Analysis: Sun&#8217;s billion-dollar baby
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If you had any doubts about Sun Microsystems? commitment to open source, it?s time to set them aside. Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping $1 billion. If the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?Sun has toyed with the idea of a database offering of its own for at least two years. But in a market where basic relational database functionality is increasingly considered a commodity, competing successfully is no mean feat, even when playing the open source card.Certainly, Sun isn?t the first to try it. In 2001, leading Linux vendor Red Hat launched its own branded version of the open source PostgreSQL database, only to scrap the project a year later after deciding that servicing and supporting a database was not its core competency. Similarly, Computer Associates opened the source of the Ingres database in hopes of becoming a one-stop shop for customers in need of an enterprise application stack, but had little luck winning market share away from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. CA spun Ingres off into its own company in 2005, where it continues to nurture a small installed base.In his blog announcing the MySQL acquisition Wednesday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains characteristically effusive. ?Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the Internet,? he wrote. ?No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS.?Yet CA?s and Red Hat?s experiences seem to discredit the idea that a stem-to-stern platform offering from a single vendor is what customers really want. Not to mention the fact that Sun already offers enterprise support for PostgreSQL, a competing open source database that is widely perceived as being technologically superior to MySQL. Schwartz reaffirmed Sun?s commitment to PostgreSQL in a conference call Wednesday, causing some analysts to speculate whether the MySQL acquisition was anything more than a billion-dollar PR stunt.But there may be method to Sun?s madness. The considerable goodwill that MySQL has cultivated among enterprise customers could have benefits for Sun that technology alone never could.?I think the answer is simple: ubiquity,? says Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, which markets a high-performance, commercial database product based on PostgreSQL. ?[Sun is] a big company; to move their needle, they need to see millions of potential users, which MySQL provides.?According to MySQL?s own estimates, there are already some 11 million active installations of the MySQL database worldwide. What?s more, MySQL is virtually the de facto standard relational database for rapid application development, particularly for the Web. In future, as these fledgling sites mature and their needs broaden, they will become natural customers for Sun?s enterprise support offerings.Sun?s new role as steward of MySQL is sure to ruffle feathers in the software industry, as well -- particularly at Oracle, which, with its recent acquisitions, increasingly competes with Sun in the enterprise application platform arena. In 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, makers of a plug-in component that adds advanced features to MySQL, in what was widely perceived as a competitive swipe at the open source upstart.For his part, MySQL CEO M?rten Mickos has repeatedly denied that his company?s aim is to displace high-end databases such as Oracle?s. And that?s only appropriate; for those customers who demand Oracle?s most advanced features, no other product will do. But Mickos? protestations verge on false modesty. On the low end, MySQL is an absolute pandemic, and it?s already making headway into the mid-tier territory traditionally owned by the likes of Microsoft. That trend is only likely to accelerate with Sun?s backing.What is unclear, however, is whether Sun will take any steps to alter MySQL?s license terms. Licensing and project governance have played key roles in MySQL?s success, and as a result, MySQL?s license policy is somewhat more restrictive than the one that Sun has used for the rest of its software portfolio.Although all MySQL code is available under the GNU GPL (General Public License), the product is developed primarily by full-time employees of MySQL. Furthermore, the MySQL company requests that community developers sign over copyright to their code contributions to the company before those changes become part of the main MySQL code base. This allows the company to offer a separate, commercial version of its database for enterprise customers who don?t want to be bound by the terms of the GPL. Initially, this license structure was used mainly to allow companies to embed the MySQL database into their own products, but the MySQL company was criticized last year for making it more difficult for non-paying customers to download the enterprise version of the database.By comparison, Sun has been freer with its own code, foregoing separate, commercial versions of its products in favor of a subscription-based enterprise support scheme. PostgreSQL is arguably even more free; it is governed in a much more distributed, community-based fashion than MySQL, and its permissive license even allows proprietary derivatives, such as EnterpriseDB.Ironically, however, MySQL?s stringent intellectual property policy may be precisely what makes it so appealing to Sun. Red Hat Database and Sun?s own version of PostgreSQL were merely different retoolings of an existing open source software product, one that customers could just as easily download from elsewhere. To the enterprise IT community at large, however, there?s really only one MySQL -- and from now on, that name will be indelibly associated with Sun. Remember, for all Sun?s talk about open source, this is a company that banks so heavily on its trademarks that it had its stock ticker symbol changed to JAVA.Ah, but there?s the rub. Sun open-sourced the Java platform in 2006, and while the move has been widely hailed by developers, not everyone in the business community was as thrilled with the idea of Sun giving away its crown jewels. As former Sun vice president Larry Singer put it, ?We [at Sun] were spending all of our time and attention ? on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint, [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company.?So far, MySQL has built a solid business selling open source database software. Whether Sun has the strategic acumen to take that success to the next level, however, remains to be seen. But stay tuned; after all, $1 billion gives Sun a hell of an incentive.
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A new solar breakthrough could expand a subsidiary's business.
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BIG TIN firm Sun is planning a brave new world where computing power is sold as a commodity and spare capacity is flogged off to other companies.
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InfoWorld - With Sun Microsystems' $1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.
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news analysis Microsoft and Sun Microsystems may be going steady, but they aren&#39;t quite sure where the relationship is headed.
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DECEMBER 06, 2004  - The progress report that Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. issued last week on their joint initiatives left some IT managers and analysts wondering when or if the
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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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Hefty valuations = a bet on the future.  That future is clearly open source + SaaS, based on the multiples people are willing to pay.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM's Blue Gene, courtesy of a $59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design. The design provides 21 million flops (floating-point operations per second), potentially reaching 2 petaflops (Pflops). IBM already has a 3-Pflop version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the No. 2 spot. Sun's Constellation will be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center along with other supercomputers and is a Linux cluster system, to be known as Ranger. It will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD's forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately, there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores. The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB per second, and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire. The benefit of a big switch is that interswitch cables -- needed if smaller switches were used -- can be dispensed with, saving a lot of money as it's cheaper to build one big switch than link several smaller switches. Six times fewer cables are needed, in fact. Sun also said that the processors get a standard latency for data access this way. It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores. Sun estimates that Constellation could scale to a 2-Pflop system with 1 exabyte of disk capacity. It isn't enough to keep IBM at bay, though. IBM has announced Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer. Also a Linux cluster, it nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L, while remaining, according to IBM, the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. It is designed to run continuously at speeds faster than 1 Pflop and could be configured to reach 3 Pflops. IBM suggests that a home user would need a 1.5-mile-high pile of laptops to have the equivalent of 1 Pflop of computing power. Dave Turek, IBM's deep computing vice president, said, "We see commercial interest in Blue Gene developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle -- from government labs to leading enterprises -- that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market." IBM said Blue Gene/P is a green supercomputer, being at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer. Its design uses many small low-power chips, each connected through five specialized networks inside the system. Blue Gene/L uses dual-core 700MHz chips. Blue Gene/P has four 850MHz PowerPC 450 processors integrated on a single chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A 2-by-2-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors. Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the 6-foot-high racks, meaning 4,096 cores per rack -- far denser than Sun's core count per rack. The 1-Pflop Blue Gene/P configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical -- not InfiniBand -- network. A new SMP mode supports multithreaded applications. The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., will deploy the first Blue Gene/P in the United States beginning later this year. In Germany, the Max Planck Society and Forschungszentrum Julich also plan to begin installing Blue Gene/P systems in late 2007. Additional Blue Gene/P rollouts are being planned by Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England.
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Sun Microsystems to plunk down about $1 billion for one of the most successful open-source software companies.
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Credit Suisse First Boston raised estimates and the target price on Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) after the company broke even on per-share, pro forma basis for the fiscal first quarter.
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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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BusinessWeek Online - Tech industry mavens had their doubts about Jonathan I. Schwartz when he was promoted to chief executive of Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW - News) in April, replacing longtime CEO Scott McNealy. There was the ponytail, which helps Schwartz look a lot younger than his 40 years. He also has a brash style that seemed to be out of sync with Sun's grim realities. Did this Web 2.0 CEO have enough gravitas to run a struggling computer company?
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(InfoWorld) - Calling your shot. Thatâs the phrase in baseball when a batter points his or her bat to a section of the park, then proceeds to hit a home run to that very spot. Babe Ruth is rumored to have done it once in the 1932 World Series. But even that feat is in doubt. Suffice it to say that calling your shot in a fluky game such as baseball, with its rotating spheres and cylindrical bats, is almost impossible. Rather than call the shot, why not just wave your bat around as you step up to the plate, pointing to every part of the outfield, then try to hit a home run that just goes somewhere? In our last issue of 2006, with the new year closing in, thatâs the approach weâve decided to take: bringing you five, bold, Babe Ruth-quality predictions of things we think will happen sometime in the next 12 months. The prodigal Sun returns Itâs no secret that Sun Microsystems has seen better days. Once the darling of the dot-com set, Sunâs stock now trades for less than one-tenth of its peak price in September 2000. Its product portfolio is virtually bursting at the seams with great technology, and yet analysts and the media alike have repeatedly taken it to task for its apparent failure to capitalize on its assets. Donât count Sun out yet, though. If it plays its cards right, 2007 could be the year it sees its fortunes reverse, emerging as the new champion of open source software in the enterprise. Sun may have started the climb back to the top with its decision, after years of equivocation, to commit to the process of opening its flagship Java platform under the GNU GPL (General Public License). That announcement in November was barely heard amid the noise of megadeals such as Red Hatâs purchase of JBoss or Microsoftâs partnership with Novell. But Sunâs commitment to community development is unquestionable. Look for the company to continue to spread its message with an aggressive public relations campaign in 2007, including vocal participation in major standards bodies and open source communities. Partnerships seem likely, also. A renewed relationship with IBM could bolster the perception of Sun in corporate boardrooms, making 2007 the year that Sun rises (again) to prominence as one of the IT greats. â Neil McAllister Mean, not green, tech Change swept through all sectors of the nuts-and-bolts world. Intelâs introduction of its Core microarchitecture CPUs and related logic sounded the death knell for Pentium 4 Netburst and knocked down the brick wall that blocked Intelâs road map. Unlike Netburst, Core microarchitecture can grow, and it already has: Before the end of the year, Intel beat AMD to market with a quad-core CPU and platform nicknamed Kentsfield. It gave Intel bragging rights, but also signaled that Intel is taking the performance desktop market seriously. AMD and Intel are competing in the performance-per-watt arena, but they know that there are users who need or want to sacrifice green computing for mean computing. AMDâs dual socket Quad FX (4x4) platform aims at the same market, but with Athlon 64 FX CPUs. By mid-2007, 64-bit quad-core CPUs will be the de facto standard for x86 desktop and server computers. A sub-$5,000 two-socket workstation or server will sport a mind-boggling eight processor cores. Intel engineered its dual core per socket Woodcrest server/workstation CPU to allow a four core per socket upgrade with nothing but a chip swap. AMD has done the same with Opteron and Athlon 64 FX systems built after Revision F. AMDâs capacity to expand Opteron systems to eight sockets means that in 2007, IT can buy 32-way servers for the price it once paid for four-way servers. Talk about consolidation! â Tom Yager Salesforce goes to India Offshoring will meet SaaS (software as a service) in a battle of the low-cost service giants in 2007. Among other developments, SaaS giant Salesforce.com will be stung early in the year by a major offshore outsourcer whose prices will be cheaper and services even greater than what Salesforce.com and its AppExchange minions can offer. Salesforce will counter with the announcement that it is building major hosting sites in India, Russia, and Botswana. The bottom line here is that as SaaS grows in importance, offshoring becomes an easier decision. After all, if the service is being hosted anyway, what does it matter where it is located? What will foster the growth of SaaS delivered solutions? Compliance. A recent Forrester study predicts one compliance issue alone, e-discovery, will be a $4.8 billion industry by 2011, due to the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. SaaS providers will take the lionâs share of that. In short, compliance regulations will be backing up like a plugged drain pipe onto the IT floor, and companies looking to have someone clean up the mess and manage these issues will turn to hosted solutions such as SaaS. Other trends will also play a part in SaaSâs growth this year. A Gartner study written by Allie Young says that byÂ  2008, more than 70 percent of utility offerings will be targeted toward business units or line managers rather than IT organizations, with more than 30 percent of new software purchasing delivered in the utility model. If Gartnerâs right, that trend will mean a serious degrading of IT influence in the enterprise in the near future. âEphraim Schwartz Cisco buys AV smarts Successfully predicting that Cisco Systems will buy a security firm isnât much of a feat. The networking giant, based in San Jose, Calif., averaged almost an acquisition a month in 2004 and 2005 â a good number of them security firms. Itâs a good bet that 2007 will bring news of more security buys. Iâm guessing that one of those will be an anti-virus software firm. Why anti-virus? First, Cisco needs what an anti-virus firm has to offer. The vision of a âSelf Defending Networkâ that integrates security intelligence with Ciscoâs core switching and routing gear is key to Ciscoâs future. Up till now, the Self Defending Network vision finds its best expression in Ciscoâs Network Admission Control (NAC) program, which allows firms to vet the security posture of hosts attempting to connect to LANs or WANs. But client-screening isnât a silver bullet, as became clear at this yearâs Black Hat conference, when security researchersÂ  showed how hackers could use spoofed MAC and IP addresses to pose as known systems on networks, and others postulated that rootkits could be used to manipulate reports from third-party security products. Those kinds of threats mean that Cisco will need to own the researchers, malware signature databases, and next-generation security IP to spot threats, not rent them. Software- based AV and threat intelligence can then become a service consumed by its increasingly service-oriented networking architecture.Â  â Paul F. Roberts New Java, same as the old A year from now, what exactly will be the impact of an open source Java? Iâm betting that by Christmastime 2007, people will not have noticed much difference at all. In fact, the Java open sourcing might parrot the Year 2000 switch: much talked about and much feared by some, but in the end, it registered a resounding thud and life went on as it always had. After all, Java in its so-called closed implementation already had spawned open source projects ranging from the Spring Framework to Apache Jakarta and the Eclipse project. Open source Java application server vendor JBoss also built quite a business model without needing an open source Java. So, in 2007 we might have to look to the Microsoft camp for excitement in the application development space, because Javaâs big splash wonât amount to much. â Paul Krill Mashups Meet SOA Some predict the trend of big software companies devouring small pure plays will continue to dominate the SOA scene in 2007, but that reasoning is faulty â mainly because there are so few independents left to buy. The real action in SOA will be on the ground, not among vendors, as more and more IT organizations embrace mashups. Are enterprise mashups really SOA? Absolutely, provided the services available for mashups are properly provisioned and managed, and if services inside the firewall map to an organization's business processes. Some of the most successful SOA initiatives line up services on one side and AJAX clients on the other -- and that's it. No nasty complicated orchestration or heavy duty middleware. Just useful apps that can be programmed in a matter of weeks or even days. If the selection of services for enterprise mashups is more ad hoc, that may not fit the canonical definition of SOA, but so what? The great thing about mashups is that they offer a shortcut to the value SOA is supposed to deliver -- lightweight, quick-to-market apps that leverage existing assets. Will some mashups be toylike or brittle? Sure. But nothing convinces skeptics of the power of SOA faster than, say, a glitzy Google maps app mashed up with internal sales data. The long tail of mashups may also wag the dog of governance, the details of which constitute the biggest obstacle to SOA adoption. Governance -- that is, the development and enforcement of policies for building and running an SOA â entails the creation and maintenance of design-time and runtime policies for services. Governance is the biggest hump to get over, because it demands a big chunk of everyone's bandwidth. And it also carries a risk that too many locked-down rules, policies, and procedures will kill SOA's highly touted agility. By default, mashups tend to involve services that are content-based rather than transaction-based, which means governance policies can and should be tolerant. In 2007, enterprises that indulge in mashups will realize that such services constitute their own service class -- and deserve their own lightweight set of rules. At the other end of the spectrum, the closer you get to transactions, the more you need to screw down the rules -- and the fewer people should gain access them. In other words, mashups will drive services classification, which may not be a panacea, but will certainly help sort out the governance mess. And looser rules for content-based services will ensure that many parties across the organization start reaping the benefits of SOA sooner rather than later. â Eric Knorr
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One of the principal products in the LAMP open source arsenal will become a Sun Microsystems product, possibly by the end of this quarter.
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Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) said it broke even for the fiscal first quarter, topping analysts&#39; estimates.
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Sun&#39;s COO Jonathan Schwartz has outlined a new direction for his company in the form of a cycle farm. Such a farm would rent out CPU time by the hour for a nominal charge - 99 cents for the use of a dual CPU