Sun Invades New York
Sun
took over Wall Street to emphasize that it was back at its old stand
in the financial services industry, in full force.
It made use of the event to talk to financial analysts,
industry analysts, press, and customers, to make a number of product
announcements, and to meet with local developers.
Of
course, the major message remains unchanged.
Sun’s Solaris operating system is the right way to go, top
to bottom, from an –x86 box to a high-end system.
Sun
offered Wall Street customers a variety of trade-in and upgrade
programs centered on moving them from Xeon servers (presumably
running Linux or Windows) to SPARC servers running Solaris, deals on
Solaris 10 software, Linux to Solaris upgrades, and customized
offers and programs incorporating its business partners.
Sun
is augmenting its various developer programs with new community
programs for Wall Street including Sun Tech Days and Developer
Advisory Council events
Sun
now offers a broader variety of hardware than ever, including its
AMD Opterons with Linux, but it makes it clear – very clear –
that it prefers to load them with ever-so-superior Solaris.
We’ve always had a problem with this message.
Not that we think that there’s anything wrong with Solaris
– there are certainly customers who still prefer UNIX and Solaris
is a well-thought of, popular UNIX, but we don’t understand why
anyone who actually wants Linux would want to buy product from a
company who so openly doesn’t think much of it.
We’d
guess they don’t sell much Linux and that most of it goes to very
loyal Sun customers who just want some Linux boxes without the
inconvenience of adding another vendor.
We’d love Sun to publish some numbers about how many Linux
boxes it sells and to whom it sells them, just it case we’re
wrong.
We’ll
spare you the marketing portions of Sun’s announcements – the
parts that go: bigger, faster, cheaper.
You can read their ads.
Sun
is starting to offer additional software features, such as Grid
Container software for NW that provides logical partitioning for
predictive self-healing and fault isolation and cluster software for
the Solaris OS x86 platform for failure detection and recovery.
Sun
talks proudly about how many partners they now have, including 2
million licenses for Solaris 10 on the x86 platform, 300,000+
licenses for the Sun Java Enterprise System and more than 250 pilots
for the Sun Java Desktop system.
Sun
will next release a number of new technologies, migration tools and
support programs on the road to the Solaris 10 OS. These include:
Sun Studio 10 software for Solaris on AMD Opteron and Intel Nocona
processor-based systems running 64-bit applications; Integration of
the Java(TM) 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5, J2SE 5 (code named
Project Tiger; The iForce(SM) Partner Program/Solaris 10 Early
Adoption Program offers ISVs, IHVs and development partners the
opportunity to adopt the newest Solaris features and technologies;
Enhancements to Sun(TM) Cluster 3 software to help reduce the cost
and complexity of managing mission critical applications.
We were impressed with the idea that Sun was introducing a
pay-for-use computing grid plan.
However, as we understand it, the $1 hour per hour price
bears examination, as customers need a very high volume commitment
to qualify. In any
event, Sun intends to offer this mainly through partners, not from
its own data centers. They
believe that the levels of granularity and virtualization they can
achieve, running on AMD Opteron and SPARC processors are at this
time unmatched.
Sun
intends to initially target non-transactional workloads such as
simulations, modeling, and rendering.
These are traditional grid applications.
They also believe software testing will be of interest. For a limited time, developers will be offered one week’s
free access to Sun’s latest hardware, software, and solutions.
Sun’s Imaginative
Business Plans
Recently,
Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz has been observed speaking to Sun’s
business partners about Sun’s plans to offer its hardware at “negative
prices” if necessary.
(What he really means, we think, is to negotiate contracts
where the commodity priced hardware is sold at little or no profit
(or even at a loss), but software and services provide sufficient
margins.)
There’s
nothing wrong with this idea. To
some extent, other systems vendors have often practiced such bundled
pricing. The trouble
is, you have to have the right goods to bundle.
That would mean, in Sun’s case, a big and profitable
software business and a big and profitable services business.
As far as we can tell, Sun is still in the process of
building a software business. We’d guess that it still is wending its way to the half
billion dollar mark. Sun,
as a policy, sends most services business (except maintenance) to
its partners. So there
would need to be substantial changes in strategy and organizational
structure and assets, I believe, for this to work.
Perhaps Sun has some plans we don’t know about.
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