Sun Sets Sights on Low-End Market
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After years of battling Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. has set its sights on Linux vendors, seeking to jump into a low-end but high-volume market it's been accused of ignoring.
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Besides unleashing Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to turn the spotlight on new storage hardware and software offerings as part of its quarterly product launch.
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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.
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Once, twice, three times a lady Contrary to public perception, Sun Microsystems does want to play in the mainstream blade server market.â¦
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Sun Microsystems went to Wall Street today, hoping to convince prized financial services customers that it still matters, has speedy kit on the way and unique pricing.
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Sun's services business did well, but sales of servers and storage wares went down.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. intends to pull off a 1-for-4 reverse stock split to boost its share price and improve perceptions of the computing company's recent turnaround, its top two executives told analysts Wednesday.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. is on track to meet its financial targets for the 2008 and 2009 fiscal years, fueled by strong sales growth in emerging markets and a shift toward more expensive server and storage setups, the company's chief financial officer said Tuesday.
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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.
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Struggling company set to show that it's grabbed some customers in the financial community, one of Sun's three chief markets.
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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;
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Sun is getting into the open-source business with Solaris, but will this automatically translate into better sales?
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While low-priced stocks can be cheap for a reason, they might also be overlooked opportunities.
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Sun Microsystems wants to distinguish its future servers by fitting them with new chips that get their jobs done more efficiently.
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Software giant's deal with Sun has raised some questions.
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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.
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Sun Microsystems is exploring a margin-negative model for hardware in order to win more business and solution providers should be preparing for that scenario, said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun president and COO.