Sun executive talks up NAS strategy
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Sun Microsystems is planning to beef up its network-attached storage product line with support for utility computing and its new zettabyte file system, according to Balint Fleischer, vice president and CTO of the network storage products group
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SAN FRANCISCO - Sun Microsystems on Monday will update its Sun Ray platform with new workstations and server software that company executives believe will give the thin client devices a foothold among home users.
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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
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The job of linking products from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft is "more complicated" than envisioned, Sun's CEO says.
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(InfoWorld) - Larry Singer, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s advocate for its leading partners and customers and sometime colorful public mouthpiece of the company, will leave his job by Sept. 22. Sun gave no reason for his departure. Sun is evaluating filling his position, while in the interim customer advocate responsibilities will be shared by all of Sun's executives. Singer joined Sun in early 2003 as senior vice president of global market strategies and held a number of similar titles at the company, including vice president of global information systems strategy and strategic insights officer. His main role was to develop and implement programs to more tightly integrate Sun's product, services and marketing teams with field sales operations and customers. Singer also headed Sun's competitive office, often providing pithy comments on the vendor's computer and chip rivals. Before joining Sun, Singer was chief information officer of the State of Georgia where he headed the Georgia Technology Authority. He'd previously held positions with Texas Instruments Inc. and CA Inc. There's been plenty of movement among Sun executives this year, as some former managers like Rich Green and Peder Ulander have returned to the company and others including Mark Canepa and John Loiacono have headed out. Jonathan Schwartz recently celebrated his first 100 days in his new role as Sun's chief executive officer after Scott McNealy, the long-time holder of that role, stepped down in April. One of Schwartz's first moves as Sun CEO was an executive shake-up around the heads of the vendor's server and storage businesses. His next major decision was to commit to cut as many as 5,000 jobs at the company in Sun's latest restructuring plan designed to return the vendor to profitability.
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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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(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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(InfoWorld) - A Sun Microsystems executive said the $13 billion technology company should be able to handle a possible slowdown in information technology (IT) spending better than some of its larger rivals. John Fowler, senior vice president of Sun's Systems Group, which sells servers and related products, responded Tuesday to a research report forecasting slower growth for global IT spending in 2007. Forrester ResearchÂ forecasts worldwide spending on IT goods and services to grow by only 5 percent next year, after two consecutive years of 8 percent growth. Forrester said 5 percent would be the weakest growth rate since 2003. Fowler, in an interview with technology reporters, said larger rivals such as Hewlett-Packard, which finished its fiscal year with $91.7 billion in revenue, IBM, forecast to make $90.72 billion, and Dell, $58 billion, are more vulnerable to macroeconomic conditions than the smaller Sun. "We can, in a weaker market, gain ground in market share by virtue of product and execution, which is what has been happening," Fowler said. He noted that when the worldwide server market grew by just 0.6 percent in the second quarter of this year, Sun's revenue grew by 15.5 percent, according to a report from the research firm IDC. In the third quarter, when the server market grew only 3.5 percent, Sun's revenue grew 15.8 percent. "You have to pay attention to macroeconomics but...if you were a $60 to $70 billion company, the macroeconomics affect you [more] dramatically," Fowler said. However, Sun's server shares have been in the low double digits and the company has been reporting net losses in recent quarterly reports. Forrester said sales in the U.S., in particular, will be weak as chief information officers at companies reduce spending in the coming year. "This is a caution flag for IT vendors, 2007 will be a challenging environment," said Andrew Bartels, vice president of Forrester Research, in a prepared statement.
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My punchline is better than theirs Rich Green, Sun Microsystems' new software chief, thinks his rivals are "hung up" on service oriented architectures (SOA), and are failing to grasp the bigger picture.â¦
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Sun Microsystems is readying an upgrade to its enterprise-level application server and is touting new downloading figures as evidence of the companyâs growing presence in the application server market.
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NEW YORK -- Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) President and COO Jonathan Schwartz declared war on Red Hat Linux on Intel-based x86 machines in an attempt to woo financial services customers.
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When Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) President and COO Jonathan Schwartz made his pitch to financial services customers at an event in New York Tuesday, he provoked a lot of discussion among the analyst community.
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Adoption of the Solaris 10 OS is key to Sun's future success, CEO Schwartz says.
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From the Department of Dualing Rhetoric: In his story regarding the launch of two new IBM pSeries servers, News.com&#39;s Stephen Shankland quotes IBM Unix vice president Karl Freund as saying &quot;Our goal is to beat Sun and perhaps become the No.
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OTTAWA -- A local firm that says it can help shrink backup times at large data centres is growing its business thanks to an alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc.
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Also: Sun CEO among the few chiefs who blog
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Almost lost in the clamor over Sun's expanded partnership with Microsoft on Wednesday was a small acquisition that will bolster Sun's HPC storage offerings. Sun agreed to acquire a majority of the assets of Cluster File Systems.