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Sequent High-End Solution Competitive Brief __________________ Corporate Profile Sequent was one of the first companies to deliver fully symmetric multiprocessing computers based on the UNIX environment. Using off-the- shelf components and leading edge architectural technologies they were able to deliver high performance servers at a competitive price. The company continues to focus on developing their capabilities in parallel processing, open systems and on-line transaction processing. They have worked with Oracle in porting the parallel version of Oracle on to Sequent's systems. They have also helped develop a parallel version of ATT's STREAMS. Much of Sequent's success comes from smaller companies with revenues up to $500 million per year; Sequent has had very limited success with larger accounts due to a lack of name recognition and also due to financial instability. During fiscal 1991 (ending December 28, 1991), Sequent posted a loss of $48.7 million on revenues of $231.3 million. In the previous fiscal year, they posted earnings of $18.8 million on revenues of $248.8 million. Their financial weakness caused Sequent to rethink their lofty goals of becoming a $1 billion company by 1993; they are now focusing on being a small and profitable company rather than a large and marginally profitable company. The company ended fiscal 1991 with more than 1350 people worldwide after having to lay off about 20 percent of its work force during 1991. Although they returned to profitability in the last quarter of 1991, the financial shortfall hurt Sequent in several ways. They are in a more difficult position in dealing with large accounts. This has also caused Sequent to cancel some important R&D projects and focus more on software. They cut about 20% of their work force during fiscal 1991; this excluded the sales force, in fact, they are focusing on expanding their direct and indirect channels and have assigned quotas to the support staff as well. An interesting recent development was the departure of President and Co-CEO Scott Gibson. One of the founders of Sequent, Scott left the company "to devote more time to the family". Casey Powell, Chairman and Co-CEO will assume sole responsibilities of CEO. The executive ranks now are as follows: .G.SEQ01.HPG;4.565";3.356";HPGL .G.SEQ02.HPG;4.565";3.356";HPGL Sales organization Sequent has 43 sales and service locations worldwide, including 28 in the U.S., 4 in Canada, 5 in Europe (Amsterdam, London, Munich, Paris, and Stockholm) and 3 in Asia- Pacific (Hong Kong, Sydney, and Auckland). Some of their sales offices were closed or consolidated regionally due to their financial difficulties during 1991. Sequent also has relationships with a variety of distributors to provide sales and service in other countries. These include Control Data in Mexico, International Turnkey Systems in the Middle East, Far East Computer in Singapore, Mitac in Taiwan and Ssang Yong in South Korea. In Japan, Sequent systems are sold through Pana-Sequent, a joint venture between Sequent and Matsushita Electric Industrial Company Ltd. In addition, Sequent has relationships with more than 20 value- added resellers for such markets as telecommunications, financial services, library automation, and the public sector. Sequent has also renewed their OEM relationship with Unisys Corp which has been their largest OEM partner in the past. Business represented by this OEM agreement represented one-fourth of Sequent's backlog at the end of 1991. Sequent previously had OEM partners that also included Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and MAI-Basic Four. There has been no revenue from MAI-Basic Four after first quarter 1991. Revenue from Siemens has been fairly consistent, but at levels of only about $2 million annually. In 1991, Sequent's direct sales and service personnel worldwide included: | 130 sales representatives | 130 systems analysts | 150 service staff | 100 technical staff and management Sequent has recently been focusing on increasing the size of its direct sales force and support staff. As a result of their financial shortfalls during 1991, the company announced that the support staff would be given quotas in addition to the traditional quotas assigned to the sales staff. Sequent High-End Solution Strategies Performance Although Sequent can configure up to 30 processors in their systems, they have published TPC benchmarks for configurations up to 16 processors only. It is also common belief (among industry consultants) that the current Sequent bus and I/O architecture cannot support more than 16 or 18 processors due to bus saturation issues. Sequent has published a few TPC-A results but have not published any results for configurations with more than 16 processors. They use Intel 80386 processors and both versions of the Intel 80486 processor (running at either 25 MHz or 50 MHz). They have achieved a peak of 214.53 tps-A with a 16 processor configuration using 50 MHz Intel 486 processors. Sequent has also achieved comparable performance between a 16 processor configuration (166.2 tps-A) and a configuration involving four uniprocessor clients and a server with 8 processors (168.9 tps-A); in both cases, the server was using 25 MHz Intel 486 processors. Note that as seen in results achieved by the IBM RS6000/560, client/server configurations achieve greater performance than traditional monolithic configurations (72 tps-A versus 61 tps-A respectively) with all other aspects of the benchmark remaining constant. See Appendix for system comparisons with respect to TPC-A and B benchmark results. Enterprise-wide connectivity Sequent offers products that can provide connectivity to industry standard conventions such as NFS, TCP/IP, OSI and X.25. A suite of TCP/IP products provide connectivity to IEEE 802.3, X.25 and Berkeley networking facilities. The NFS product allows diskless Sun workstations to boot from a Sequent NFS server. The X.25 product is available with parallel STREAMS for high performance. An LMserver product conforming to Microsoft LAN Manager version 2.0 provides PC integration and interoperability with other vendors' implementations of LAN Manager. Ethernet/802.3, Token Ring/802.5 and FDDI provide additional connectivity. Sequent also offers proprietary protocols such as NetWare, DECnet, LAT, SNA and BiSync. IBM connectivity is delivered through products that provide SNA based 3270, RJE and LU6.2 functionality as well as Binary Synchronous protocols based 3270 and RJE functionality. Controllers are available to provide direct connectivity between Sequent and IBM systems. HP offers comparable connectivity with industry standard as well as proprietary protocols. In addition, HP's OpenView network manager has been widely recognized as a leading product. Some of the licensees include IBM, Anderson Consulting, GM/EDS and Synoptics. System management Sequent offers software products for backup, disk management and transaction monitoring. ptx/Backup allows "files and databases to be backed up even while users are at work". It can back up multiple machines concurrently, to one or several storage devices in a fully automated manner. It can also support machines from Sun, IBM RS/6000 and Mips on the network. ptx/SVM (Sequent Volume Manager) optimizes disk I/O in several ways. It offers disk mirroring, making up to eight copies of data. It also offers disk concatenation, which allows two or more disks to be viewed as one. Another feature, disk striping, allows portions of multiple disks to be viewed as one logical entity, so that data on a heavily used partition can be split over several disks. This product also allows data to be moved among disks while the system is running. ptx/Transaction is a monitor based on Tuxedo from the Unix Systems Laboratories. It manages all communications within an OLTP client/server environment. It also shortens the time required to develop complex applications and improves their quality. Sequent provides a menu based "easy-to-use" system administration package. HP offers all of these functionalities through products such as OmniBack, disk mirroring, SwitchOver/UX, System Administration Manager (SAM), GlancePlus/UX, LaserRX/UX, RXForecast, Tuxedo and OpenView Network Management Server. In addition, Computer Associates will make available on HP-UX, their UNICENTER product to provide centralized control and administration of the data center. These products are among the reasons for the superiority of HP-UX in commercial environments when compared to other UNIX products. Applications Sequent provides a single system architecture that allows binary compatibility across their entire systems family. A comprehensive set of library routines are provided that support parallel programming in all languages available on Sequent systems. A parallel debugger is also available to execute parallel programs in a controlled environment where all execution streams can be monitored. Sequent provides development language support for C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal and MicroFocus COBOL/2. Third-party products are available for development in BASIC, LISP and Prolog. A third-party FORTRAN parallelizing preprocessor is also available. For commercial development, the FOCUS, INFORMIX, INGRES, ORACLE, PROGRESS, SYBASE and UNIFY relational database management systems are also available. HP offers the common development languages and tools listed above including the leading database products. Agreements with companies such as Computer Associates, Software AG, Cincom, IBI/Focus and Lawson Associates, help provide capabilities similar to a mainframe environment. In fact, partners that include Innovative Information Systems Inc (IISI), Infosoft, VISystems, CGI Consulting and Anderson Consulting, help HP provide customers assistance in reducing their dependence on expensive mainframe systems. Service and support Sequent offers support with their own staff as well as in partnerships with strategic multi- vendor service providers. Sequent provides coverage 24 hours per day, 7 days per week through more than 200 offices across the US and Canada. A variety of service agreements are offered that range from simple parts replacement, software support, software updates or a complete set of system services. Consulting services are available to provide technical expertise in developing applications, databases, networks or in migrations. Educational services provide instruction at Sequent facilities or at the customer's site. Custom Integration services provide special solutions that customers might require. When it comes to overseas support, Sequent is strong in the UK. However, in most parts of Europe, Far East and Latin America, they have minimal support capabilities if any at all. In contrast, HP offers its industry leading support regardless of geographic location. High availability Sequent does offer disk mirroring functionality with the ptx/SVM product as described earlier. However, CPU fail-over and fault-tolerant products are not available. HP has superior capabilities in this area. The range of high MTBF, disk mirroring, CPU fail- over and fully fault- tolerant systems enables HP to offer solutions with increasing degrees of high availability. Although Sequent claims to put emphasis on quality in their manufacturing process, they do not publish any information on failure rates or mean time between failure of their systems. Disk array functionality Sequent provides I/O controllers that are capable of providing functionality equivalent to HP's disk arrays. Each of these "Quad Controllers" can support four I/O channels, each channel being capable of supporting six disk connections. This provides a disk capacity of up to 32 GB per Quad Controller, using 24 disk drives that can be either SCSI or SCSI-2 devices. HP offers disk arrays with a variety of benefits compared to stand- alone disks; these include high data availability, data protection, increased disk connectivity, enhanced performance, on-line replacement of failed disks and uninterrupted access to user data in case of disk failure. The disk array controller supports up to five separate channels which can be used simultaneously for disk I/O. Futures Sequent has substantially reduced its hardware related research and is putting more emphasis on software research. This resulted from weak financial performance during fiscal 1991. The project to evaluate RISC processors to be used in future systems was cancelled due to this change in R&D focus. For now, Sequent is planning on using Intel 80586 processors in future systems. They are concentrating on building their relationship with Novell (developing a parallel version of Netware) and on finding ways to use parallelism to improve batch performance. Some of the key issues that Sequent needs to address are as follows: | Need a system bus with higher bandwidth. Their servers currently use a bus with 53MB/s (sustained) bandwidth which reaches bus saturation with SMP configurations of 16 to 18 processors. This is one of the reasons that Sequent has not published any performance data for systems using more than 18 processors. As a result of this limitation, capability of configuring up to 30 processors in their server is of no consequence when the practical limit is much lower. With their new emphasis on software R&D, development of a new system bus may be affected. | Batch performance is very weak. While an SMP architecture can help deliver high performance servers, it does not provide any benefits in a batch environment. Improvement in batch performance is directly related to processor performance. Since Sequent's processors are Intel 80486 processors, the servers are severely limited with regard to batch performance. Sequent Competitive Selling Strategies HP 9000 versus Sequent Parity HP's Strengths HP's Perceived (Sequent's Weaknesses Weaknesses) (Sequent's Strengths) -Open systems -Contribution to open -Perception of easy -Scalable OLTP standards upgrades servers -Financial stability -Parallel processing -Multivendor networking -Leading support services -Aggressive prices/ -Distributed computing -RISC discounts -Leading OLTP -Leading batch performance performance -Commercial UNIX -Fault-tolerance -Lower cost upgrades for midrange performance -Incremental and fully compatible growth path The issues listed under parity reflect areas that may be important in a sales situation but both vendors offer equivalent products or services. The HP strengths or Sequent weaknesses reflect areas that HP should discuss and sell as being critical to the prospect's success. Being in the account first and discussing the importance of these items may set the criteria for an HP win. Sequent's perceived strengths reflect areas that Sequent will discuss. These may be HP's perceived weaknesses and HP can expect to be challenged on these issues. The handling objections section discusses tactics to discount or turn these issues into an HP strength. HP's Strengths Against Sequent Financial stability HP advantage: HP is a $14.5 billion company ranked Fortune 29 in Fortune magazine's ranking of U.S. based companies. Customer benefits: HP will be a long-term and stable partner. Our financial stability ensures that we can maintain levels of R&D budgets in developing new technologies and that we can maintain and improve our customer support resources. Support services HP advantage: Aside from leading UNIX-based systems, HP provides an extensive range of support, maintenance, and consulting services on a worldwide basis. Customer benefits: HP's support services on a worldwide have been consistently rated among the best in the industry. Customers can be assured that any difficulties they encounter will be quickly and efficiently dealt with by HP regardless of their geographic location. HP's support has been consistently highly rated by industry sources on a worldwide basis. RISC HP advantage: Unlike Sequent's systems which use Intel 80486 processors, HP uses RISC processors. Customer benefits: RISC technology has proven benefits with regard to scalability, range of performance points, price-performance, reliability and easy growth paths. PA-RISC is helping HP deliver systems that provide all these benefits. This architecture will protect customers' investment while allowing them to upgrade to higher performance systems in the future. Although Sequent is delivering systems with comparable performance today, their growth path is questionable. Over the next 3 - 5 years, Sequent will be forced to use higher performance RISC processors in their systems. Intel, their current processor supplier is moving to RISC technology. The investment protection that Sequent will be able to offer in moving to RISC based systems, is very questionable. Batch performance HP advantage: HP is far better positioned for superior batch performance. It is common knowledge that symmetric multiprocessing technology is beneficial in on-line applications but does not have any advantage over a uniprocessor architecture in batch environments. For batch applications, processor performance plays a key role in determining overall system throughput. Customer benefits: The same systems from HP can deliver superior batch as well as OLTP performance. The Symmetry systems deliver good OLTP performance but very poor batch performance. Although Sequent is examining ways to use multiprocessing concepts in order to deliver better batch performance, these projects are only in the research stage. Commercial UNIX systems HP advantage: HP is the premier choice of commercial UNIX systems VABs and offers the largest selection of commercial applications running on UNIX systems. Customer benefits: A number of leading commercial ISVs, including those from the mainframe environment such as Computer Associates, Lawson Associates, and Software AG, have chosen HP to be the platform for their UNIX system- based products. Customers can be assured that HP will be able to provide a full range of applications for all their business needs. Fault tolerance HP advantage: HP offers fully fault tolerant systems for absolutely critical applications. Customer benefits: HP can deliver fully fault tolerant systems if customers need it. These are source-code compatible with the HP 9000 Series 800 systems. Sequent does not offer fault tolerant systems. Complete solutions HP advantage: HP offers a full range of products in addition to computer systems workstations, X-stations, peripherals, networking, and support services. Customer benefits: HP provides a complete solution to fit the customers' needs. Sequent only makes computer systems and disk drives. Other components of the overall solution must be obtained from third-party vendors. Sequent's Perceived Strengths Against HP Handling objections | Sequent offers integration and customization services. Counter with: Sequent does indeed offer integration services to customers. This is to compensate for a major weakness that Sequent has, which is lack of their own peripherals. HP offers not just systems but also all the peripherals and networking that customers need for a complete configuration. HP also offers industry-leading support services as necessary. HP support has been consistently ranked number one for a number of years. | Sequent is the pioneer in parallel processing technology--first with symmetric multiprocessing systems and now with parallel enabled software for RDBMS and networking. Counter with: Sequent's differentiation has been the use of symmetric multiprocessing in their systems. This technology is becoming commonplace today. There is another technology, RISC, that is becoming increasingly commonplace but Sequent has still not adopted it as yet. Their pioneer position seems to be just a "flash in the pan." Regarding databases tuned for multiprocessing, HP has special versions of the leading databases running on the 870 multiprocessing systems. The parallel enabled networking software that Sequent developed with Novell will not be shipping until sometime in 1992. Besides, Novell will also be making this available on HP systems. | Scalability of Symmetry systems--they can support up to 30 processors at the high end. Counter with: The largest working configuration tracked is a 16-processor system. Industry sources agree that having more than 16 processors will not improve system performance significantly with Sequent's current implementation; Sequent has not published any performance data to indicate otherwise. Having the capacity of 30 processors with nominal performance improvements beyond a 16-processor configuration is not a tremendous benefit for customers. The 870 and also the 890 multiprocessing systems show consistent and substantial improvements in performance all the way to the 4-way configuration. Appendix Systems specifications: Models s2000/250 s2000/450 s2000/750 CPU 80486 80486 80486 Clock speed (MHz) 33 33 33 MIPS 82 per board 82 per board 82 per board No. of processors 2-6 2-10 2-30 Cache 512 KB 512 KB 512 KB Memory in Mbytes 16/320 16/512 16/960 (min/max) Disk in MB (min/max) 316/76000 540/130260 540/259900 # slots 5 VME 8 VME 8 VME 6 Sequent bus 12 Sequent bus 26 Sequent bus Base config price $53,500 $152,000 $226,000 includes: 2 cpu 2 cpu 2 cpu 16MB memory 64MB 64MB 16MB disk 2.7GB 2.7GB 16 user OS 16 user OS 16 user OS ________________________________________________________________________ Models s2000/40 s2000/200 s2000/400 s2000/700 CPU 80486 80486 80486 80486 Clock speed (MHz) 33 25 25 25 MIPS 20 28 per board 28 per board 28 per board No. of processors 1 2-6 2-10 2-30 Cache 8 KB 512 KB 512 KB 512 KB Memory in Mbytes 8/64 16/320 16/416 16/816 (min/max) Disk in MB 316/2500 316/15000 540/24800 540/86800 (min/max) # slots 8 ISA bus 5 VME 7 Multibus 12 Multibus 6 Sequent 12 Sequent 26 Sequent bus bus bus ________________________________________________________________________ Models s3 s16 s27 s81 CPU 80386 80386 80386 80386 Clock speed (MHz) 33 20 20 20 MIPS 8 10-30 10-50 10-150 No. of processors 1 2-6 2-10 2-30 Cache (all ECC) 64 KB 128 KB 128 KB 128 KB Memory in Mbytes 4/40 8/80 8/128 8/384 (min/max) Disk Mbytes 330/1800 316/2500 150/6300 264/25300 (min/max) # slots 8 ISA bus 5 VME bus 7 Multibus 12 Multibus 6 Sequent 12 Sequent 26 Sequent bus bus bus ________________________________________________________________________ Price/performance The following audited benchmarks have been comparisons published by Sequent. TPC-A benchmark: Model Database Total cost tps-A $/tps-A Symmetry 2000/200 (4 cpu) Informix 4.0 $ 746,920 49.96 $ 14,950 Symmetry 2000/700 (8 cpu)* Sybase SMP 2,476,493 168.91 14,662 Symmetry 2000/700 (12 cpu) Informix 4.0 2,868,018 129.19 22,200 Symmetry 2000/700 (16 cpu) Oracle V6.0.33 3,831,032 166.20 23,051 Symmetry 2000/750 (16 cpu) Oracle V6.0.33 3,970,280 214.53 18,507 * Using four clients - the uniprocessor S2000/40 systems. TPC-B benchmark: Model Database Total cost tps-B $/tps-B Symmetry 2000/700 Oracle V6.0.32 $2,016,039 319.60 $6,308 Compare these to HP's published benchmarks for TPC-A: Model Database Total cost tps-A $/tps-A 9000/807 Informix 4.0 $ 422,217 30.4 $13,889 9000/817 Informix 4.0 606,509 51.2 11,846 9000/827 Informix 4.0 645,274 51.8 12,457 9000/837 Informix 4.0 769,369 60.0 12,823 9000/847 Informix 4.0 788,315 60.1 16,473 9000/857 Informix 4.0 990,037 60.1 16,473 9000/867 Informix 4.0 1,156,431 74.9 15,440 9000/877 Informix 4.0 1,184,886 74.9 15,820 9000/870-100 Informix 4.1 1,737,699 74.5 23,325 9000/870-200 Informix 4.1 2,360,217 111.2 21,233 9000/870-400 Informix 4.1 2,566,843 173.2 14,820 Multi-user performance estimates for the 890 are as follows: 890 1 110 tps 890 2 185 tps 890 3 275 tps 890 4 336 tps Also compare HP's published benchmarks for TPC-B: Model Database Total cost tps-B $/tps-B 9000/807 Informix 4.0 $106,066 41.07 2,583 9000/817 Informix 4.0 125,666 64.79 1,940