Pay for Sun&#39;s Schwartz jumps 56 percent
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com September 22, 2004, 4:33 PM PT. With the economy slowly turning up, upgrading hardware has been on businesses radar in the past 12 months as their number two priority.
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In deciding to buy MySQL last month, Sun was attracted to the open-source database company's very rapid growth rate and its revenue model, Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz said in a keynote presentation Wednesday at SugarCRM's SugarCon 2008 conference in San Jose, Calif.MySQL was driving real value, innovation, and choice, Schwartz said. Sun agreed to buy the company in a $1 billion deal."What was attractive was how profound their distribution was," Schwartz said. MySQL offers access to about 11 million deployments around the world, and Sun began to see MySQL delivering real value, innovation, and choice, he said. MySQL sells services and support for its database.Asked if Sun planned to scale the MySQL database to compete with Oracle, Schwartz said Sun will not compete with Oracle but "will scale MySQL to extraordinary heights."The future lies in open source, innovation, and freedom of choice, according to Schwartz. Open source, he said, represents choice for CIOs. Developers, meanwhile, are making decisions about what runs in data centers, something that used to be the sole domain of the CIO, said Schwartz.Schwartz also stressed the importance of communities. "With every mainstream asset at Sun, we're investing to create a community," of developers and users regardless of whether they pay any money, he said.Schwartz's being a keynote presenter at the conference presents a bit of irony in that the open-source Sugar CRM package is written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) rather than the Java language created and promoted by Sun. But Schwartz noted the Java Virtual Machine is being expanded to accommodate other languages. The JVM enables Java applications to run on platforms supporting the JVM."I think what you'll see from Sun is that we're just going to take the J off the JVM and just make it a VM," Schwartz said. He cited Sun's Da Vinci Machine project, which is an effort to expand language coverage of the JVM.In other developments at the conference, SugarCRM laid out a roadmap of Sugar product releases planned for 2008.Due in April or May, the 5.1 edition of Sugar focuses on SMBs. It will feature improvements in reporting, including about 20 pre-canned reports, as well as a new systems management console via the company's DCE (Data Center Edition) 1.0.Wireless and tracker enhancements also are planned. The tracker will be able to tell who and how many users are online. Also, it will reveal the CRM usage level for a particular team and what modules are being used the most.The 5.2 edition, expected in July, is to feature real-time and global grid capabilities.Sugar 6.0, due in December, will be geared to large enterprises. Included will be portal-enabled partner relationship management and a new calendar with an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) UI and a recurring meeting capability. Users also can create Web services-based mashups.A Java layer in version 6.0 will link Sugar to other applications, such as the Lucene search engine. DCE 2.0 will debut with advanced resource and systems management.In a morning keynote presentation, SugarCRM co-founder and CEO John Roberts touted a new era in "commercial open source.""We are at the end of the beginning in commercial open source these last four years, and open source is clearly in the mainstream now," Roberts said.SugarCRM founders in 2003 started questioning the proprietary lock-in of software, he said. They left their jobs in 2004 and began SugarCRM, Roberts recalled."We founded [the] Sugar open-source project before we even incorporated the company," Roberts said. The founders, who also include Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor, decided to post code in an effort to write software in a public venue, said Roberts.Roberts cited five forces shaping technology: ideas, willpower and the Internet; belief in the intelligence of crowds, consumerization of IT, cloud computing, and the global language of sharing. "It's exciting, and for me, it's clear that this journey we started on four years ago is real and there really isn't any stopping it," said Roberts. "The best thing I like about it is its focus on innovation," he added.A user of SugarCRM, Eddie White, director of Mania Technologie UK, which makes manufacturing equipment, uses the product as a database for marketing, customer care, and field service support."The investment was very cost-effective in terms of overall license costs," White said."We've been able to create a global database of customers and contacts," he said.Mania is looking to integrate its Sugar installation with its other systems, such as stock control and sales order management systems, White said.The biggest hurdle to deploying Sugar has been getting users to embrace it who had been used to doing things another way, according to White. "It's been easy to use; it's just a question of getting people to change their work practice," he said.While Mania did examine the source code of SugarCRM when doing administrative-level customization, it did not make any changes to the code. The company may do this when it expands use of the product for customer care.SugarCRM announced on Wednesday stack installers that provide a simplified, wizard-based installation for Sugar Community Edition for Solaris and OpenSolaris.
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The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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During his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, Sun CEO Scott McNealy talked up the company&#39;s pay-as-you-go strategy, which is one of the bigger
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Despite having revenues of around $70 million to $85 million, MySQL commanded an impressive $1 billion price tag in today's acquisition by database giant Sun.
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What a strange weekend it has been for the most prolific CxO-cum-blogger in the high tech industry - Sun COO and presidentï¿½Jonathan Schwartz.
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Keep praising your troops and maybe they&#39;ll win the fight. Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) Chief Executive Scott McNealy saw good in earnings that were somewhat worse than expected.
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34,600 staff take a deep breath Sun Microsystems has given the official word â its employees can hold their heads high.â¦
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The New York Times Co. stock jumped 7.5 percent yesterday, its biggest gain in almost six years, on reports that billionaire Maurice "Hank" Greenberg , former chairman of insurance giant American International Group, was snapping up shares of Times Co. in a bid to challenge its two-tier ownership structure.
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Mickos and Sun's Green dish the dirt Radio Reg When one of technology's major players lays down $1bn for an open source software maker, the Open Season crew must swing into action. To our credit, we swung in style this week, getting Sun - the acquirer - software chief Rich Green and MySQL - the acquired - CEO Marten Mickos on the horn.â¦
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Net income for Sunâs fiscal 2008 second quarter, rose to $260 million, or 31 cents a share, from $133 million, or 15 cents a share, a year earlier.
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Shares of Sun Healthcare Group Inc. moved higher Monday after a UBS analyst upgraded the health care services provider and predicted the company will have a strong fourth quarter due to higher Medicare reimbursement rates.
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Sun doubled its profit in the quarter ended Dec. 30, although revenue was nearly flat compared with the same period a year earlier, the company announced Thursday.Net income for the quarter, the second of Sun&#39;s fiscal year, was $260 million, or $0.31 per share, up from $133 million and $0.15 per share in the same quarter of fiscal 2006, the company announced Thursday.Revenue was $3.62 billion, up just 1.4 percent from the same quarter a year earlier. The growth came from Sun&#39;s services business, where revenue climbed 5 percent. Sales of servers and storage products, which account for about two-thirds of Sun&#39;s business, declined by 0.5 percent.Business was particularly slow in the U.S., where revenue declined 8 percent year over year. The EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) region performed better with growth of 7 percent. EMEA accounted for 39 percent of revenue in the quarter, overtaking the U.S., which is usually Sun&#39;s biggest source of revenue.Despite the quarter&#39;s slow growth, Sun said its full-year growth would be better. On a conference call, Chief Financial Officer Mike Lehman said revenue for fiscal 2008 would increase in the &quot;low-to-mid single digits&quot; and predicted revenue growth in the second half of greater than 5 percent.Sun&#39;s profit benefited from its ongoing cost-cutting plan, which has included several hundred layoffs so far. Its $260 million profit included a restructuring charge of $32 million.Sun announced a surprise plan last week to buy MySQL, the biggest open-source database vendor, for $1 billion. Sun officials said Thursday they are unsure whether the MySQL acquisition will close in the second or third quarter, and have not yet calculated the long-term impact on Sun&#39;s financials. They expect to take a one-time charge of $30 million to $50 million when the deal closes.
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taking our intellectual property and turning it into pay-for-use network services,&quot; Sun President Jonathan Schwartz said. The company envisions businesses that
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Which letter did Sun buy again? Correction of the day Anytime a major acquisition such as Sun's $1bn buy of MySQL hits, analysts around the globe rush out their takes on the deal, hoping to prove their fierce insight. Journalists sit back as the analysts' notes flood their inboxes.â¦
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Sun Microsystems' purchase of MySQL for $1 billion is not only the largest open-source deal yet, it's almost bigger than all previous open-source deals combined, including RedHat's $326 million buy of JBoss, Citrix's $500 million purchase of XenSource and Yahoo's $350 million acquisition of Zimbra.
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The Reserve Bank has raised the Official Cash Rate by a further 25 basis points, to 6.5 percent. It&#39;s the sixth rate rise this year, and matches market anticipations.