High-end market research company Smaby Group Inc poured some cold water on folks down at Supercomputing ’95 in San Diego earlier this month, estimating the market for high-performance worldwide scientific, engineering and technical systems declined to $1,910m this year from $2,000m in 1994. It forecasts a market worth $3,000m in 1999 with most growth in the departmental (under $1m) sector. Sales of large-scale systems valued at between $1m and $5m will grow slowly; sales of enterprise systems – $5m-plus – will actually decline by 7.5%. At 23%, Smaby says Silicon Graphics Inc has the largest overall share of the $1,910m global scientific, engineering, technical market. Cray Research Inc follows with 20%, IBM Corp’s RS/6000 SP2 15%, Digital Equipment Corp 11%, Fujitsu Ltd 6%, Hewlett-Convex Computer Corp 6%, Intel Corp 4% and others 15%. Smaby attributes Silicon Graphics’s leadership position to its departmental symmetric multiprocessing systems – Silicon Graphics is estimated to account for 42% of the ($100,000-to-$350,000) low-end departmental segment of a $545m market. DEC is at 18%, Hewlett-Convex 11%, Cray 5% and others at 24%. Silicon Graphics has 30% of the $698m high-end market departmental ($350,000-to-$1m). IBM’s SP2 has 25%, DEC 17%, Cray 14%, Hewlett-Convex 6% and others 8%. Cray has 51% of the $297m high-end market for systems valued at $5m-plus. Fujitsu is next at 20%, NEC Corp 10%, IBM 7%, Intel 4% and others 8%. In the $371m, 1995 low-end enterprise market for systems priced at from $1m to $5m Cray’s share is 30%, IBM 22%, Intel 9%, NEC 8%; Hitachi 5%, Hewlett-Convex 5% and others 5%. IBM’s SP2s are the only systems sold in both the commercial and scientific markets; it has 12% of the commercial space. Tandem Computers Inc and AT&T Global Information Solutions each have 36%, Unisys 6% and others 10%. Smaby says that proprietary architectures will virtually disappear from the technical systems market, falling to 5% of sales in 1999 from 40% in 1994.
