3 April 2003 The continued pressure on IT budgets, coupled with the growing power and sophistication of Intel-based systems, has led to a fresh round of price cuts in the Unix server market.

IBM cut the prices of its systems in January, Sun Microsystems followed suit in March and now Hewlett-Packard has announced price cuts of up to 20% on a number of its midrange Unix servers.

The cuts, which came into force in the US and Europe on 1 April, apply to the company’s eight-processor rp4705 and rp7410 systems, and to the 16-processor rp8400.

According to market analyst IDC, HP remains the leader in the midrange Unix server market (systems costing between $100,000 and $1 million), earning revenues of $3 billion from the sector in 2002. IBM was in second place with revenues of $2 billion, while Sun was in third place with revenues of $1.6 billion. However, HP’s dominance has come under increasing pressure in recent months, particularly from IBM.

In the coming months, analysts also expect to see increasingly fierce competition in the high-Unix server market, as all of the three leading vendors unveil new machines.