Sun to buy VirtualBox maker Innotek
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Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.
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Sun Microsystems has entered into an agreement to acquire SevenSpace, a privately-held company based in Ashburn, Va. SevenSpace will broaden Sun&#39;s Managed Services offerings to include heterogeneous environments
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Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are both building storage virtualization tools and storage grid technology to help customers drive adaptable intelligence and unified management deeper into multivendor storage environments.
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In for the big win Having recently rediscovered itself as a systems company, Sun Microsystems has been welcomed into Microsoft's vast and growing family of OEM partners.â¦
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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW) today unveiled its next generation Sun Ray(TM) Server Software 3.0 an interoperable, platform that enables instant
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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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In a bid to boost its desktop virtualization portfolio, VMware on Tuesday agreed to acquire application-based virtualization vendor Thinstall.
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International Business Machines Corp.  said on Tuesday that it agreed to buy privately held software maker Vallent Corp. to boost its line of software offerings.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Sun will start selling its lineup of 64-bit PC servers preinstalled with the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft within 90 days, the two companies said today. The two longtime rivals also said they will cooperate on technical development of Microsoft's server operating system on Sun Fire hardware as well as making Sun's Solaris Unix operating system fully manageable under Microsoft's recently introduced System Center Virtual Machine Manager software.                                                     "Management interoperability is part of our management strategy," said Andrew Lees, corporate vice president for the server and tools marketing and solutions group at Microsoft. The moves could help Sun boost sales of its servers, which have been hurting ever since the bursting of the dot-com bubble saw the rise of cheap PC servers running either Linux or Windows. "People who might not have in the past considered a Sun server for Windows will now consider it," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. Sun has been making aggressive partnership moves. IBM said last month that it would sell PC-based servers and blades using Solaris. For Microsoft, the tie-up could help the company compete in the hot virtualization market, where it is No. 2 to market leader VMware. Sun has long had its own virtualization technology, called Solaris Containers. Today's announcement, the companies said, is an expansion of an initial technical cooperation agreement signed in April 2004, during which Microsoft also paid Sun $1.6 billion to settle lingering antitrust and patent disputes. "What we have had has already produced good fruit, but we are looking forward to a significant expansion," Lees said. Sun will also build an interoperability center on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash. The companies will also expand their Internet Protocol television partnership, which involves Microsoft's MediaRoom IPTV and multimedia platform and Sun's server and storage systems. Sun launched its Sun Fire servers two years ago as its first foray into the fast-growing PC server market. The servers run less-expensive but powerful AMD Opteron processors and start at prices of less than $1,000. The Sun Fire servers already support Windows Server, along with Red Hat Linux, Novell's Suse Enterprise Linux, VMware's ESX virtualization system, and Sun's own Solaris operating system, according to Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing at Sun Systems. That allowed customers who had volume-license agreements with Microsoft to send their image DVDs to Sun and have the company preinstall Windows Server, Sieker said. But with this agreement, Sun will now officially be able to ship servers preinstalled with Windows Server to any customer or channel partner, she said. Windows Server will still be unable to run on Sun Fire servers using Sun's own Sparc64 chips, she said. Sun will continue to support and resell Red Hat and Suse Linux on its Sun Fire servers, she said. Future versions of those servers will also use Intel processors. Asked if Sun's latest alliance shows its intent to compete more directly with Linux and VMware, Sieker said, "We are responding to strong customer demand for this.... It's a complex marketplace out there." Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Sun has agreed to purchase Ashburn, Va., IT services company SevenSpace, the companies announced Monday. With the purchase, Sun takes a further step away from its traditional focus on supporting only its Solaris
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Sun Microsystems will gain access to high end open source file system technology with its imminent purchase of Cluster File Systems Inc.
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BREAKING NEWS - Sun Microsystems has become the latest server manufacturer to offer Windows Server operating systems pre-installed on x64 servers, as well as what Sun's EVP John Fowler described this afternoon, during a press conference call, as "the entirety of our server line."
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HOPING to attract more developers worldwide, Sun Microsystems is giving away its latest operating system, Solaris 10, after spending years of development and investing roughly 500 million dollars into the software.
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Veritas Software Corp. (VRTS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , the largest independent US storage software provider, said on Tuesday it will buy e-mail backup company KVault Software Ltd.
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Sun Microsystems Monday expanded its growing managed services business with an agreement to acquire SevenSpace, a small managed services company based in Ashburn, Va.
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Sun on Monday is announcing a deal with S2io Technologies Inc. to integrate drivers for that company&#39;s Xframe 10G-bps Ethernet Adapter into its Solaris operating system for all of its servers, including those