Schwartz, Sun reach out to customers
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems Inc. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and President Jonathan Schwartz made it clear Wednesday what kind of customers his company hopes to lure now that long-troubled Sun finally appears to be in the middle of an upswing. "There are two customers we see [in the market]," Schwartz said, speaking at a Sun product launch event in New York. "Customers that look at information technology as a competitive weapon, and those that look at information technology as a cost center. We're obsessed with and focused on the former." Calling New York the "epicenter for those kind of customers" because of the technology-savvy financial services firms and media companies that have headquarters there, Schwartz outlined some of the positives for his company since he assumed the CEO position a little over 100 days ago. While his first 100 days "honeymoon is over," according to Schwartz, Sun is just beginning to see the fruits of a comeback strategy it's been crafting since it took the dot.com bust on the chin in 2001. The company seems to be finally climbing -- albeit slowly -- out of its unprofitable rut, and has shown promising revenue growth over the last couple of quarters as it cut costs by shedding employees. Schwartz said the company even expects to achieve sustainable profitability by its fiscal fourth quarter, which ends June 30, 2007. Schwartz had little new to report about the company's overall strategy, although Sun Wednesday launched some storage and server products -- and one, called "Thumper," that is a hybrid of the two. In a message he's been trumpeting for years, the new CEO continued to stress Sun's commitment to offering a mix of hardware systems, software, storage and services, and helping customers combine those products in heterogeneous IT environments so Sun's products run seamlessly alongside competitive offerings. Schwartz pointed to the success of Sun's open-source version of its Solaris OS as proof that Sun is happy to play well with others if it means winning customers. He said since the company open sourced Solaris last year, nearly 70 percent of its implementations have been on competing hardware from IBM Corp., Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., not Sun's own servers. Sun to date has distributed nearly 6 million licenses for OpenSolaris, Schwartz added. One analyst who attended Wednesday's event said it was not meant to be a new product-driven launch. Instead, said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata, the event was to show that Sun's investment in open source and new products over the past several years, including its early adoption of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron chips for its Galaxy server line, is finally beginning to pay off. Sun Wednesday sent a message that it's on the right path now and has something compelling to offer customers who shied away from it since it hit hard times, he said. "This is a drumbeat event," Eunice said. "This was not about the product pipeline, but about customer connections. [This is Sun saying], 'We continue to do the work, continue to get back with quality customers.'" Sun's announcement Wednesday that it has renewed its relationship with systems integrator Accenture Ltd., which is setting up an identity management practice on Sun's technology, is particularly important to reaching new customers or some it has lost since its downturn, Eunice said. "It's a very critical way for Sun to get new business and revenue," he said of the Accenture deal.
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SAN FRANCISCO - As Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. ready an early December unveiling of the first step in their highly publicized technology collaboration, industry observers are questioning whether the former foes will fail to address industry standards, particularly the work being done by the Sun-backed Liberty Alliance consortium.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Datacomm White PaperFind out how Crate & Barrel expects to save $180,000 by moving to VoIP, compared to a traditional PBX.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems, buoyed by its first profitable quarter in more than a year and a half, said Tuesday it has a goal of generating an operating margin of 10 percent by its 2009 fiscal year. Sun executives set the goal, though they cautioned that a lot of things have to happen in order to reach it, during a conference with analysts Tuesday in San Francisco. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said increased adoption of Sun's freely-distributed Solaris operating system,Â its recently announced partnership with Intel, and other strategic moves, will help it grow revenue. At the same time, said Sun CFO Michael Lehman, the company will continue to reduce its cost structure using a number of levers, though not employee layoffs. "Our cost structure is still too high," Lehman said, "but we do not intend to have a big layoff and just lower the numbers." The company is going to reduce general and administrative expenses and research and development spending as a percentage of revenue so that those expenses provide a better return, he said. For example, Sun is converting its own business software infrastructure to standardize on Oracle's 11i bundle of enterprise resource planning software, including general ledger, payroll, andÂ CRM software. The conversion is expected to cost more than $200 million, Lehman said, but it will save Sun the expense of having to manage 1,000 different types of software throughout its company. "We have put a stake in the ground, and we are on a journey," Lehman said. Sun posted net income of $126 million, or $0.03 per share, on $3.566 billion in revenue, in its fiscal 2007 second quarter ended Dec. 31, 2006. It was Sun's first profitable quarter after five successive quarterly losses. Sun recorded an operating margin of 2.9 percent in the second quarter and forecasts a 4 percent operating margin in its fourth quarter. On the revenue side, Schwartz said the company's decision to give away its Solaris operating system and open source its Java software create opportunities for Sun to sell hardware and services to those users. Sun's recently announced deal with Intel to install Intel processors in its servers, while Intel markets Solaris, will also create new sales opportunities. "We are now fully outfitted to pursue 100 percent of the market. There is no opportunity that we are precluded from bidding on. There is no customer that we cannot serve," Schwartz said. Sun's turnaround strategy is finally showing up in its financials, said Nathan Brookwood, an industry analyst with Insight 64, a research firm. "You had to take it on faith a year ago." Sun previously only sold servers and workstations running its Sparc processors. Now, because it also uses Intel and AMD processors, it can appeal to broader markets, said Brookwood. "Three years ago if you wanted to buy hardware from Sun, you had to sign up for the Sparc religion. Some people believe in other religions, and they didn't want to have to do a religious conversion to buy from Sun," he said. Sun's operating margin goals seem "conservative" to Sun financial analyst Andrew Neff of Bear Stearns & Co. In a research note to investors, Neff, who also attended the conference, said "Sun has more work to do on costs, [but] we believe its outlook can further improve."
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(InfoWorld) - Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz showed up Thursday evening at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference and declared he would not answer questions about the GNU general public license version 3, but he did disclose his lifelong fantasy concerning open source licensing. The GPLv3, which is expected to be released at noon on Friday, has been the focus of a public exchange between Schwartz and Linux creator Linus Torvalds over the future of open source licensing and the relationship between OpenSolaris and Linux. Schwartz, who briefly stopped to talk to reporters, said he wants licensing to be kept simple. "I want to get to uniform licenses for everything we do," Schwartz said. "So if you look at Sun you say 'Oh, I know you. I get you.'" Schwartz did not say which license he was considering. Sun has developed its own open source license, Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Then he added, "One of my great fantasies in life is that the number of people with opinions on open source licenses will come roughly into balance with the number of people who have read them." "Go read the Mozilla license," he said. "It is very difficult for an international company to use it because it is for the [United States] only. What do I tell people in China? Sorry, if you have a gripe you need to come back to Santa Clara," he said with a laugh. Schwartz then took the stage and joked with the audience, thanking them for Sun's fourth-quarter revenue. He then talked about helping customers to condense their infrastructure by consolidating workloads, to run virtualized infrastructure at scale, and to develop compelling services. He singled out identity as one of those services. He then laid out Sun's position on open source software and licensing. "The core value of Sun comes down to a basic set of things," he said. "Everything we build will be built in the open source community, it will be built with a community of partners around us and, with all deference to my friends from the Linux world, under a coherent license that we can draft, ideally in concert with Linus, so we end up with a common platform and a common opportunity." "We're every way thinking to combine the communities because we think that gives us the critical mass to go after the big opportunities in the marketplace." Shortly afterward Schwartz welcomed questions from the crowd, but added "just not about GPLv3, please." Earlier this month, Torvalds used the Linux Kernel Mailing List to slam Sun in responding to a post about Sun and open source licensing: "You are making the fundamental mistake of thinking that Sun is in this to actually further some open source agenda." He then launched into a "cynical prediction" slamming Sun's licensing interests around the OpenSolaris kernel and GPLv3, and predicting Sun would use licensing to protect patents on its ZFS file system rather than make it freely and widely available to the open source community. The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and kernel developers have said there is little chance the Linux community would move to the new GPLv3 because it is not significantly better than GPLv2 and could take six months or more to convert all the components of the kernel. "A GPLv3-only release [of the OpenSolaris kernel] would actually let [Sun] look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," Torvalds wrote. A day later, Schwartz responded on his blog in a friendly tone disputing Torvalds contention the Linux hurts Sun and saying Linux was not the enemy. Schwartz, writing on his blog, addresses Torvalds personally: "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back, or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner. I'll cook, you bring the wine. A mashup in the truest sense." Like the licensing, there also was no word Thursday night about dinner.
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COPS: Silicon Valley Sun Microsystems has spent of lot of time insisting that customers actually want to buy some of its white trash, trailerized data centers. And now the company has a press release to back up its insistiation.â¦
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The apparel retailer needs to do more to communicate its social responsibility efforts to customers.
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(InfoWorld) - In the IT shop of the near future, personnel likely will manage services instead of systems, a Sun Microsystems official said Monday in elaborating both on Sun's internal plans and what can be expected of the IT landscape at large. While the average enterprise IT shop now has many servers and client systems, companies including Sun can be expected to utilize online services available over the public Internet, said Robert Worrall, Sun chief information officer and senior vice president. This will make IT staff act more as service managers than systems managers. Meanwhile, internal application developers instead would find work building applications for service providers. Sun expects to be at the forefront of this wave. "We've been out talking quite a bit about this notion that the IT organizations of tomorrow are going to look very different from the IT organizations [of] today," Worrall said. IT will focus more on business than technology, he said. IT shops will transform from building, deploying, and supporting traditional applications to serving more as aggregators of network services, said Worrall. Like doctors who do high-level diagnoses and then refer patients to specialists, IT will refer users to providers of services, Worrall said. He cited online CRM specialists Salesforce.com, one of the most prominent examples of a SaaS (software as services) vendor, as such a company providing application services. "We're simply [espousing] that over a period of time, that will become the norm and not the exception," Worrall said. Other examples of online services gaining prominence include e-mail applications from Google and Yahoo and the Oracle On Demand service. ERP and human resources applications also will be leveraged online. "I think it's time for us as industry leaders really to get our hands around how we're going to evolve that model, because like it not, the current models of building hundreds or thousands of customized business applications simply aren't sustainable," Worrall said. Acknowledging user concerns over security and protection of intellectual property, Worrall said services providers will have to provide a model that ensures privacy and data protection. Service-level agreements will become critical in meeting this goal. Concepts such as federated identity will help take care of security issues. At Sun, the company currently runs about 1,200 business applications. There is no reason these cannot be provided as online services, Worrall said. In Sun's vision, the company will buy services, then run them in a browser on a device such as a laptop or a thin client. There will be no need to maintain legions of servers. Sun currently utilizes about 3,000 servers worldwide to run its business. Sun ultimately would like to be relieved of maintaining its own datacenter, but some servers still would be needed for applications that service providers probably would not offer, such as engineering applications, Worrall said. "I'd love to say the vision is zero [servers], but I don't know that we'd ever get to zero," said Worrall. The market is already moving to this more efficient paradigm, but Sun internally expects to be largely services-based by 2015, although it could be a few years earlier or later than that, said Worrall. With Sun itself a purveyor of server hardware, a widespread move to services-based computing by users at large would mean a radical change for Sun's business model. Its customer base will shift to being service providers, who need to maintain large datacenters. With this paradigm, Sun's server sales volumes potentially could increase, even if the customer list itself shrinks. "That's where I think Sun has the greatest play in the future," Worrall said. Meanwhile, companies that otherwise could not afford their own IT networks can avail themselves to online services. IT has been criticized for being too expensive, and the service paradigm addresses this problem. "I can simply buy a standard service off-the-shelf," said Worrall. Sun anticipates SaaS moving to the next level, Worrall said. Right now, SaaS tends to have a one-size-fits-all approach to privacy, trust, and service levels. This will not be sufficient, and service providers will need to offer more flexible options, according to Worrall; 24/7 service provision will be essential if large companies are to adopt service-based application models. As Sun moves toward service adoption internally, the halls of the company's IT offices may have fewer Java developers. Instead, Sun offices will feature persons focused on vendor management, security, and compliance. Java developers, meanwhile, will find work at organizations building services. This does not necessarily mean these application development services would be outsourced; a sizable amount of work requires local knowledge, Worrall said. "Offshoring is not the panacea; you have to have an onshore presence," he said. As Sun moves to a services paradigm, the company will need to focus on an ecosystem to accommodate this, because it is not the same as having a traditional ISV strategy, said M.R. Rangaswami, managing director of the Sand Hill Group, an investment and advisory firm that has researched SaaS. Sun must focus on building a partner-friendly environment for the new model, he said. "In a SaaS model, it's very different," Rangaswami said. "You don't need to give anyone hardware or software; you need to have a program that is very sculpted to give you a quick on-board [entrance] onto the new on-demand ecosystem." Fortune 500 companies are taking a look at this model, said Rangaswami. A services-based approach offers benefits such as flexibility and savings in power consumption. But companies must fit application services into their own standards for security and compliance, he said. Sun customers, meanwhile, are latching onto the services concept over development of internal IT infrastructures. During a recent meeting in Moscow with a group of 50 startup companies, the vast majority said they would not want to build to build their own IT shops, Worrall said. Several large customers in New York City also gave the idea a thumbs-up, he said. Sun's Network.com, which also has been known as Sun Grid, is a hosted service to provide compute cycles. Although the service was criticized for not gaining much traction in the market, Worrall said the grid service has had some successes in unexpected areas, with developers rather than large enterprises latching onto it. The industry itself needs to mature before grids are as successful as they could be, he said. Sun does not plan to sell hosted application services, Worrall said. The company does see open source as a conduit for a service-based application model. Developers can experiment with many solutions without getting locked into a single provider, Worrall said.
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When the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) wanted to increase its computing capacity last year it considered a satellite datacenter or an extension to the existing building, but in the end it chose a faster and more novel approach: it ordered a datacenter in a box.The center, which does high-energy physics research for the U.S. Department of Energy, was one of the first customers for&#160;Sun Microsystems&#39; Project Blackbox, which takes standard shipping containers 20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet (6.1m x 2.4m x 2.4m) and turns them into mini datacenters that can be delivered and operational in a few weeks, according to Sun.SLAC&#39;s Blackbox was delivered in July last year and was up and running by September. Aside from a few challenges -- like figuring out how to service the unit when it&#39;s raining -- the center is pleased with its choice and in the process of installing a second unit.It is one of four customers that Sun identified Tuesday to illustrate momentum for Project Blackbox. It also renamed the product the Sun Modular Datacenter, or Sun MD. The boxes start at $559,000 without the &quot;payload,&quot; or the computers inside, and Sun will ship them around the world for an extra fee. Delivery to Amsterdam by air, for example, costs about $15,000.SLAC turned to Project Blackbox because it needed to expand its compute capacity fairly quickly. &quot;The datacenter here was at its capacity, especially in terms of the electrical service to the building and the amount of heat we could take back out. And the experiments needed their next year&#39;s worth of computing,&quot; said Chuck Boeheim, SLAC&#39;s assistant director of computing services.Modifying its existing datacenter to accommodate another major electrical feed and &quot;chiller plant&quot; would have taken one to two years and cost several million dollars. &quot;We also looked at doing a satellite datacenter in a smaller building, but with the approvals and lead time that was a couple of years out as well. Blackbox was something we could do very quickly,&quot; Boeheim said.The raw shipping containers are customized by a subcontractor, and Sun typically installs the payload before delivery. SLAC&#39;s Blackbox arrived on a flat-bed truck last July, fitted with 252 Sun Fire X2200 rack-mount servers, the same type it uses in its datacenter. Sun had also wired the servers to a Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch that SLAC provided before delivery.Boeheim described the process in a white paper on his Web site, along with photos and time-lapse videos that show the box being hoisted into place by a crane.Customers can put other vendors&#39; hardware in the unit, but not all equipment will fit. SLAC bought some Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers that it wanted to put in its second Blackbox, but they were too long for the server racks. Instead it will move some existing Sun servers to the box from its datacenter, and put the Dell machines inside the building instead.The computing center already had a 4-megawatt substation serving its area of the site. &quot;So it was a fairly simple matter to put a 220-kilowatt power pane on the outside of that and bring up a fairly standard chiller unit and put that on a concrete pad next to the Blackbox. Both of those things could just be fork-lifted in and connected up,&quot; Boeheim said.SLAC wanted to do a rigorous installation that would last several years, so it spent a few weeks getting the unit hooked up. It had to reconnect about half the power cords which had shaken loose during the truck ride. Aside from that the installation went smoothly and the machines were turned on for batch work Sept. 25, about two months after delivery. The 60-ton chiller and the outside power unit were also delivered in that time.Servicing the unit has presented some challenges. &quot;We&#39;re trying to figure out how to do it on a day like today when it&#39;s pouring with rain,&quot; Boeheim said recently. &quot;The wind doesn&#39;t have to be blowing very hard for the rain to blow in the end, and you pretty much have to open both ends of the box to service it,&quot;It&#39;s quite cramped in the box, he said, and both ends need to be open so that a person can maneuver when a server rack is slid out into the narrow central aisle.&quot;Our stance right now is to wait for a clear day to open it up,&quot; he said. Two people are needed to service the box in case one gets trapped inside or injured, he wrote in the white paper on his Web site. SLAC put a phone in the box in case someone gets locked in.The first Blackbox gave the center a roughly 25 percent boost in computing capacity, and the servers have been running as smoothly as their counterparts inside the datacenter, Boeheim said. &quot;Once we got them turned on they just ran. We went a full 30 days not even opening the thing.&quot; He put rack servers in the box rather than storage gear, because storage gear tends to need servicing more often, he said.Sun&#39;s Blackbox won&#39;t be for everyone. Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, New York, considered a Blackbox but decided on a new wing for its datacenter instead, Boeheim said. SLAC&#39;s experience may have been easier than that of an average business because it is a federal government site located on county land. A business in a city may need more planning permissions and permits.A few other companies offer comparable products, such as the Ice Cube from Rackable Systems, and the Infrastructure Express from American Power Conversion.Sun said it is happy with the&#160;momentum for Blackbox, although it wouldn&#39;t say how many customers it has. The other three it named are Hansen Transmissions, a Belgian industrial manufacturer that is using one at a new plant in India; Mobile TeleSystems, Russia&#39;s largest mobile operator; and the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.Most of the customers had no room to add capacity in their datacenters, said Darlene Yaplee, vice president for integrated platforms in Sun&#39;s systems marketing group. &quot;Half the customers are using it while they build extra datacenter capacity, and then it will remain for disaster recovery,&quot; she said.The next size up in standard shipping containers is 40 feet long. &quot;We could do 40 feet technically, but most people have been happy with 20 feet,&quot; Yaplee said. Boeheim said he&#39;d probably choose a wider box rather than a longer one, which would accommodate his Dell 1950 servers.
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Its new lightbulb initiative will benefit customers, shareholders, and the environment.
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(InfoWorld) - A day after Linux creator Linus Torvalds publicly questioned the authenticity of Sun's interest in serving the open-source community, Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz invited Torvalds for a sit-down over dinner to discuss how Sun and the overseers of the Linux kernel can join forces. "I wanted you to hear this from me directly," Schwartz wrote in an entry on his blog. "We want to work together, we want to join hands and communities -- we have no intention of holding anything back or pulling patent nonsense. And to prove the sincerity of the offer, I invite you to my house for dinner." Schwartz was defending Sun against comments Torvalds made in a post Tuesday on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Torvalds suggested that Sun is keeping some of the more interesting features of its OpenSolaris open-source project -- such as ZFS, a file system in Sun's OpenSolaris Unix OS that is generating a lot of buzz -- close to the vest because the company doesn't want to help Linux, which has hurt Sun's position in the market. Schwartz begged to differ that Sun is punishing the Linux community for how commodity servers running the OS trumped Sun's Solaris-based hardware after the dot-com bust, a phenomenon that eventually led Sun to release Solaris as an open-source project. "Did the Linux community hurt Sun? No, not a bit. It was the companies that leveraged their work," Schwartz wrote. "I draw a very sharp distinction -- even if our competition is conveniently reckless. They like to paint the battle as Sun vs. the community, and it's not. Companies compete, communities simply fracture." Torvalds also took issue with the fact that Sun has not released OpenSolaris under the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2), which currently governs Linux. The license for OpenSolaris is the Community Development and Distribution License, which Sun created based on the Mozilla Public License. However, Schwartz is leaning toward supporting GPLv3 (GPLÂ Version 3), which should be released in its final version in the next few weeks as an option for OpenSolaris and other Sun open-source projects before GPLv2, which Torvalds prefers. In fact, the differences between GPLv2 and v3 have caused a public rift between Torvalds and other key members of the open-source community. "We love where the FSF's GPL3 is headed," Schwartz wrote. He cited a "variety of mechanical reasons" why it would be difficult to license OpenSolaris under GPLv2 and insisted it has "nothing to do with being afraid of the community. "Why does open sourcing take so long? Because we're starting from products that exist, in which a diversity of contributors and licensors/licensees have rights we have to negotiate," Schwartz wrote. "Indulge me when I say it's different than starting from scratch. I would love to go faster, and we are all doing everything under our control to accelerate progress.... It's also a delicate dance to manage this transition while growing a corporation." Torvalds in his post seemed unlikely to buy such an argument. "To Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the joys of license fragmentation)," he wrote. As to whether Torvalds would accept Schwartz's offer, he joked in an e-mail Wednesday that while he does not get to the San Francisco Bay area very often, "free food is a big draw." Torvalds lives in Portland, Oregon. He also said that though his post was not strictly meant for Schwartz, he appreciates the executive's response, especially his assertion that Sun would not seek patent fees for ZFS, as some in the Linux community wanted to port the file system to Linux. Still, Torvalds' mistrust of Sun's motives in the open-source industry is deep-rooted, though he remains optimistic that Sun and the Linux community still can come together on common interests. "I'll just have to say that I still have the old Java licensing mess fresh in my memory, and I'll take a 'wait and see' attitude to what actually comes out of Sun," he wrote, saying he is the kind of person who "would rather be pleasantly surprised by people's (and companies') actions, than expect too much and be disappointed." Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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InfoWorld - The key to Sun&#39;s success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday.
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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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The two companies are targeting customers that have invested in a services-oriented architecture.
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Sun Microsystems made some of its first sales in the early 1980s selling workstations to Wall Street. Now the struggling Santa Clara computer maker is returning to its roots with a campaign to win back some of its former financial-industry customers.
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After setting up an initial RFID test center in Dallas last May, Sun Microsystems Inc. will follow up with a similar facility somewhere in Scotland, said Vijay Sarathy, group marketing manager for RFID at Sun.
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A day after Linux creator Linus Torvalds publicly questioned the authenticity of Sun Microsystems Inc.&#39;s interest in serving the open-source community, Sun Chief Executive Officer and President Jonathan Schwartz invited Torvalds for a sit-down over dinner to discuss how Sun and the overseers of the Linux kernel can join forces.
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(InfoWorld) - It's impressive that there are 2 billion people connected to the Internet, but having 4 billion not connected is a social issue. Technology companies are reaching out to those 4 billion people to connect them to the Web and its advantages of better education, a stronger economy, more political power and a better life. And, not surprisingly, the side benefit is higher sales and profits for the companies. "I don't think there's a doubt in anybody's mind that technology has the capacity to change the world," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, on stage at the company's JavaOne Conference in May in San Francisco. Sun, along with other companies including Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems, realize that there's more to their corporate humanitarian work than giving money or delivering palettes full of computers to some distant country. Instead, they are providing educational programs and wiring developing countries that are, so far, excluded from the Internet economy. At JavaOne, Schwartz introduced Jibril Diallo, director of the United Nations Office of Sports for Development and Peace. The Office of Sports for Development and Peace promotes youth sports as a common interest to encourage education and empowerment of young people in many countries. Sun supports the program and sponsored the Global Youth Leadership Summit in November 2006 at U.N. headquarters in New York. The U.N. promotes technology, education, social and economic development in poor countries. "We need to create opportunities for young people," said Diallo to the audience of software programmers, Sun employees and others. "With all the resources we have in this world, it's just unconscionable that 1.5 billion people will go to bed hungry every night." Schwartz, along with Sun Chairman Scot McNealy proposed creation of "Engineers Without Borders," an organization of computer engineers that would help bring technology to underserved countries much like "Doctors Without Borders" brings health care. A Sun spokeswoman later cautioned, though, that the idea was only discussed briefly by Schwartz and McNealy moments before they went on stage. Companies with millions of dollars in profits have as many, or sometimes more, resources to bring IT to poorer countries than the countries themselves, said Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting. Although she mostly helps companies sell into markets in developing countries, the firm also advises them on their philanthropic strategies. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, about 50 of them are corporations, Partridge said. "When you are looking at large Fortune 50 companies, they have the kind of power that a lot of countries have in terms of economic capability." Philanthropic efforts in developing countries also dovetail with their business efforts, she said. Technology growth rates are slowing in mature markets so companies need to expand into new ones. Sun's Schwartz, for instance, acknowledges that if Internet service is extended into countries without it, there will be more demand for Sun's server and storage products. HP expects to spend $50 million on philanthropic projects this year. As a company selling in 170 countries and deriving 65 percent of its revenue from outside the U.S., HP is clearly a global corporate citizen, said Sidney Espinosa, director of philanthropy programs. In many communities in which it operates, HP assesses local needs and focuses its grant giving on educational and economic development and environmental protection, Espinosa said. "You look at what in particular you bring to the table and then you look at what needle you can move. What impact can you really have to make a difference and to change things?" HP also supports a Micro Economic Development Program that provides small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Like many tech companies, HP realizes people in developing countries are more likely to access the Internet on wireless devices than PCs because landline phone networks are inadequate or nonexistent. Cisco has operations in 80 countries, but its Cisco Networking Academy operates in 165, said Amy Christen, vice president of corporate affairs. The academy delivers technology training programs through high schools, universities, and technical schools in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Cisco establishes the curriculum and local instructors teach it. The academy serves about 500,000 students worldwide. Cisco's routers and switches helped build the Internet and will likely be used to extend it to developing countries, Christen said. Still, Cisco chose education over just donating its products because if developing countries are to grow their Internet economies, they'll need a knowledgeable work force. "We quickly found that equipment's not the solution. Knowledge is the solution," she said.