A huge market for high-end SPARC machines are enterprises, who use them to run Oracle RDBMS and SAP/other similar business software. IBM competes directly in this market with what used to be AS/400 and System/390 (not sure I know what they're called now, afaik iSeries and zSeries).
This isn't really about technology, it's about convincing these enterprises that it's better for them to scale vertically on a single machine than to scale horizontally on commodity hardware. From a technical point of view this has long been proven false, but for certain companies it may be true from a business point of view: if technology is a cost center (i.e., it's called "IT" not "R&D") and you don't have the talent needed to operate a cluster of commodity hardware (e.g, there are either no operations engineers who can program in your geographic area or they simply won't want to work for you) leasing/buying big iron (especially if it comes pre-configured and with a support contract) starts to sound attractive.
Even if SPARC is superior hardware, the customer simply wouldn't care. It would be more profitable for IBM to cut SPARC off and continue only with POWER. The professional services involved in this is the lucrative part for the vendor.
People who do care about technology, have in-house talent and do HPC (scientific computing, machine learning/data mining, Internet companies with scalability problems) are best served by x86_64 (in almost all cases excluding some types of computation), ia64 as well as IBM's own Power-based 1U/2U servers (what used to be the RS6000 series).
This isn't really about technology, it's about convincing these enterprises that it's better for them to scale vertically on a single machine than to scale horizontally on commodity hardware. From a technical point of view this has long been proven false, but for certain companies it may be true from a business point of view: if technology is a cost center (i.e., it's called "IT" not "R&D") and you don't have the talent needed to operate a cluster of commodity hardware (e.g, there are either no operations engineers who can program in your geographic area or they simply won't want to work for you) leasing/buying big iron (especially if it comes pre-configured and with a support contract) starts to sound attractive.
Even if SPARC is superior hardware, the customer simply wouldn't care. It would be more profitable for IBM to cut SPARC off and continue only with POWER. The professional services involved in this is the lucrative part for the vendor.
People who do care about technology, have in-house talent and do HPC (scientific computing, machine learning/data mining, Internet companies with scalability problems) are best served by x86_64 (in almost all cases excluding some types of computation), ia64 as well as IBM's own Power-based 1U/2U servers (what used to be the RS6000 series).