Sun Regime Changes Continue
Jonathan
Schwartz, Sun’s new COO, is busy placing his stamp on the
management of Sun Microsystems, with additional management
rearrangements and other strategic changes.
In
David
W. Yen, Executive VP, will be in charge of Sun's
microprocessors, enterprise systems and SPARC-based volume systems
initiatives, unified under the Throughput Systems organization.
John
Fowler becomes acting EVP for Network Systems and CTO for Schwartz.
This includes Intel and AMD processor-based systems with a
focus on delivering low-cost, horizontally scaled systems with
off-the-shelf components that leverage industry economics.
Anil
Gadre was named interim chief marketing officer and Brian Sutphin
vice president, corporate development.
Schwartz
had already named John Loiacono, a long-time Sun executive, as his
own replacement as executive vice president, software.
Laterally Arabesqued
Clarke
Masters, formerly Sun's head of large UNIX servers, will now move to
run government customer sales.
Out
Mark
Tolliver, chief marketing and strategy officer (replaced by Gadre
and Sutphin).
Neil
Knox, executive vice president, volume systems products (replaced,
at least for now, with John Fowler).
Both
“have decided to leave the company to pursue other interests.”
Out And Away
Rich Green, the former Sun Java chief who
negotiated the Sun-Microsoft settlement, has been spotted en route
to his new job, as EVP of Product Development at software start-up
Cassatt. We’ve been
hearing from them since Bill Coleman (ex of Sun and a founder of
BEA) joined Cassatt, with whispers that Cassatt would be hot, very
hot, in the new field we call Virtual Computing (systems
management/virtualization/automation, etc.).
Cassatt is rumored to have a number of ex-Sun staffers and a
Java point of view.
(For those of you not familiar with the
company, it started as United Scale in Minneapolis in 2000, and then
changed its name to Cassatt and its headquarters to Menlo Park,
California in September 2003.)
Product
Changes, Too
Part
of the changes at Sun included an announcement that Sun would halt
development on the UltraSPARC V (Millennium) and the Gemini chips,
laying off a number of engineers and freeing up others to work on
the next generation of chips. This is viewed as part of a set of
decisions to trim costs and to move on to the Rock and Niagara
processors, which were next in line.
We’ll
leave it to the hardware specialists to speculate whether this
leaves a temporary hole in Sun’s product offering or whether they
can speed up production of the next generation enough to keep
customers happily waiting. It’s
a competitive market and we heard that IBM, which has new versions
of its POWER chip ready to go, was quite happy to hear the news.
Sun may simply partner more (in a more cost effective
way) to get the processors it needs.
Certainly AMD, Intel, and Sun partner Fujitsu are happy to
help.
New Throughput Computing chief Yen writes the
timeline/product change off to a move to consolidate resources
behind the Throughput initiative.
That will make those schedules and its success now much more
important for Sun.
Sun has also made another one of its
innovative software pricing changes that we suspect are hallmarks of
Jonathan Schwartz’s thinking.
(In fact, he alluded to more software pricing changes to come
when he met with software analysts in March.)
This time Sun is offering bulk subscription prices for
Solaris on –x86. Customers
can buy licenses in volumes of 100 ($50,000 per year), 500 or 2,000
($800,000 per year) units. Support
is included. Now here’s
the kicker: pricing is
per system, regardless of the number of cpu’s; a one-way and a
four-way (the limit) are the same price.
This makes Solaris on –x86 cheaper than Red Hat Linux or
Windows (or buying Solaris licenses separately and then adding
support). Sun is
hoping, we hear, that customers will decide that Solaris, not Linux,
is the best form of UNIX for the –x86 platform.
We are sure that some customers, who prefer Solaris to Linux,
will be very pleased with this new pricing.
Whether it will change the long-term market trend toward
Linux and away from many flavors of UNIX is quite another matter.
We’ll wait for the market to vote.
(back to top)
