Sun's top Solaris sellers bail out
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OS under attack from families Exclusive A pair of Sun's top Solaris executives have scurried right on out of the company, The Register can reveal.â¦
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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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(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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One of Britain's biggest property funds shuts its doors to withdrawals after panic selling
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Will Sun's $1 billion buyout of open source database vendor SQL drive down pricing on enterprise databases from IBM, Microsoft of Oracle?
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roundup Plus: Sun expands pay-as-you go supercomputing...SGI works on Linux performance software...Good Technology supported by HP, Samsung.
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So much support It appears that HP's fondness for Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system has returned. The hardware maker today announced quick support for the latest version of Solaris across a number of its Intel-based servers.â¦
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Sun Microsystems' purchase earlier this month of open-source database maker MySQL may have been pennywise and pound-foolish, with many observers suggesting that Valley stalwart Sybase was in fact the smarter buy. The logic is compelling -- but won't someone stand up for the cussedly independent?
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Company will compensate its sales staff for selling non-Sun machines, as part of its effort to boost Solaris on x86 hardware.
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I believe you have my stapler Sun Microsystems has gone very granola by buying desktop virtualization software player innotek. (The small 'i' stands for big innovation or something like that.)â¦
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IBM (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and other technology companies recently "donated" portions of their software to the open-source community. But those donations are not motivated by corporate generosity; there are tactics and strategies behind these moves.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun MicrosystemsÂ on Wednesday will begin donating its Solaris clustering code to the open-source community, the latest move in the company'sÂ ongoing strategyÂ to eventually make all of its software freely available. It has been more than two years since SunÂ released OpenSolaris, an open-source version of its Solaris 10 Unix operating system. Since June 2005, the vendor has made other pieces of its software freely available, notably itsÂ core Java platformÂ starting in November of last year. Sun hopes opening up its software will enable its products to enter new markets and lead to more customers for its servers, storage, and paid support services. Known as Open High Availability Cluster, Sun will release its Solaris Cluster source code over the next 18 months through the High Availability (HA) Clusters community on the OpenSolaris Web site. Developers can use the code to help them build clustered and high-availability applications and services. Sun will make the clustering source code available under its own open-source license, CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), said Paul Steeves, director of Solaris marketing at Sun. There are no plans to also provide the code under the GNU general public license (GPL)Â as Sun did with Java. That situation might change, if, as rumored, Sun decides to also provideÂ OpenSolaris under GPLv3. The third version of the GPL is due to be finalized later this week. OpenSolaris is currently offered under CDDL. Sun will make three major contributions to the clustering code, according to Steeves. The first donation, due out this week, is focused on application modules or agents that allow open-source or commercial applications to become highly available in a clustered environment. Sun will make the code available for 24 of the high-availability agents it offers with its commercially available Solaris Cluster software. Among the agents are modules for Sun's Solaris Containers virtualization technology, BEA Systems' WebLogic application server and the open-source PostgreSQL database. "There are a couple of agents we need to work through, that have encumbrances," Steeves said, where Sun doesn't hold enough rights to release the code under CDDL. These modules include agents for Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology, Sybase's database and IBM's WebSphere middleware. "We intend to release them once we've worked through the licensing," he added. Sun will also provide documentation for the agents along with the source code for the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) so that developers can test new agents they develop, Steeves said. Agents written using Open HA Cluster will run on Cluster Express, a binary version of Solaris Cluster, which Sun plans to release in a few weeks, Steeves said. The agents will also run on the latest version of Sun's commercial clustering product, Solaris Cluster 3.2, which debuted in January, and runs on the Solaris 9 and 10 operating systems. The second donation will likely appear in December, Steeves said, and will include code for the Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, software that enables multisite disaster recovery. At the end of the 18-month period, Sun will release the code for the core Solaris Cluster infrastructure along with more documentation and additional SCATE infrastructure tests. In total, Sun will make around 2 million lines of clustering source code available, Steeves said. By comparison, Sun's donation of Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software to the open-source community represents over 6 million lines of code. Â
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The software company gets a stock boost from sacking its chief exec. Also: Microsoft continues to battle European courts. & hellip; University of Texas and Sun Microsystems come together to make a computer & hellip;. and more.
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SCO group is going down. Microsoft, Sun, and the greedy investors that abetted SCO in its campaign to loot Unix and Linux vendors and their customers have abandoned ship. Microsoftâs public endorsement of SCOâs legal action against, effectively, Microsoftâs enterprise competitors and their customers, gave SCO the leverage to mug said vendorsâ customers for license fees when vendors refused to drop their wallets in court. Sun and Microsoft animated SCO as the prototypical litigious IP boogeyman in order to terrorize competitorsâ customers into switching to Windows or Solaris to avoid being hauled to court. Thatâs how I laid it out in 2003, and I stand by it now.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Ziff Davis - In another blow to Microsoft, a government agency in New South Wales, Australia, signs a deal with Sun to migrate 1,500 users to the company's StarOffice productivity suite and Messaging products.
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Which letter did Sun buy again? Correction of the day Anytime a major acquisition such as Sun's $1bn buy of MySQL hits, analysts around the globe rush out their takes on the deal, hoping to prove their fierce insight. Journalists sit back as the analysts' notes flood their inboxes.â¦
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The company has decided to leave the public markets.