NEC Corp claims its home market for high-end servers is booming and that currently only Unix has the scalability, security and robustness to address it. That is why it began to sell Hewlett-Packard Co HP 9000 servers in Japan last year as the NX7000 series. Although it sold only 30 in 1995 – and 57 this year up to August – it expects orders to rise significantly in the short term. By comparison, it has shipped 112,850 MIPS-based EWS 4800 workstations and 4,965 UP-4800 servers over a five-year period. NEC’s computer systems chief executive vice-president Masao Toka says that in comparison with prevailing attitudes in the US, where the battle between Windows NT and Unix is perceived as a winner takes all situation, Japanese vendors see co-existence as the key and NEC expects Unix to continue to be vital for its computer business for the mid-term, defined as five to 10 years.
