Sun CEO to Torvalds: let's work together
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Blog: Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz invited Linux leader Linus Torvalds to dinner and made the case that Linux and Solaris should join open-source forces.
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Do mobile application developers need to band together to tackle the tough issues facing them? Attendees at Sun's Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday afternoon will briefly discuss this issue.The idea is that developers must deal with issues such as fragmentation in features, behavior, security policies, and deployment policies and could form an alliance providing a single voice, said Terrence Barr, Sun technical evangelist for the mobile and embedded developer community."We call it the mobile developer alliance and it's essentially a developer activism group," Barr said on Wednesday evening. "It's just a grassroots thing. We haven't thought about it too much. The idea is to bring developers together to give them a common voice and try and work on some of the fragmentation and issues that the industry has."The mobile developer alliance is envisioned as an industrywide effort and not Java-specific. Developers, Barr said, have not had a consistent, uniform voice in facing issues.Among the problems developers face is having to slightly rework applications for each of the many phones, Barr said. Every phone, he said "has certain quirks that you have to deal with, and if you're trying to cover 80, 90 percent of the installed base out there it becomes very painful because you're literally producing hundreds of slightly different versions of the same application," he said.The alliance could serve as sort of a citizens' voice, but the exact mode of operation is still up for discussion, Barr said. Agreement on high-priority issues that developers want to make progress on would be a main focus, as well as trying to establish relationships with players such as carriers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)."It's not necessarily [about] battling your enemies but it's about getting everybody on the same page," said Barr. No single player can address them, he said."At the end of the day, [developers] are the ones who have to make all this stuff work," he said.OEMs care about the platform and carriers care about the networks, said Barr. "The developer has to bring all these pieces together and that's why it's so painful," he said.Sun officials Wednesday also talked about Java ME (Micro Edition) development tools, including plans for a Java ME development toolkit with a consolidated environment for both the CDC (Connected Device Configuration) framework and CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) technology.Also highlighted were enhancements planned for the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CDLC. Planned features include an application testing framework and support for Java Specification Request (JSR) 256 - Mobile Sensor API Submission to the JCP (Java Community Process) and JSR 280 - XML API for Java ME.The application testing framework is intended to automate manual testing. It will support refined testing scenarios in an emulated environment as well as improvements for testing of applications for users with visual, motor, or dexterity impairments.JSR 256 offers a unified way of managing sensors connected to mobile devices and easy access to sensor data. JSR 280 is designed to provide a general-purpose XML API for next-generation mobile devices.
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Apparently it&#39;s not enough that Sun peppers any and all discussions of its hardware and software products with liberal mentions of its Java programming language, now the vendor wants Wall Street to sit up and take more note of its homegrown technology too.
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ZFS file system can't be un-open-sourced, Schwartz says on his blog. And if Sun wins, it'll donate some proceeds to open-source and patent reform causes.
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Blog: Linux leader seems inclined to take Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz up on his dinner offer, so at least one cultural barrier separating Linux and Solaris looks to be lowering.
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(InfoWorld) - The key to Sun's success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday. Sun had 7 million free downloads of Solaris in recent months, and 70 percent of those downloading it have non-Sun hardware in their IT infrastructure, Schwartz said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week in San Francisco. If IT people are running Solaris on hardware from IBM, HP, and Dell, they can be sold Sun hardware to replace those other brands. "If your OS is in front of a customer, you're now given permission to sell everything you've got in your portfolio," Schwartz said. Sun's servers and storage appliances are optimized to run on Solaris, though they can also run on the Linux OS. Sun is approaching the first anniversary ofÂ a restructuring planÂ announced by Schwartz after he took over from Scott McNealy, who remains chairman. Sun has eliminated 4,000 jobs at the company over the last year to reduce costs and there may be more workforce reductions ahead, but only through attrition, Schwartz said. The company currently has about 38,000 employees worldwide. Sun has an opportunity to grow as data centers continue to evolve, Schwartz said. Already, the number of rack-mounted servers has surpassed the number of tower servers sold, and blade servers are on track to outsell rack servers as data centers continue to consolidate. "Why do we even bother with racks?" Schwartz asked during an interview before a roomful of analysts. "Racks are optimized for people to interact with infrastructure. But if you talk to any IT administrator, the last thing they want in their data center is a person because they try to be helpful, but they bend pins and kick plugs and do all kinds of bad things. "The long-term evolution of this marketplace will see data centers emerge in a standardized form factor at large scale," he said. Sun is planning to serve that market with its Project Blackbox, a data center that is installed in a 20-foot shipping container, delivered to a customer and operated from the container. It is scheduled to begin shipping later this year. In its first profitable quarter in more than a year, Sun posted net income of $126 million, or $0.03 per share, on a 7 percent gain in revenue to $3.56 billion, in its fiscal 2007 second quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2006. Analysts, including those at firms besides Morgan Stanley, forecast Sun to earn $0.01 a share in the current quarter on $3.42 billion in revenue. For fiscal 2007, they estimate Sun will earn $0.10 a share on revenue of $14.88 billion, according to an average of analyst estimates from Thomson Financial. In recent months, Sun has begun again to use Intel chips in its hardware. Sun also announced a $700 million investment in the company by KKR Private Equity Investors, the publicly traded fund of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. KKR will also nominate a director to Sun's board. KKR's investment will provide Sun the opportunity to market to all the other firms in which KKR invests, Schwartz said. Â
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The Service Research & Innovation Initiative (SRII) today announced that  Sun Microsystems, Inc has joined 15 leading technology companies and  academic researchers in their mission to increase the amount of funding  for services research, development and innovation in the technology  industry.
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SAN FRANCISCO - On Tuesday, executives from Sun Microsystems Inc. will head to Wall Street, hoping to convince customers and partners in the financial industry that the company continues to be viable in the industry that Sun President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Scwhartz affectionately refers to as "the swamp from which we spawned." Sun is expected to make a number of new product and partnership announcements during an event for customers, press and analysts at the W Hotel in New York City on Tuesday.
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Microsoft and Sun held a conference call yesterday to update the industry on where they are at in terms of their agreement to work together and interoperate more.
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It hasn't even been eight months since Sun Microsystems promoted Jonathan Schwartz to be Chief Executive Scott McNealy's right-hand man, but the two are already acting like an old couple. [Missing Links]
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Blog: Linux leader Linus Torvalds looks inclined to take Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz up on his dinner offer, so at least one cultural barrier separating Linux and Solaris looks to be lowering.
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Sun Microsystems is planning to beef up its network-attached storage product line with support for utility computing and its new zettabyte file system, according to Balint Fleischer, vice president and CTO of the network storage products group
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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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Hal Stern holds the titles at Sun Microsystems of vice president, Distinguished Engineer, and CTO for Sun Services. He also has co-authored technical books on networking and high-availability techniques and, prior to joining Sun, developed molecular modeling software. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Stern to discuss Sunâs âNext Generation Data Centerâ concept and to talk about subjects such as security, utility computing, and how the company stacks up its services efforts against IBM Global Services.
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As long as they're running Solaris Sun is looking to burnish its support credentials by offering to look after other vendorsâ hardware as long it is running its Solaris OS.â¦
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The longtime rivals claim that they&#39;ll work harder to make their software work together. By Aaron Ricadela. Longtime rivals Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have made a &quot;180-degree U-turn&quot; in their relationship
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The key to Sun Microsystems Inc.'s success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday.