We were on hand for Sun’s industry analyst call today as they provided the details behind their FY07 financial results. It was a banner year for Sun, with the company healthier than any time since, let’s see, probably 2000. Overall revenue was up a little over 6%, even though overall product revenue was down from last year – mainly due to reduced storage sales (down 10%).

Sun didn’t provide a breakdown of individual product sales or unit numbers, but they did throw out a few numbers briefly, here are some of the highlights -Total unit sales were down from last year, but x86 server units were up significantly. Reading between the lines, with x86 units up strongly, but total units down, we’re led to conclude that SPARC units were down significantly in ’07. Sun explains this as the impact of virtualization and customers buying fewer, but larger servers. This makes sense and certainly jibes with what we’re hearing from both Unix and x86 data center managers.
- The bright spot for Sun, from a server perspective at least, is sales of their Niagara-based T1000/T2000 systems, with sales up a whopping 225%. A great number, but it’s also still a fairly new product and thus should have a steep ramp.
– x64 systems turned in 39% year-to-year revenue growth
- Sun’s new blade product is selling at an annualized rate of $55 million. It’s difficult to say if this is good or bad, as the product has only been shipping for a few months. Sun has quite a mountain to climb, the size of the blade market in 2007 should come in north of $3 billion, and somewhere around 75% of the market is controlled by Sun’s arch-enemies IBM and HP.
Want more? Sun analyst presentation