Digital Equipment Corp is preparing a major sales offensive against its arch-rival Sun Microsystems Inc this year. DEC is vowing to win back some of its original customers who defected to Sun workstations in the mid-1980s, when DEC spent four years getting its first VAXstations out of the door. And this time DEC feels it has the advantage, claiming that it is easier to convert from SunOS/Solaris 1 to DEC’s OSF/1 implementation than it is to Sun’s own V.4-based Solaris 2, with its different file system and kernel. OSF/1, built on the Mach microkernel, shares a greater commonality of file constructs, application programming interfaces and commands with Berkeley Unix, from which SunOS derived, than with Solaris 2. DEC also cites a two to one price-performance advantage over Sun, includes three years of maintenance in the price, and claims to have as many applications under OSF/1 as there are for Solaris 2. A senior vice-president is said to be ready to head the worldwide campaign, and word is that customers have already been lured away, including some in the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Sun says it may lose out on a few deals due to raw processing speed, but does not think the conversion issue is a valid one, particularly now that Spec 1170 is coming on stream. However, although most of its customers now take Solaris 2 on new Sun boxes, it admits that a number still opt for what it calls a sidegrade and stubbornly stick with the old Solaris 1.
