Q&A: Sun's Marissa Peterson on the company's IT services plans
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Marissa Peterson, who heads Sun Microsystems' services division, talked this week about the company's efforts to help its managed services partners broaden their reach.
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When Oracle executives in JanuaryÂ publicly described the vendor's Fusion projectÂ to create a new suite of enterprise applications as halfway done, they were referring to the completion of the smaller middleware piece of the massive multibillion dollar project, according to the man in charge of that undertaking. Much work remains to be done on the larger applications piece of Fusion.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's top executive outlined the company's plan to transition from a traditional software company to offering software plus services for the first time on Tuesday, giving some roadmap details for how the strategy will play out in the next year. In a keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shed more details on the plan other executives, such as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, have been teasing out over the past year -- but not many more. He gave a time frame for the early part of the transition but mostly echoed what other executives have said about Microsoft's slow transition to adding hosted business services to its traditional software portfolio. "For software plus services, the time is now," Ballmer said, finishing off the first of a raft of keynotes on the first day of Microsoft's annual partner conference. He said that over the next year, Microsoft will continue to sell mostly on-premises software, but there will be more evidence of the transition to its hybrid model as the year goes on. Since Microsoft began talking about its plan to gradually transition to offering more hosted services last year in a speech by Ozzie at its TechEd Conference in Boston, many noted that the company had no choice. With such an entrenched business in enterprise and consumer desktop software, it would be impossible for Microsoft to be as nimble in offering hosted services as rivals like Google and Salesforce.com, which started their businesses as Web-based services providers. And a warmer reception for hosted services is clearly the direction the enterprise market is heading as businesses become more comfortable accessing Web-based services beyond the traditional consumer staples of e-mail and search that have been popular for years. The transition to providing more services will touch every part of Microsoft's business, but some changes will be more obvious than others, Ballmer said. The user interface will be an important place for innovation in this area, and Microsoft's Silverlight technology is the cornerstone of that, he said. Microsoft introduced Silverlight, a browser plug-in that allows for rich video and interactive media experience to be delivered within Web sites, in April. A solid services platform on which partners can build services and also that they can resell with Microsoft managing and hosting them also will be a clear sign of the transition, Ballmer said. Microsoft already is offering a combination of consumer-oriented services, such as Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Local Search, but will begin bulking up its portfolio of enterprise services as well, he said. Microsoft already has unveiled business services like Exchange Hosted Services for enterprise messaging and Office Live hosted service for small businesses. There will be new and expanded services like these as Microsoft progresses further with its software plus services strategy, Ballmer said.
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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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Red Hat&#39;s new CEO plans to keep the company focused on its core Linux OS and middleware business while also improving the service it offers to customers, he said Thursday.&quot;It&#39;s a very exciting time for Red Hat, we have a very bright future in front of us. Our business model is strong and our growth remains very, very robust,&quot; said Jim Whitehurst, who was speaking in Tokyo during his third week in the job.Whitehurst came to Red Hat from Delta Air Lines&#160;where he served as chief operating officer for two years. During that time he gained experience of being a customer of major IT vendors and says he knows well what is expected of companies like Red Hat.&quot;From a user perspective an absolute focus on service is critical. Based on talking to customers so far, one observation I have is that we need to re-double our effort working with our various partners in service,&quot; he said.Because much of Red Hat&#39;s business is done through resellers and the channel, there can sometimes be disconnects in customer service. For example, Red Hat might end up telling a customer to contact the partner while the partner refers the customer back to Red Hat, he said.But is Whitehurst the right man to be talking about customer service? After all, he came to Red Hat from an industry that is the subject of frequent complaints from its customers.&quot;I think airlines only beat out cable TV operators in customer satisfaction surveys so I&#39;m certainly not going to defend the airline industry&#39;s record on customer service,&quot; he said. Experience at Delta taught him the need to pick a small number of things and do them well to improve overall satisfaction, he said.&quot;The Delta situation was the fastest major bankruptcy ever and during that situation our customer service numbers actually went up quite significantly. We did it by focusing on a couple of things. In the airline industry it&#39;s clean airplanes and on-time, those were the two things we focused on. I know those sound like two little things but they significantly impact the customer experience,&quot; said Whitehurst.For Red Hat he said he is still working on which areas will be the priorities that he focuses upon.&quot;I understand the importance from the customer&#39;s perspective of excellent customer service in IT,&quot; he said. &quot;As an industry, information technology is not known for excellence in serving our customers well and I have been adamant from day one that everything Red Hat does will be viewed through the eyes of the customer.&quot;
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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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Blog: Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz had something surprising to say about company management.
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SAP's chief software architect talked about one of the company's first on-demand offerings, its software-as-a-service philosophy, search functionalities in enterprise software, Web service standards and more in an interview.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun MicrosystemsÂ is going to where the carriers are to unveil new features on its platform for mobile content delivery platform. On Monday, the company is set to announce enhancements to its Sun Java System Content Delivery Server (CDS) at the International Telecommunication Union's Telecom World show in Hong Kong. Organizers expect as many as 57,000 attendees from around the world at the week-long show, which takes place once every three years. Mobile operators looking at big bills for 3G (third-generation) networks and shrinking revenue from voice minutes want to offer subscribers something new that they'll pay extra for. Sun is one of many vendors promising to help them get new money-making services up and attracting users. Sun's CDS provides a common infrastructure for delivering all types of content, including Java applications, games, ringtones and wallpaper. It also lets operators create storefronts, viral marketing tools and payment systems. It lets the carriers and other content providers set up services more easily and quickly, the company said. Among the new features coming at Telecom World is the Central Device Catalog, which lets carriers quickly aggregate content from various sources for a new device and then collect records of downloads. This lets the operator view usage patterns and segment customers, directing new content to the appropriate group. Also at the show, Sun plans to announce that Telefonica Moviles Espana and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom have chosen Sun Fire servers and the Solaris 10 operating system to deliver services to their customers. The show will also be a coming-out party for an alliance Sun announced last week with Nokia and Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson. In the Telecommunications Platform Initiative, the companies will jointly develop requirements for a standardized, integrated telecommunications platform. If network equipment providers follow a common set of open standards in their products, it will be easier for carriers to integrate gear from different suppliers and ultimately get revenue-producing services out more quickly, Sun said. Sun and other members of the initiative will continue to work with other groups that set telecommunications computing standards, such as PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group), the company said
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Sun's acquisition of MySQL has broad implications for the software industry.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Despite Oracleâs strategic push for Linux- and Intel-based deployments, Sun Microsystems retains its position as the leading platform for Oracle, Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy said Wednesday at the Oracle OpenWorld conference here.
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Blog: Linux leader seems inclined to take Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz up on his dinner offer, so at least one cultural barrier separating Linux and Solaris looks to be lowering.
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taking our intellectual property and turning it into pay-for-use network services,&quot; Sun President Jonathan Schwartz said. The company envisions businesses that
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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&#39;s internal plans and what can be expected of the IT landscape at large.
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Hal Stern holds the titles at Sun Microsystems of vice president, Distinguished Engineer, and CTO for Sun Services. He also has co-authored technical books on networking and high-availability techniques and, prior to joining Sun, developed molecular modeling software. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Stern to discuss Sunâs âNext Generation Data Centerâ concept and to talk about subjects such as security, utility computing, and how the company stacks up its services efforts against IBM Global Services.
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Sun Microsystems has agreed to purchase IT services company SevenSpace Inc. The move takes Sun further away from its traditional focus on supporting only its Solaris operating system platform.
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Ziff Davis - In an eWEEK interview, the Sun exec says he sees Solaris, Linux, Java and even Windows coexisting.