HP Professional AP500 Compaq Workstations Graphics Product Positioning - Page 5

Compaq Professional Workstations Graphics Product Positioning 5 components and offer the full Compaq warranty, providing uncompromising stability and cost of ownership. The Premier graphics partners are Compaq's closest allies and these integrated solutions and option kits meet the needs of roughly 80 percent of the market. This is also where Compaq invests most heavily in terms of its partner relationships. While these solutions pass through the GEP lab, Compaq also spends months working closely with the graphics vendor and professional ISVs to tune and integrate the solutions. This tiered approach is a pragmatic way to make investments and position and deliver solutions in an increasingly fragmented market. But while delivery and integration of solutions are key consideration points for customers, it is also important to understand the relative merits and positioning of the controllers based on technical merits. After all, the workstation and graphics markets were both built upon a foundation of technical excellence. The following sections outline the customer requirements and technical capabilities that help position Compaq's graphics solutions for key market segments. Market Requirements As a corollary to the merging of the commodity PC space and the historical technical computing market dominated by specialized workstation products, it is understandable to consider the customer requirements for workstation graphics in two broad categories, each of which spans the more traditional performance-oriented delineations for graphics (e.g 2D, Multi-display 2D and 3D controllers). The best way to think about these two classes are to apply labels based on customer attributes. Compaq considers these classes as those with basic "Productivity" requirements and those with more demanding "Performance" requirements. Essentially, these can be defined as follows: Productivity customers Productivity customers are best represented by the class of users that have traditionally purchased highest performance PCs for maximum computing power, and are moving up to Intel-based workstation for more of the same. Another set of these customers may be moving to NT workstations from RISC platforms used where performance graphics were not available or required, such as Sun Ultra 5 or SPARCstation or IBM RS/6000 systems used for risk management, financial trading, ECAD and publishing. These customers too were typically purchasing workstations for compute performance or to suit application requirements for operating system support or SCSI storage subsystems. In general, these customers seek the best value available when it comes to graphics and believe that price/performance is critical in the consideration set. Since the planned usage probably does not stress graphics performance with large models or unique feature requirements (as per the legacy of the users), these customers will typically sacrifice some features found in higher-end "Performance" solutions. Also for this reason, and perhaps because many of these customers plan to run on homegrown applications, many also believe that application certification is not a critical requirement for this class of product. Since graphics performance has historically not been a bottleneck or a key purchase consideration, many of this class of customer consider graphics controller branding a secondary if