Excellent first quarter 2001 results for Sun's UNIX server trade

In the worldwide total server market, Sun surpassed Hewlett-Packard to take the No. 1 spot in midrange market unit shipments, demonstrating 19% year-over-year growth, commanding 32% market share. In worldwide midrange market factory revenue, Sun experienced 9% growth over last year, more than any other top-5 vendor in this market.

Sun maintained steady growth in worldwide server high-end market unit shipments, with 4% year-over-year growth. Meanwhile, IBM and HP both posted a 6% decline compared to the same period last year.

"Sun Microsystems has shown tremendous staying-power in the UNIX and worldwide Server Markets and a large part of that is attributable to its consistency and focus on the UNIX environment," said Vernon Turner, vice president, Global Enterprise Server Solutions, IDC. "Sun's unit growth in the low-end, midrange and high-end markets indicates that its growth in any one segment was not a result of temporary pricing actions."

"Sun has consistently outperformed competitors, maintaining its leadership position in UNIX server market shipments for the past 16 quarters and in UNIX server market revenue for nine consecutive quarters. And the Sun Fire Midframe line is helping to continue our strong momentum in the midrange market," said Shahin Khan, vice president of marketing, Computer Systems, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The IDC numbers repeatedly show our UNIX market leadership, demonstrating Sun's focused, growth-based strategy is a winning one."

Sun introduced the Sun Fire Midframe servers in March 2001 as the first server line bringing mainframe-class availability, superior balanced performance, and excellent flexibility to the midrange at costs that start below $75,000.