Enterprise Unix Roundup -- Selling Wall Street on Sun
617150
Three years ago, we attended Sun&#39;s quarterly network computing day. It was the heart of the Bust, and we were treated to pot shots directed at IBM and Microsoft and were told that Sun was the true &quot;open standards&quot; vendor.
248837
(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
706249
roundup Plus: Open-source Web tools company nets VC funding...SAP spiffs up small business programs...Piracy crackdown yields $2.2 million...Sun draws Nvidia graphics into Solaris.
278027
Investor's Business Daily - Some free open-source software aside, business software has been sold through licensing agreements for packaged products or via Web-based subscriptions -- until now.
551317
PeopleSoft is the latest vendor to jump aboard the managed-services bandwagon, last week announcing a comprehensive service for all its ERP product lines. The application management services will be available for all Enterprise, EnterpriseOne, and World products and will include maintenance, administration, end-user, and extended services.ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
135852
roundup Plus: IBM releases low-cost Unix servers...Former Cisco exec joins Red Hat board...Sun lures Siebel to x86 Solaris.
724777
Plus:  Microsoft tops its expectations...Google doubles profit year-over-year...SAP earnings beat estimates...EarthLink trims outlook...AT&#38;T posts $7.1 billion loss...Lucent sees first profitable year since 2000...EMC issues sunny report.
621509
Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) today came out swinging with the launch of the latest Solaris operating system, announcing that the new and improved Unix-based software would be offered for free.
580556
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.
607264
Mike Arrington is doing a great job of laying out the options for Yahoo wrt Microsoft's offer to buy them out. He's written two pieces that helped put it together for me. Mike clearly has great sources in the investment banking community and among potential buyers of Yahoo, and is actively talking with them. He's got a business lawyer's mind and, as you know I'm sure, he's spent the last few years immersed in web applications.  Bottom-line: Yahoo's three choices are: 1. Tough it out alone. 2. Sell advertising rights to Google. 3. Accept Microsoft's offer.  Mike argues that option 1 would result in shareholder lawsuits and in the end would get Yahoo nowhere because they'd end up selling to Microsoft eventually. Option 2 would enable them to pay a major cash dividend to their shareholders, making up for the lost windfall coming from Microsoft's offer. Options 2 and 3 have the risk of being rejected by government regulators.  Now, as a member of Yahoo's developer community, and generally a respector of Yahoo (is that a word) -- I say take the deal. I don't think Yahoo has ever had leadership that has been up to navigating the treacherous waters of tech industry economics and politics. At least with the Microsoft acquisition they would get one -- Ray Ozzie. He's a guy you can sit across the table from and plot something out and he can deliver. I've had many good meetings with Yahoo people, but rarely have they resulted in action. From my own selfish point of view, Microsoft owning Yahoo might mean that Ray makes more trips to the Bay Area (figuratively) and when he sits down, we can talk about new open interfaces and developer programs for Yahoo properties. I've read most of the commentary on the Yahoo deal, and the other piece that made an impression was Mark Cuban's. He says that Yahoo should accept the Microsoft deal because it would give them the breathing room they need re Wall Street. He argues that the market has always allowed Microsoft to sink resources into developing markets, and that's exactly what Yahoo needs to become the organization that it has been trying to be. Instead, the market treats Yahoo as a comp to Google, but Yahoo doesn't have the economics of Google, so that's, long-term, a losing battle.  There's one more reason I think Yahoo should sell to Microsoft -- the fatigue of the people. The company has been wobbly too long. If they don't take the Microsoft offer it's going to be a long wobbly decline and the shareholders will be right to be angry. Here's their chance to get out, it's time, so just do it.
593671
Plus: Dell delays...Novell profit climbs...Symbian spurt continues...HP profit surges. Check back for latest.
747656
At a launch event at the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York City, CEO Steve Ballmer debuted Vista, Office 2007, and Exchange Server 2007. Some 30 other business-centric programs were also launched at the event.
264619
First, let me gloat.  I bought $49,761 of AAPL on Oct 8.  My investment is now worth $54,933. That's 10.5 percent growth in less than a month. Hah! I bought the stock because I was going to buy everything Apple sold from now until forever. The last product I had yet to purchase was the company's stock. That was a mistake. The beauty of owning the stock is that you can use the increase in value to fund the hardware habit. So far so good.  My very dear friend Sylvia Paull bought an iPod a month ago. In a blog post today she calls it a gateway drug. Having read early reviews of the new operating system, she's ready to buy a 24 inch iMac.  I recognize the signs.  It's like a virus I tell you.
616879
Sun Microsystems went to Wall Street today, hoping to convince prized financial services customers that it still matters, has speedy kit on the way and unique pricing.
41787
Software giant's deal with Sun has raised some questions.
308580
Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) announced the availability of two upgrades to its software development platforms on Tuesday. Java Studio Enterprise (JSE) 7, the Santa Clara, Calif.
320537
Sun is getting into the open-source business with Solaris, but will this automatically translate into better sales?