Business as usual over at Sun Microsystems Inc whose first quarter came in more or less in line with expectations. The company claims it continues to take market share away from competitors. Taking aim at Hewlett-Packard Co’s dismal performance in Unix servers last quarter, Sun president and COO Ed Zander said that rather than blaming its own sales force, it should have blamed Sun’s.
Sales of services rose 42% and product revenue grew 23% in overall revenue growth of 25%. The company said it sold a record amount of workgroup servers and claims it is taking market share away from competitors. It says it has installed 1,500 of its high-end StarFire servers. It claims its Sun-Netscape alliance now has a total of 60 million mailboxes installed and has eight vendors ready to show prototypes of applications using its Jiro Java-based storage management APIs later this month.
Sun reported first quarter net income up 138% at $271.1m including a charge of $3.5m for the acquisition of Star Division and a tax hit of $1.3m, over $197.8m, on revenue that rose 25% to $3.12bn from $2.49bn. Earnings per share were $0.33, a couple of cents ahead of estimates.
