COO apologizes to customers; outlines new "open" product strategy
by Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
In a rare moment of candor for a technology vendor, Sun Microsystems' COO, Jonathon Schwartz, recently conceded that the company should have done a better job listening to its customers over the past several years.
"You told us to stop being an isolated island and that you wanted interoperability," Schwartz told customers who joined a group of analysts on Wall Street for a mid-September briefing on Sun's product strategy.
Displaying a model of the company's very first workstation, built with off-the-shelf parts and using an early version of UNIX that was in the public domain, Schwartz declared that Sun now is committed to becoming "more open than open." As examples, he pointed to strategies for offering servers based on Intel-compatible microprocessors, as well as Sun's own SPARC chips. Sun has made its Solaris operating system available on both platforms. According to Schwartz, nearly 250 Intel-compatible servers are certified to run Solaris.
Although Sun will continue offering Linux, Schwartz claims both users and software developers are rediscovering Solaris in the wake of recent price hikes in enterprise licenses from Linux distributor Red Hat. "Linux is not as free as most people thought," he said, adding that in the past six months, the number of applications certified to run on Solaris x86 (the Intel version) rose by 17 percent. Schwartz pointed to benefits of the forthcoming Solaris 10, now available for beta download, which Linux does not match.
Among the Solaris features cited by Schwartz are dynamic tracing of performance bottlenecks, which can lower costs by helping customers optimize existing servers and reduce the need for new hardware. He claimed other features—such as predictive self-healing of problems and the ability to run Linux applications in secure containers running inside an instance of Solaris—will dramatically reduce cost of ownership. Based on these numbers and aggressive hardware pricing, Sun claims its four-way AMD Opteron-based server would cost almost $5,000 less than similar IBM or Dell models over three years.
"This announcement is largely about the fact that innovation still matters," says Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with Red Monk, Bath, Maine, who attended the event. The question is whether this new open attitude—toward both product development and customer relations—will be enough to restore Sun to its once-dominant position in the technology marketplace.
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