In what looks like the shape of things to come, Nomura International Plc, the Japanese securities house has ordered 1,100 JavaStation network computers from Sun Microsystems Inc for its London office, having reportedly tested the things already in its Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australian offices. The JavaStations only work with Sun’s Netra j Java servers, so presumably there’s a big order for those coming Sun’s way also, but Sun couldn’t get back to us in time to confirm this. Sun is also likely to get bigger margins on the servers than on the skinny clients. Nomura has a large Motif installed base and it is likely to be such customers that the ball rolling. Software companies that serve the same market tell us finance houses are enthusiastic about sweeping PCs off their desktops and replacing them with NCs. For instance, Santa Cruz Operation Inc reckons a lot of its customers using X terminals and Motif are planning to run their applications on NCs, and SCO is hoping they will choose its Tarantella middleware to link back to their legacy systems (CI No 3,086). Nomura is reportedly even going to the trouble of stripping out the guts of those PCs it is not replacing entirely, so they conform, to Microsoft and Intel’s NetPC standard, which seems a bit unnecessary.
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