Sun announced a full line of Sun Storage Hardware (moving past, way past, its prior reliance on a re-branded, outsourced offering) and emphasizing Storage Software as a major advantage of its storage offering.  (Interestingly, one day later, IBM announced the reorganization of its Storage division, led by Linda Sanford, creating a new Storage Software Group as part of that division, to be managed by Michael Zisman, formerly President of Lotus and an adviser on mergers and acquisitions to IBM). 

A feature of Sun announcements and meetings has always been none-too-subtle jabs at its chief competitor Microsoft.  (We’ve always thought this strong focus on Microsoft was a little strange in light of the fact that Sun CEO Scott McNealy likes to claim that Sun is in the server business and in the past often referred to Sun’s software as just “a way to sell more servers.”)  Forget that.  This year, Microsoft was nearly forgotten as Sun switched its competitive spotlight to IBM.  This seemed appropriate as it is IBM, clearly, Sun must meet in the server, systems, and solutions marketplace.  However, Sun is still up to its favorite tricks.  One analyst claims to have kept a count of how many times Sun mentioned IBM negatively in one day (February 7, it was a very long day), and says the count exceeded 400; it seemed excessive, paranoid, and a little boring.

There was lots of emphasis on software.  This is a whole new focus for Sun.  Of course, they have always had software – and done some good and innovative work here, from their solid and popular UNIX implementation, Solaris, to their pioneering work with Java.  Nevertheless, it was clear that the balance had shifted this year, with much less emphasis in the presentations on new chips and powerful processing and much more emphasis on the final integration of the Netscape iPlanet servers from AOL into Sun, the aforementioned Sun storage software, and a new meta operating system (N1) that to some old hands seemed a kind of New Age version of VM.  Some things, we nodded to each other, never change.

Another shift was Sun’s decision to have a Linux announcement during the Analysts’ Conference.  From the timing (just a week after LinuxWorld, the natural venue for such an event) and its informality (Sun executives seemed vague as to the details in answering press and analyst questions), we got the impression, this was a last-minute decision.  In any case, while Sun tried to present this as a natural extension of a long and solid existing commitment to Linux, many analysts questioned Sun long and hard on its rationale.