By William Fellows
Sequent Computer Systems Inc is going to spend some significant dollars on an advertising and marketing campaign geared towards its forthcoming Merced/Monterey64 server strategy. It is confident that it can win at least two more OEMs on the strength of its Merced story and reckons it might pull other IA-32 OEMs in on the back of it. There’s also a migration strategy for existing users that will take them through IA-32 running Dynix/ptx Unix to UnixWare/ptx and IA-63 running the ptx-informed version of the IBM Corp/Santa Cruz Operation Inc Monterey64. Sequent is also about to make a bigger play for a piece of the application service and rental market. The Pentium III Xeon versions of NUMA-Q 2000 ship this quarter. There will be clock rate and cache improvements over the year. Systems using the Pentium III Xeon follow-on called Cascades are due early next year. The UK was the main blight in Sequent’s first quarter, where revenue was off by some a significant amount. Sequent made $1.2m on revenue of $194m. It shipped 76 NUMA-Q 1000 quad boards in the quarter. It says the difficult quarterly comparisons with the year ago periods which included revenue from its large Boeing contract are now over. It expects to record 10% revenue growth for the full year.
