Sun Microsystems, once a great enterprise computer company, has been shrinking. Sun is also shrinking in other ways, such as the enterprise-only part, by entering to the consumer markets. Sun has getting slow at some things, such as copying off competitors.Editorial Notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com
An example of this would be how slow they were to offer x86 & Linux. They however, do not offer Microsoft Windows like IBM, HP, and other major manufacturers which may hurt them. They are now doing what IBM and HP do, using their own systems to compete with the x86 servers. The slowness is about to change after the management shuffle.
Sources in Sun disclose that they “weren’t born yesterday” and they are fully aware of the current situation, they will be applying “basic changes” inside the business to combat the lengthy failures. Sun may be interested in some of the changes but its crucial for them to stay a big company. The company is willing to do alot to retain it’s size. Two examples would be prefering Solaris over Linux and SPARC over x86, but willing sell you whatever the customer prefers as they are interested in revenue. The company also plans to try to sell more subscription based software and servers, such as leasing servers and services for them. Furthermore, the company is no longer interested in Solaris, but selling support and services for Solaris.
One of the biggest things people criticize Sun over is not selling to low volume clients. Many clients that get turned away go elsewhere, particularly the x86 and PowerPC market. That might be changing. Sun is aware that they should quit their old practices of selling to high volume clients only, but while still concentrating on high volume. They might actually start selling to low volume clients as well. If Sun pulls this off without manufacturing a bunch of CPUs and boards that just sit in a warehouse, OEMS and online shops will be able to sell SPARC-based computers using Sun’s system boards and processors. The copmany is still considering this plan and say it may occur in time.
The marketing issue that customers complain is also changing, new advertisements are appearing on various high traffic websites promoting what Jonathan Schwartz says are opportunities, such as their Opteron server and Java Enterprise System with a hint of Solaris.
One of the biggest problems for Sun is the FUD that surrounds it, some executives plan to try all they can to counter it as many are currently doing all they can, however some do not think its good enough. Sun is busy working on changing themselves to achieve profitability as others criticize it so it seems they doing worse.
Sun has been criticized by open source advocates over various issues such as Java. Sources close to sun claim that they have done plenty for the open source, more than companies like IBM. They also hint that the pressure on them to open source Java is mainly due to IBM which is allegedly trying to use its position on Linux vs. SCO to take advantage of Sun’s Java technologies which make up the core of its software business.
Jonathan Schwartz has been busy, reading user comments and getting feedback on statements he has made to make effective decisions. Many Sun customers stand by Schwartz and McNealy in hope that Sun will get back on its feet and become profitable once again as Schwartz and McNealy say they will but it will take a little more time, likely not this or the next quarter.
Other than this, there is not much Sun will tell you. June’s quarterly launch event will be interesting. This company definitely going to be around here for awhile.
This article is by Tim H. of Rack64.com, a server administrator, sun customer and shareholder. Information gathered in this article was from employees of Sun Microsystems and interviews posted on various news sites.
Did you ask them at all about their java strategy from a business standpoint? I’d be curious too see how much they make off of it vs. IBM. I’ve talked to some poeople at Sun’s java consulting arm and they seem to get big projects, but I still don’t know how much revenue they really pull in.
seems like the article just forget about Sun’s high potential market in embedded/wireless.
it’s not just only J2ME.
it’s also Java Card. I heard that they about to got some Java Card bid from the Ministry of Interior in Thailand.
RFID is also another market that Sun do researches for a while.
those kind of things are just perfectly fitted in Sun vision of “The Internet of Things”.
and now Jini has a real (large) market (which it lack of for a long time).
Isn’t Sun still the largest provider in the Enterprise Server space? Supplying systems to Wall Street, etc? Though it seems IBM has been catching up to them. But how many other options do those customers have?
But you’re right, they are shrinking – the dot com boom seems to have been their last hurrah. Java is popular, but how much do they make off of it – how much of a cut do they get off each cell phone which has it? It doesn’t seem like enough.
Sun needs to get back to profitability very soon – before the end of the year. This weak US recovery won’t last much longer, and they will have to make deeper cuts if they aren’t breaking even
I think not (unless we’re delving into the realm of miracles) — http://chart.yahoo.com/c/5y/s/sunw.gif — the track record speaks for itself.
I think this article may be a little more than ‘Opinion’ since I got alot of my sources from Sun itself. But there may be opinions in there 😉
RE: Java Strategy
Sun wouldn’t tell me except that its the core of their software business and that it has made sun extremely successful.
RE: embedded market?
I totally agree with you, sun did miss out on the embedded market and I personally think their recent increase in it has been due to their overall push to become profitable.. They are not doing so well the in the embedded market and I have not seen from them regarding a big push… yet. It may come. Sun suggests you e-mailing your suggestions to them.
RE: Sun in the enterprise
Sun is the largest 64-bit server provider, but they no longer outship everyeone else. Java is the ‘core’ of their business, Jonathon told me that without Java sun’s software business wouldn’t be as great as it is now.
Well compare that to Microsoft. You’ll see the same graph.
January 2000 was the height of an insane speculative tech bubble.
it should read:
“Sun has BEEN getting slow at some things, such as copying off competitors” should read
should also read “by entering the consumer markets”
…I’m a tech guy not really an english major….. I am improving though.
I’d also like to know how Java is supposed to make Sun money.
Statements from Sun such as “It’s the core of their software business and has made Sun extremely successful’ don’t mean anything as everybody knows.
I think Sun could sell J2EE licenses well into the next millenium and they still wouldn’t make a ROI from Java. And I doubt it’s helped their server hardware in any way.
McNealy was saying in 1998 that the OS didn’t matter anymore and Java _was_ the platform, and thin clients would dominate, yada, yada. But as we know, things didn’t turn out that way.
I’m not bashing the Java language or Sun engineers. I’m just wondering what is the point in holding onto Java anymore? Will it ever help the bottom line by pouring tons of cash into its development?
I have seen lots of people posing this question in a lot of forums. I believe that the answer is actually in the financial statements that Sun is required to make.
Did anyone actually have a look before saying that they don’t know this?
I do believe that the number is not inconsequential.
Good article Tim.
Whilst Sun might not sell MS-Windows with any of their hardware, they do now offer some WHQL certified computers.
This sort of transition has been accomplished, but it is very tricky and difficult to execute. Many who tried are no longer with us.
The difficulty that Sun faces is reminiscent of Digital Equipment as it watched personal computers eat away at its business from the bottom. The first reaction is to hope it goes away. Ken Olsen says, “There is no reason for an individual to have a computer in his home.” McNealy tells us that linux is a toy suitable for use by hobbyists.
A little later they dabble in it, but they can’t quite get past proprietary-think. Yes, here’s an Intel-based DEC PC, but just look at this little desktop PDP-11. Same thing here… what you really want is Solaris on Intel. The message customers receive is that they don’t ‘get it’ and they aren’t serious.
Turning a major accounts sales force into one that calls on VARs and resellers is virtually impossible. They are different people. Change the comp plan all you want, the major accounts guys will still see easier dollars in what they know. Data General once tried to go the other way: take its fairly successful VAR and reseller sales force and aim it at major accounts. Splat. Of the mainframe guys, only IBM really succeeded in building a sizeable, dedicated, reseller channel. The rest died. Sun today is the equivalent of a “mainframe guy” of the 1970’s. Death looms. Can they make the transition to follow the market, or will they insist for too long that the market follow them? This does not depend on McNealy or Schwartz. It depends on a corporate culture that they have been building for 20 years.
I wish them luck, but I can’t help but notice all the tombstones of companies that were once in similar straits.
>> Turning a major accounts sales force into one that calls on VARs and resellers is virtually impossible.
Dude people are buying IBM mainframes and Cisco routers over the web. The days of “VARS” ended a long time ago.
Once your architecture gets the stink of plague on it (IRIX,Tru64,yada yada), its almost impossible to attract buyers. Sun may have already reached that point with Sparc/Solaris. x86 destroyed Sparc a long time ago, I don’t even think this is seriously debated anymore. Now linux is the reference unix implementation, not Solaris. At least IBM sees the writing on the wall and is essentially end-of-life’ing AIX.
It actually looks like some people at Sun understand they are not defining the platform at this point. Others tout the whiz-bang high-end stuff Sun boxes do that x86 boxes do not…yet many fail to realize Sun will be laying off 75% of its workforce if it intends to go the Cray/SGI high performance route.
um…. first of all you cannot compare x86 to SPARC.
AIX and Tru64 and the like are all OS’s tied to one specific archetecture. Solaris, like windows, runs on multiple archetectures. Also, the x86 did not destroy the SPARC. SPARC systems are manufactured by dosens of 3rd party companies and TI has SPARC in the embedded market. End of life’in AIX is horrible to the IBM AIX users and I surely hope they switch to sun. IBM has never had the attitude of enjoying software they only care about hardware…atleast sun cares about software customers too.
i seriously don’t think you own a SPARC box nor have anything to do with sun other than someone who wants to sit back and criticise something you do not understand.
I apologize for being rude in my earlier post. We are all entitled to our own opinions
It’s pretty odd really.. Sun is a company who
a) has THE operating system for servers (Solaris) which plays in its own division
b) has java
c) Has contributed more to the open source world than any other company in the world (as in they should have good will)
and still people say Sun is crap and bla bla bla…
Sun is also the only big Vendor who doesn’t support DRM, something IBM does (and I assume that you could say most Linux fanatics support DRM too since they think IBM and AMD is so great).
Hopefully DRM and such will blast light into Suns HW line again…
Opinion? Hmm. I don’t see much of an opinion, instead i see a number of observations of some happenings.
One of which is copied from someone “close to Sun” stating Sun does more to FLOSS than IBM does. Where are the arguments for that? Without arguments such a statement is hard to believe to be true, except for those who want to believe.
I find it extremely hard to conclude such a statement because there are many factors.
First of all: how do you measure “more”?
* Lines of code? Which languages?
* Projects open-sourced?
* Projects being contributed to?
* Numbers of employers actively working on FLOSS?
* Time invested by employers who work on FLOSS?
* Resources provided (documentation, hardware, etc)?
* Does the size of the companies count too (IBM is far bigger)?
* The benefits the company is not (in)directly gaining from it?
* Combination of the above?
Keeping aside how you measure all the above since that’s also hard to do. A damn lot of work, actually. And some statistics are private information thus harder/practical_impossible to get.
For example: how can you tell which is more important: IBM donating a server to the KDE project or Sun’s contributions to the GNOME project? Both do have impact and both are contributions.
Now to mr. Russian Guy.
“Sun is also the only big Vendor who doesn’t support DRM, something IBM does (and I assume that you could say most Linux fanatics support DRM too since they think IBM and AMD is so great).”
I see voices who argue this on Groklaw and Slashdot, and i agree with them in such way that a company as entity is not necessarily pro or anti <fill in ethic>.
—-
My observation is i see a company which loves its own technologies (Solaris, SPARC, Java) and is convinced they’re superiour than other other alternatives. But they’re not gaining the profit they got from it in the 90’s. Many companies aren’t.
It faces fear by more popular technologies: Windows, .NET, Linux, Intel/AMD’s x86-32 & x86-64 thus they’re trying to take parts of these popular technologies and integrate those in their own which makes their end solution partly their old but with new flavors. It is the same with SCO providing a port of Samba for SCO’s Unices. However these new technologies itself aren’t the only reason Sun is having problems. The economic recession is a reason too, and like it or not this counts for potential Sun customers too. Like it or not, but cheap alternatives look more attractive, and there’s an obvious correlation between popularity and price.
So what do you do when the world is in an economic recession and there’s multiple more cheaper alternatives than yours while theirs is less good? You put down the costs you make as company (eventually temporarily), you put down your prices (eventually temporarily), argument why your product is better, market your product, and thus make it a viable alternative or you accept you’ll be in a niche market which might die or be catched up by the cheaper mass markets. Plus also taking in account the recession part. I’d say there lies potential in people doing parts of the costs the company make, argument why the product is better, improve the product, marketing the product for free (beer). Free labor is great, so when you can partly use that, i’d say go for that [from an economic point of view]. Having said that, why is Sun doing so bad right now? This is what they’re doing…
Maybe the problem lies in the marketing part since smaller companies are shitty on such parts. DEC, for example.
Adapt or die. Good luck Sun!
One of which is copied from someone “close to Sun” stating Sun does more to FLOSS than IBM does. Where are the arguments for that? Without arguments such a statement is hard to believe to be true, except for those who want to believe.
May be if you looked harder you would have found this
http://www.sunsource.net/projects.html
If you add up the lines of code in just OpenOffice and NetBeans, I am sure they will far out number any thing IBM has ever contributed. But lines of code is a stupid way of measuring anything.
But the bottom lines is Opensource advocates/Zealots often remark that sun is evil and against opensource and make IBM to be the poster child of Coorporations doing Opensource. So such statements are often needed to remind said people that Sun has an equally large presence in the OSS market as IBM, if not greater. IBM is mainly a linux contributor and now Eclipse, how many other project has IBM contributed to.
Mr. Tim H. Before you get all nasty towards MY opinions because I am about to take a contrary view from yours, I think you should use reason instead of passion before responding. And if you decide to respond, I think you should know that I’ve been a Unix Administrator for nearly 14 years. Seven of which has been with Solaris 2.6, 7, 8, and 9.
Schwartz and McNealy are primarily responsible for the shambles they’ve made of Sun, just as they are for its once former glory. Oh, the comparisons between Apple (a low”er”-end, non-enterprise, consumer computer soon to be electronics and entertainment company) and Sun ( a high end enterprise only business but soon to be low end consumer java desktop WalMart company) are astounding. What makes the comparisons astounding it the exact opposite paths each company has taken in the last 5 years or so.
Commonalities:
Both Jobs and McNealy had complained and whined for years and years about Microsoft, resultintg in adverse effects on the bottom line of their respective companies.
Both Jobs and McNealy have been primarily responsible for their respective companies glories as well as its miserable failures.
Both or their companies OSes now run Unix or “Unix-like” kernels.
Differences:
While both still claim their products are superior to Microsoft’s, only Jobs is correct. Steve learned this when he returned to Apple and persuaded Bill to throw the company a life-line. It took the pressure of MANY Sun customers to persuade the stubborn McNealy that this marketing gimmick was no longer working, and he has only recently (last month to be exact) changed his tactics. But for Sun, that is too little too late.
Schwartz is only kidding himself if he thinks Java is not only keeping the company afloat, but going to be its saving grace. And Schwartz is equally to blame for Sun’s “holier than thou” attitude when it comes to competing technologies. I can see right through his little “pony tail I’m a smart rebel working in the man’s system” trickery.
Jobs has reversed his companies near disasterous path and has brought Apple back to its former glories. And if anyone thinks that Sun is a “victim” of the media, take a look at all the tech rag’s supposed analysis on Apple and you’ll see why that cannot be the cause for Sun’s current predicament.
Apple is very very slowly trying to move into a small enterprise niche, while Sun is taking the exact opposite approach and trying to compete in the low-end consumer desktop space. I don’t think Joe-Bob and Elly-May WalMart customers are going to trek down the gravel road to buy a “Sun” machine.
Jobs is turning Apple into a profitable and popular consumer electronics and media company. McNealy is turning Sun into a “buy” opportunity for IBM or HP.
The writing this time is plainly on the wall, for all to see
FYI,
SunSource.net
http://www.sunsource.net/
Quite right.
Although SUN and Apple have both let Microsoft “happen”, Apple is seeking a way out and might have found one, for now.
SUN is still pretending to believe that the old markets might be resurected and themselves negate the opportunities that their open source involvement offer them.
SUN is not even a buy opportunity, since it is now more of a liability than powerhouse with a funding problem. IBM would just like to get opensource’s hand on Java, because Java + Linux is a hugely cost effective starting point to compete against MS proposition. Beyond that, I don’t see them paying for control of SUN just to get Java open source.
Sun is trying really hard to change itself and while it gets a lot of heat from the industry for not turning itself into a box pusher like Dell or a Linux puppet like IBM, it’s trying to reinvent itself. It’s a difficult process. Sun has a great product line, both hardware and software. They are realizing that they have to cover both the high-end, the middle ground, and the low-end markets. It’s not something that happens in a day or a year to make that kind of change. Regardless of what ppl say, here are the paths for Sun:
1. Sun succeeds in integrating it’s hardware and software product lines for small business and large enterprises and reaches a balance that returns good profits.
2. Sun succeeds on the corporate desktop and sells mid-range /entry-level servers to support the JDS/sunray market.
3. Sun succeeds in integrating technology from Fujitsu’s SPARC64 and produces a processor that competes with IBM’s Power4 and soon Power5. Helps attract IBM AIX, Tru64, HPUX, etc customers who don’t want to switch to commodity x86 hardware running linux. Sun returns to being a high-end Unix vendor. Fails with general consumer market.
4. Sun succeeds at transforming into a services company utilizing N1 blade products and high-end servers. Offers hosting and management services to companies. Becomes a leader in that niche market. Succeeds at providing services and technology used in offices, production lines, stores, and homes(through digital cable).
5. Sun fails at all of the above and gets bought out by Fujitsu Siemens. Technology melds between the two and next generation systems come out that are faster and cheaper that will be targeted at large corporations, telco companies, and the embedded market. With Fujitsu’s marketing power, Sun’s products finally get wide market usage.
6. Sun fails at all of the above. Sun uses it’s money to buy back all of its shares. Becomes a privitely held company. Reinvents itself into a highend only Unix vendor for backend services (telco, governments, medical, etc.).
Bottom line is that Sun will survive in one form or another. It won’t be bought out by the likes of IBM, HP, Dell, etc, because Fujitsu-Siemens are line first:) For those who think Sun is down the same path as DEC, you are wrong. DEC was a great company, but it sold off soo much of its IP in the early ’90’s that it stripped itself down to harshly to survive or be revivied. Compaq saved them and helped keep DEC products (Tru64, VMS, storage, etc) going. While both Sun and DEC suck at marketing, Sun holds dearly onto its IP and that’s what a company needs to hold onto the most. Apple went through a lot and it did not give up its IP, because without it, another company would sell it cheaper (think of Dell selling Mac clones and M$ selling the MacOS GUI in windows). Personally, I hope that Sun will keeps things together and succeed at a doing a combination of 1,2,3, and 4 from above to reach a stable state in the market.
>>Bottom line is that Sun will survive in one form or another
Hmm, that’s funny. I seem to remember someone making that same statement, and all the same arguments, about DEC. And we know what happened to DEC? Don’t we?