Sunbeam Enters Duopoly in Boston
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By Christina Hoag, The Miami Herald  Sep. 15--Sunbeam enters television duopoly in Boston   The parent company of WSVN-TV Fox 7 snapped up a second TV station in Boston on Thursday in a $113.7 million cash deal.   Miami-based Sunbeam Television Corp.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is reaching for a larger share of the blade server market with Wednesday's launch of new models, including the first-ever Sun blades from its new alliance with chip maker Intel. Sun said the Sun Blade X6250 (starting list price: $3,695) is a two-socket server with dual-core Intel Xeon processors in each socket. It's the first Intel-based Sun server since the two companies announced in January aÂ deal for joint engineering, design, and marketingÂ of Intel's chips and Sun's Solaris operating system. Previously, the only x86 architecture processors Sun used were from Advanced Micro Devices. Sun also unveiled the Sun Blade X6220 ($3,995), a two-socket blade powered by dual-core AMD Opteron processors and the T6300 ($5,995) one-socket blade powered by Sun's own UltraSparc T1 processor. Sun also introduced the Sun Blade 6000 chassis ($4,995), which can hold up to 10 Sun blade servers and provide power, cooling and network connections to them. A user could install any combination of AMD, Intel and Sun-powered blades in one chassis. By offering Sun, AMD, and Intel processors in a blade form factor, "this is the most open and versatile blade platform out on the market," said Mike McNerney, director of Sun's blades server product line. "It is a compelling and interesting proposition." By using Intel inside its blades, Sun can now serve customers who favor the Intel processor platform, said Matthew Eastwood, group vice president for enterprise platform research at IDC. AMD made a good run at Intel with competitive processors in recent years but Intel has re-established itself as the market leader. "I think the biggest advantage for Sun is in the area of credibility in the x86 market. It really shows to enterprise customers that Sun is committed to x86," said Eastwood. Using Intel may also make Sun more competitive with blade server industry leaders Hewlett-Packard and IBM, he said, though they are far ahead in sales. Over the last four quarters, IBM sold $1.136 billionÂ worth of blade servers for a 38.9 percent market share, closely followed by HP's $1.127 billionÂ in revenue for a 38.6 percent market share, according to IDC numbers. Sun ranked fifth with only $100 million in blade revenue for a 3.4 percent share. That gap gives HP an opportunity to criticize Sun's latest news. "Sun is a non-player in blades and has failed to grow any appreciable market share," said Eric Krueger, an HP spokesman, in an e-mail. Noting that HP introduced its c-Class blade servers in mid-2006 at about the same time Sun introduced its SunBlade 8000 line, Krueger added, "HP has enjoyed a rather quick ascension to No. 1 in blade revenues and shipments while Sun owns a very small position of this rapidly growing market." But it's the rapidly growing nature of the blade market that, along with Intel deal, give Sun a chance to improve its share, said Eastwood. IDC forecasts the blade server market to grow to $11.3 billion by 2011 from $3.77 billion in 2007, and for blades to account for 28.8 percent of all server unit sales in 2011, up from 11.3 percent this year. "Sun has a long way to go but there's really no reason why a customer wouldn't consider Sun, particularly a traditional Sun customer or some emerging classes of customers like Web 2.0 companies," he said. "They are not really married to one supplier or another." The Sun-Intel deal also opens another front in Intel's competitive battle with AMD. Every Intel-powered Sun blade sold is a lost sales opportunity for a Sun-AMD blade. But AMD doesn't see it that way. "I suppose you could look at it that way, but if you look at the market it general we're continuing to grow our footprint in the marketplace," said Bruce Shaw, AMD's director of worldwide commercial and enterprise marketing. AMD is scheduled to launch a newÂ quad-core processor, code-named Barcelona, around mid-year.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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A look at the blade platform and switch system that make up Sun's Constellation System, which launched Monday.
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First Boston is also exploring ways to integrate its back office operations with its parent, Credit Suisse, as it seeks to improve the profitability.
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Thin-client Sun Ray product hasn't taken off yet, but Sun hopes subscription pricing will boost its popularity.
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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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Boston Scientific Corp. reported a 69 percent increase in sales and a doubling of earnings for the third quarter. The Natick, Mass.
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Sun MicrosystemsÂ has agreed to purchase Ashburn, Virginia, 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 operating system platform and beefs up its support for competing operating systems like Windows, HP-UX and AIX.
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Seven years after the parent companies of three Eastern Massachusetts electric utilities merged to become NStar Electric, NStar has finally merged the utilities themselves. That will mean a small rate break for old Boston Edison Co. customers, but rate increases of $2 to $4 a month for many Cambridge and Cape Cod customers.
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Taking an innovative approach to the marketing of high-performance  computing, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) is offering its N1 Grid program in a pay-for-use pricing model that mimics the way such commodities as electricity and wireless phone plans are sold.
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By JESSE NOYES  [M]  [B]By JESSE NOYES[M]  Channel 7 owner Sunbeam Television Corp. of Miami yesterday agreed to buy WLVI-TV (Ch. 56) for nearly $114 million, a long- awaited deal that significantly alters the local media landscape.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems says its new UltraSparc T1 microprocessor, nicknamed Niagara, is creating a big splash. Sun was set to report Monday that 60 percent of the trial units of Niagara, an open-source product, have been ordered by new customers. This indicates that the company is gaining market share from rivals such as IBM's Power and Intel's Itanium high-performance microprocessor architectures. Sun isÂ offering NiagaraÂ to the market through its OpenSparc program, in which specifications of the microprocessor are beingÂ shared in an open-source communityÂ with hardware and software developers. Sun has also formed an independent OpenSparc governance board to set the direction and ensure adherence to open-source standards for the UltraSparc T1 platform. The OpenSparc community introduced in July a new Linux distribution, Gentoo Linux, whichÂ supports UltraSparcÂ T1 in the latest release of its open source operating system. Sun introduced UltraSparc T1 in December 2005 and released the chip design code, known as the Register Transfer Language (RTL), in March of this year. Since then, Sun said there have been 3,500 downloads of the RTL and 2,600 downloads of code for designing an application to run on the T1. Fadi Azhari, director of marketing and business development for Sun's OpenSparc program, attributes the strong interest to the T1's capabilities. "It's such a breakthrough in the market in terms of what it delivers," Azhari said. "It has eight-core, 32 threads, which is roughly four to five times more performance than anything else that is out there in the marketplace. That's generated a lot of interest." Among the members of the OpenSparc governance board is Nathan Brookwood, senior analyst with Silicon Valley research firm Insight 64. It is significant to note that Sun is apparently drawing interest from non-Sun customers, Brookwood said. "Sun really had no UltraSparc products that were so compelling that a customer not already in the Sun camp would be motivated to switch," he said. "Niagara [T1] is truly different ... in terms of providing good performance with miserly energy consumption. So if you have a data center that is maxed out on thermal issues but still have more work that needs to be done ... then this is like manna from heaven." Sun's resurgence is evident in second-quarter revenue figures from research company IDC. Sun's server revenue rose by 15.5 percent to $1.6 billion in the second quarter of 2006, from a year earlier. Revenue fell in the same period by 2.2 percent for industry leader IBM and by 1.7 percent for second-place vendor Hewlett-Packard. Although Niagara was new to the market in the second quarter, it should add to the momentum Sun is enjoying, Brookwood said.
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When overseas buyers go shopping for acquisitions in Massachusetts, they often set their sights on the state's innovative high-tech and life sciences start-ups.
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Real Goods Solar gets ready to join the mix.
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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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Firm is in hot seat for selling subprime securities to a Massachusetts city.
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The weather was sunny and warm, and the Boston Red Sox were in town for Game 1 of the American League Championship Series to play the New York Yankees -- arguably the greatest rivalry in sports history.