SMABY GROUP FORECASTS CSPP SYSTEMS SALES
TO TOP $5 BILLION IN 1998
Smaby Group, a leading IT market intelligence and strategic advisory firm, has released to clients its preliminary 1998 forecast for worldwide shipments of Commercial Scalable Parallel Processing (CSPP) systems utilized for enterprise-class applications.
Smaby Group points to several powerful market factors that it believes will combine to push worldwide CSPP sales to $5 billion, up an impressive 67% over 1997. This would mark the second consecutive annual revenue growth spurt for this comparatively new computing platform category. Smaby Group's final audit of 1997 results pegged revenue totals at $3.5 billion, up almost 75% over 1996.
Smaby Group's CEO and principal analyst, Gary Smaby noted that the recent growth surge at the performance peak of the commercial computing pyramid is driven by two key factors: dramatic price/performance improvements delivered by a new breed of scalable enterprise systems, and the emergence of a new class of applications that have been optimized to take full benefit of their scalability.
"The commoditization of basic computing building blocks like microprocessors, disk drives, and memory chips has fundamentally altered the economics of building enterprise computers. The promise of lower cost and higher performance has motivated many corporations to deploy enterprise-wide applications on scalable platforms," Smaby said.
The report suggests that the explosive adoption of webnet technologies has led to the introduction of new class of scalable enterprise applications to address ever-increasing data warehouse, decision support, OLTP, and ERP processing demands. The report discusses the reshuffling of key vendors detailing which are poised to profit in this redefined market and which are likely to lose CSPP market share. Smaby predicts that "IBM will remain at the top of the heap" in 1998 with HP making "serious inroads."
Smaby also pointed out that the one-time rush by many corporations to replace and upgrade legacy systems before the Y2K deadline has "given CSPP sales an additional adrenaline boost."
These promising market trends underscore the rapid migration away from mainframes and minicomputers toward high-performance CSPP and hybrid systems. While Smaby Group expects the venerable mainframe platform "to be with us for decades," the report predicts that most legacy systems will inevitably move to UNIX/RISC and UNIX/Intel enterprise environments. The report foresees NT/Intel systems dominating the end-user and departmental computing tiers.
Longer term, Smaby Group expects CSPP revenue growth to return to a normalized 20% rate, once current pent-up demand is satisfied and Y2K is behind. At this pace, Smaby Group expects the market to reach $12 billion by 2002.
Founded in 1988, Smaby Group provides market intelligence and strategic advisory services to most of the world's leading enterprise computing vendors. For more information on Smaby Group, visit its web site at http://www.smaby.com