Sun wants to support everybody's boxes
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As long as they're running Solaris Sun is looking to burnish its support credentials by offering to look after other vendorsâ hardware as long it is running its Solaris OS.â¦
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Sun Microsystems Inc. SUNW.O is  staging its first press and customer event in New York on  Tuesday in three years to roll out new products and woo  customers in the banking industry, one of the network computer  maker's most important markets.
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SEPTEMBER 20, 2004  - Sun Microsystems Inc. tomorrow plans to announce several storage products, including its first network-attached storage (NAS) box and a midrange disk array that uses virtualization
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Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.It&#39;s a strategy Sun started several years ago with a free version of its application server and that it has accelerated with such products&#160;as StarOffice, OpenSolaris, its Open xVM virtualization software, and, most recently,&#160;its acquisition of the open-source database vendor MySQL.The free software allows Sun to build communities of developers who will do pilot projects with its software and may eventually buy licenses for commercial deployment, or buy professional services to support critical applications, CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz said at the company&#39;s press day Wednesday. He called Sun&#39;s software a &quot;media asset&quot; for building communities.&quot;These are no longer simply software products, these are media properties -- networks around which communities are being built, [and] this is a means for Sun to talk to a very large developer community,&quot; he said.He put up a slide that showed a map of the world covered in pink dots. Each dot represented a download of Solaris, he said, and hence an opportunity for Sun to start a dialogue with IT people that could lead to a sale of its services and hardware.&quot;Not all customers will pay for these products before they use them -- very few will, actually,&quot; he admitted. But they all buy servers and storage on which to run the software, and the download gives Sun a foot in the door to try to capture that sale.&quot;The reason MySQL was interesting to us is it puts 50,000 new dots on that map every day, and from the community, market opportunities will emerge,&quot; Schwartz said.Sun&#39;s growth is important to customers. Its revenue funds its research and development efforts, and customers want to know there is a big community of specialists in Sun products to support their businesses.Analysts are divided about the strategy. At Sun&#39;s financial analyst conference last week, Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said he found it hard to see a link between software downloads and Sun&#39;s revenue growth.&quot;If you were to plot a chart showing revenue growth over the last 12 quarters and Solaris downloads, there would really be no correlation at all,&quot; Sacconaghi said.&quot;Oh, I think there would be an exceptional correlation,&quot; Schwartz replied. &quot;If you had shut those downloads off three years ago, our revenue would have been declining double-digit.&quot;He reiterated the point Wednesday. Sun&#39;s strongest growth period came in the late 1990s and was preceded by wide use of its software in universities, he said. Today, the growth of Sun&#39;s Niagara servers has been driven by making Solaris open source, Schwartz said.Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said there probably is a connection between Sun&#39;s free and open-source software strategy and its revenue growth, but even if there is not, the strategy is helping the company, he said.&quot;Even if you can&#39;t say that each pink dot equals $372, I think the things Sun has been doing with open source and OpenSolaris and Java and so forth have translated into improved relevancy and an improved perception of Sun, and at some level, logic suggests that this played a role in their improved financial picture.&quot;
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InfoWorld - Sun is sprucing up Solaris Express Developer Edition, which features the Solaris OS bundled with tools, by supporting enhanced application development for multicore processors.
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Ziff Davis - Sun's plans to offer Solaris code to the open-source community leaves some analysts scratching their heads.
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By Dan Farber Special to ZDNet November 16, 2004, 8:06 AM PT. Organizations are replacing aging servers with newer more-powerful boxes, often Linux--based, and theyâre also investing in storage.
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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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Compiling good time Users running Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system are getting something a little extra thrown into their contracts: developer support.â¦
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Sun is reaching out to Linux, and specially Linus Torvalds, in an effort to explain its motives in placing Solaris under GPLv3, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Wednesday.
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BIG TIN firm Sun is planning a brave new world where computing power is sold as a commodity and spare capacity is flogged off to other companies.
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Sun signs up the software company to support its attempt to make useful a version of its Solaris operating system for x86 chips.
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Sun Microsystems is backing European Union efforts to standardize office document formats, including a proposal that would enable people to switch easily between Microsoft-based documents and those created with open-source software.
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Blog: Linux leader Linus Torvalds looks 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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InfoWorld - Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.
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Sun's CEO Schwartz has invited Linux creator Torvalds to discuss how Sun and the Linux kernel can join forces.
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PC Magazine - The five-member group will set policies and regulations for the community created around Sun Microsystems' open hardware initiative.