenden, Sequent’s UK product marketing manager, points out that his company’s application positioning technology has already been integrated with the beta 3 version of Windows 2000 (nee NT). Time will show, Pattenden said, who has the intellectual property, the experience and the scalability. He said that it is very unlikely that Microsoft will have just one partnership for the task of putting NUMA onto NT.
