Sun hits back as top spot goes to Compaq

As Dataquest sales figures show Compaq has overtaken its workstation rival, Sun claims that the numbers are misleading

Workstation rivals Compaq and Sun were involved in a bitter war of words after Compaq claimed that it had eclipsed Sun in the battle for market share.

Sales figures from market researcher Dataquest gave Compaq the lead in the total workstation market for the first quarter of 1997, with 23.5 per cent of all shipments, knocking Sun from its top spot.

Compaq immediately went on the offensive, with networks product manager Hugh Jenkins claiming that: ?Sun is now saying that workstations are not interesting while software like Javasoft is.?

Jenkins said that Compaq?s sales increase ? which comes just five months after its workstation launch ? had been at the expense of Sun. But Sun hit back, claiming that Compaq?s spin on the Dataquest figures was misleading.

?Compaq wants to be taken seriously in the workstation market so they are trying to inflate its sales figures,? said Sun desktop marketing manager Chris Sarfas.

He said that Compaq workstation sales figures included its Pentium Pro Workstation 5000, which was not a genuine workstation but was simply a high-end PC.

Sun also claims it was misleading to lump Unix and PC sales together. Sarfas said that Compaq?s increased sales had been to financial customers that did not need fully functional workstations.

The Dataquest figures for Q1 1997 show Compaq?s workstations sales up from 16.1 per cent for the previous quarter. Dataquest defines PC workstations as ?Intel Pentium Pro-based NT or Unix workstations with high-end graphics capabilities.?

Compaq also has a 36 per cent share of the PC workstation market.