CEO: Sun's Growth is Solaris
452233
Adoption of the Solaris 10 OS is key to Sun's future success, CEO Schwartz says.
176590
Sun Microsystems plans to beef up its NAS (network-attached storage) product line with support for utility computing and its new zettabyte file system (ZFS), according to an executive of the company's network storage products group.
430194
Analysis: Sun broadens its open source stake, while MySQL enjoys Sun's standing and budget.
531356
Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.It&#39;s a strategy Sun started several years ago with a free version of its application server and that it has accelerated with such products&#160;as StarOffice, OpenSolaris, its Open xVM virtualization software, and, most recently,&#160;its acquisition of the open-source database vendor MySQL.The free software allows Sun to build communities of developers who will do pilot projects with its software and may eventually buy licenses for commercial deployment, or buy professional services to support critical applications, CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz said at the company&#39;s press day Wednesday. He called Sun&#39;s software a &quot;media asset&quot; for building communities.&quot;These are no longer simply software products, these are media properties -- networks around which communities are being built, [and] this is a means for Sun to talk to a very large developer community,&quot; he said.He put up a slide that showed a map of the world covered in pink dots. Each dot represented a download of Solaris, he said, and hence an opportunity for Sun to start a dialogue with IT people that could lead to a sale of its services and hardware.&quot;Not all customers will pay for these products before they use them -- very few will, actually,&quot; he admitted. But they all buy servers and storage on which to run the software, and the download gives Sun a foot in the door to try to capture that sale.&quot;The reason MySQL was interesting to us is it puts 50,000 new dots on that map every day, and from the community, market opportunities will emerge,&quot; Schwartz said.Sun&#39;s growth is important to customers. Its revenue funds its research and development efforts, and customers want to know there is a big community of specialists in Sun products to support their businesses.Analysts are divided about the strategy. At Sun&#39;s financial analyst conference last week, Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said he found it hard to see a link between software downloads and Sun&#39;s revenue growth.&quot;If you were to plot a chart showing revenue growth over the last 12 quarters and Solaris downloads, there would really be no correlation at all,&quot; Sacconaghi said.&quot;Oh, I think there would be an exceptional correlation,&quot; Schwartz replied. &quot;If you had shut those downloads off three years ago, our revenue would have been declining double-digit.&quot;He reiterated the point Wednesday. Sun&#39;s strongest growth period came in the late 1990s and was preceded by wide use of its software in universities, he said. Today, the growth of Sun&#39;s Niagara servers has been driven by making Solaris open source, Schwartz said.Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said there probably is a connection between Sun&#39;s free and open-source software strategy and its revenue growth, but even if there is not, the strategy is helping the company, he said.&quot;Even if you can&#39;t say that each pink dot equals $372, I think the things Sun has been doing with open source and OpenSolaris and Java and so forth have translated into improved relevancy and an improved perception of Sun, and at some level, logic suggests that this played a role in their improved financial picture.&quot;
417667
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
369371
Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said on Monday.
416908
Microsoft&#39;s (Quote, Chart) dominance on the desktop may turn out to be Sun Microsystems&#39; (Quote, Chart) gain in the end. A letter to Sun Microsystems&#39; COO Jonathan Schwartz by the European Commission (EC) this
381083
SUN&#39;S NEW number two, Jonathan Schwartz, has seen a 56 percent boost in his salary over the last year and is getting paid nearly seven times more than his boss Chief Executive Scott McNealy.
178479
For Sun CEO Scott McNealy, subscription-based pricing is the most interesting part of Sun s business moving forward. He claims that the model works.
441412
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.Called the largest open source software deal ever, the merger makes Sun the owner of a critical part of the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) open source software stack. Sun already has been offering up its own software to open source, even basing its development tools strategy on the open source NetBeans platform."MySQL is an important part of the LAMP stack, [and] has grown to be enterprise-ready technology used by large organizations, and Sun is now a major player in the LAMP stack," said Raven Zachary, analyst with The 451 Group. MySQL customers get the benefit of a larger support organization, Zachary said.Sun, meanwhile, will push MySQL as enterprise-ready technology and as an alternative to proprietary databases like Oracle, he said. "I think Sun has really been struggling in building a software revenue stream around its open source projects, and I think for them to take on MySQL, now they have a very successful revenue stream around an open source software [stack] that was lacking before," said Zachary.The deal was applauded by open source CRM vendor SugarCRM, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) tools vendor Zend Technologies, and SpringSource, makers of the open source Spring Framework for Java development."I think it's an incredibly smart move by Sun and Jonathan Schwartz," said SugarCRM CEO John Roberts. While Roberts said he had been looking forward to an IPO by MySQL, the deal nonetheless makes sense. Sun, Roberts said, gets a mission-critical database that is "probably the most widely used database on the planet today."Zend and SpringSource had similar impressions."I think open source has gone mainstream," and Sun has put its stamp on it, said Zend CEO Harold Goldberg. "We think it's a great day for open source, and we think it's a great day for the LAMP stack.""The acquisition of MySQL by Sun marks one of the most significant recognitions of the importance and power of open source as a disruptive force in technology," said SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson in his blog.Sun heralded the deal as its entrance into the database market and will offer global support offerings for MySQL. "We're announcing we're entering the $15 billion database business," said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on a conference call with MySQL and Sun executives.By Sun's acquisition, MySQL overcomes its biggest impediment: Ensuring peace of mind to a global company that wants to put MySQL into a mission-critical deployment, Schwartz said. "It?s very clear to us that that is what our customers have come to expect from Sun," he said. "We believe there are synergies in putting the two companies together that will allow MySQL to grow more rapidly and allow Sun to grow more rapidly."New customers for both MySQL and Sun MySQL has been extending into mission-critical, high performance environments in the last couple of years, said Marten Mickos, who has been MySQL CEO and will become a senior vice president at Sun. "With this acquisition by Sun, we'll be able to offer those customers even better service, a full stack and at the same time heterogeneous solutions running on a number of platforms with a number of environments," Mickos said. "It strengthens our ability to serve our existing customers and very importantly serve the new customers coming over as enterprises move over to Web-based architectures in their enterprise infrastructure."The acquisition complements Sun technology, said Ian Murdock, chief OS strategist at Sun in a separate interview. "If you think about the two companies together in terms of technology offerings and technology basis, it's very complementary," he said. Sun is in the enterprise and has a substantial Web presence, while MySQL has a substantial Web presence and is entering the enterprise, Murdock said.The MySQL database runs on several platforms, including Linux and Sun's Solaris. MySQL does not see the database market, though, as saturated. "One of the things that's always been exciting about MySQL is we're really going after a new market of database users," with success in the Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and SaaS (software as a service) spaces, said Zack Urlocker, MySQL executive vice president of products. Sun and MySQL also have joint customers such as eBay, he said."I think putting the two companies together, both in terms of what Sun can do to accelerate MySQL adoption and what MySQL can do to accelerate Sun's position in the Web space is going to be very interesting to watch," Murdock said. "This allows us to reach into new markets and have conversations with enormous numbers of developers and startups and other companies that are using MySQL in droves," he said, also pointing out that Sun could sell its workstations and servers to these users.Although Sun has been involved in the development of the rival open source database, PostgreSQL, Schwartz said Sun was reaffirming its commitment to PostgreSQL. "We are firmly committed to figuring out the ways we can optimize and integrate innovations across the two communities. Between MySQL and PostgreSQL, we probably have a large portion of the market covered," said Schwartz.Sun's Josh Berkus is the lead on the PostgreSQL project. Berkus said Sun would continue to accommodate multiple databases.The idea of Sun buying MySQL was born out of a dinner between Schwartz and Mickos a few months ago, Urlocker said. Although MySQL had been on a track to deliver an IPO, the chance to become part of Sun "became just too exciting for us," he said. "This enables us to accelerate our growth onto a much larger kind of platform in the industry."MySQL will become part of Sun as part of the deal, which is expected to be completed in about two months. MySQL products likely will continue to be offered via the same open source subscription strategy.
438777
Is an older Sun a mellower Sun? Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystemsâ chairman and CEO, said at a press conference this week to introduce the companyâs Solaris 10 operating system that heâd just turned 50 over the weekend.
41787
Software giant's deal with Sun has raised some questions.
447752
Sun Microsystems Inc., which turned a rare profit last quarter, is on track to reach its previously stated goal of a 4 percent operating profit margin by the end of the fiscal year, the company's chief financial officer said Tuesday.
167157
(InfoWorld) - Open-source database vendor Greenplum had cause for celebration Tuesday, announcing both $15 million in venture capital financing and the appointment of a new CEO. The startup named Sun veteran Bill Cook as its new head. He spent 19 years at Sun and held a variety of positions there, including, most recently, a three-year stint as senior vice president of sales. After leaving Sun, Cook took on a similar role in heading up sales and services at Linux hardware and clustering company Penguin Computing. In August 2006, Greenplum announced a partnership with Sun to develop dedicated data warehousing appliances using the startup's database and the Sun Fire X4500 hardware server running Sun's Solaris operating system. Tuesday, the two companies unveiled their first customer for the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance, Smart Communications, the leading wireless service provider in the Philippines. Greenplum has developed its commercial open-source databases based on the open-source PostgreSQL databaseÂ and hasÂ aimed at users of data warehousing software and Bizgres to support BI applications. Sierra Ventures led the $15 million financing round in Greenplum. Three previous investors in the startup, venture capital companies Mission Ventures, Dawntreader Ventures, and EDF Ventures, also contributed. Greenplum will additionally benefit from the $4 million line of credit that Comerica Bank is making available to the company, the vendor said. Greenplum, which is based in San Mateo, California, plans to use the funds to continue development of its database as well as to expand its sales and marketing efforts around the world. That expansion is already underway with Greenplum on Tuesday also announcing the establishment of its Asia-Pacific regional headquarters in Singapore under the leadership of former NetezzaÂ executive Vinay Samuel. Netezza is a player in the data warehousing appliance market. Â
207857
InfoWorld - Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.
192457
Blog: Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz had something surprising to say about company management.
207169
When Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) Chairman and CEO Scott G. McNealy took the stage at a shindig in San Jose&#39;s Tech Museum of Innovation on Nov. 15, he unveiled the most important product to come out of his company in nearly a decade.