MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-09-18 |
| FROM | From: "rc"
|
| SUBJECT | RE: [hangout] Sun reports Wall Street sick of Free Software :(
|
Hmm.... I was thinking:
PROPAGANDA
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hangouts-at-mrbrklyn.com [mailto:owner-hangouts-at-mrbrklyn.com] On
Behalf Of Steve Milo
Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2004 6:11 PM
To: Ruben Safir; hangout-at-nylxs.com
Subject: Re: [hangout] Sun reports Wall Street sick of Free Software :(
One word.
Initiative.
Steve M
On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:57:38 -0400, Ruben Safir wrote
> Sun's Schwartz: Linux honeymoon is over on Wall Street
>
> Jonathan Schwartz looks to Wall Street as one of the few industries
> with the means-money and will-to regularly redefine the computer
> industry. So Sun's president and chief operating officer is making it
> a goal to get to know Wall Street a lot better, including a visit to
> New York next week trying to drum up some attention to this effort.
> Wall Street & Technology did a quick E-mail question-and- answer with
> Schwartz in which he, among other things, predicts a growing
> disillusionment with Linux. Sun has had to battle a cost- cutting
> mentality that prompted many financial companies in recent years to
> migrate off Solaris to Linux running on cheaper boxes. "I would say
> about one customer a month is telling me that the honeymoon is over
> because for all practical purposes, the Linux market has tipped to a
> single vendor-Red Hat," says Schwartz. Here's the full exchange:
>
> Wall Street & Technology: What does Sun have to do differently than it
> has been to win more business on Wall Street?
>
> Schwartz: If you had asked that question two years, or even a year
> ago, I would have been able to tell you what we should be doing
differently.
> But right now Sun is doing all the right stuff. For one thing, Sun is
> listening closely to its customers. It sounds simple, but listening
> requires us to put our egos aside and find out what is really keeping
> developers, operators and the CXO up at night. It's about really
> understanding their needs and then creating the technology-and
> solutions-that matters to them. And it's not just me, Scott McNealy,
> my executive staff. The whole company is listening. If our employees
> aren't visiting our Executive Briefing Center, spending full days with
> customers, then that's a big concern of mine.
>
> Secondly, we're attacking two things head-on: cost and complexity. I
> haven't found a customer yet who has complained about that. Instead of
> selling just a piece of software, or just a storage device, we're
> selling the whole system. It's a smarter system than anybody else's on
> the planet because it runs on top of something we call Solaris, which
> is by far the best operating system on the planet. Why? It's got the
> rich features that Wall Street customers want at a price point that is
> below Red Hat's. And, it runs on both SPARC and x86 processors, for
> whatever your purpose. Mind you, Sun didn't do Solaris on X86-based
> chips a few years ago, so this is a big change based on customer
> feedback. And today we also have an agreement now with Microsoft to
> develop products that work together, that interoperate. How's that for
> doing things differently?
>
> WS&T: Where is the adoption of Linux on Wall Street today-just
> getting started, or starting to peak? Which reality is better news for
> Sun's business?
>
> Schwartz: We want Linux to succeed because Linux is a version of Unix.
> And Sun is built on Unix. There will always be the need for Linux, but
> there will always be a market for Solaris-the number one Unix OS on
> earth. Honestly, I would say about one customer a month is telling me
> that the honeymoon is over because for all practical purposes, the
> Linux market has tipped to a single vendor-Red Hat.
> And things like professional services support, upgrade costs, ISV
> support and security are becoming an issue no one wants to depend on a
> single vendor for. Imagine having thousands and thousands of servers
> all over your data center with just-OK features to manage them to make
> sure they are fully utilized. That ends up being a lot of system
> administrators who don't work for free. So we've seen a lot of
> companies turning to Sun asking us what to do now.
>
> We know at least one instance when a financial services company had a
> problem with Red Hat's operating system and they asked Red Hat to fix
> it ASAP. Moments later it found its way onto a developer forum,
> posted by a Red Hat engineer. How's that for one throat to choke?
> Suffice it to say, this customer came to us for a better way. One by
> one, our customers are beginning to see that Solaris on AMD Opteron is
> the fastest and most reliable answer to leveraging commodity hardware
> while managing your compute network with ease. And now with Solaris
> 10, Sun has the types of features that Red Hat does not have, like
> logical partitioning and dynamic tracing. That's because there are
> billions of dollars of R&D in Solaris 10, and this is the payback to
> our customers.
>
> WS&T: Sun hardware is seen as expensive, often too expensive. Do you
> agree it's thought of that way today? What's your answer?
>
> Schwartz: Someone must have started a rumor that Sun equals expensive,
> but if you look at the number of "success stories" my team shows me
> where customers are saving millions of dollars a year running Sun,
> then you'll realize it's just a question of showing everyone, one by
> one, the facts. Our biggest challenge was perception, not price or
> performance. We needed to prove that we've made a big change. In the
> last year we've been delivering on that.
> As I was saying, it's not that we don't have the industry-standard
> hardware, or that we don't have an extremely simple and predictable
> pricing model for our middleware and desktop stack, which we call Java
> Enterprise system and Java Desktop System respectively. We support
> GNU/Linux and have millions of Java developers as part of our
> ecosystem.
>
> The challenge was to get our products into our target market-those
> that don't want vendor lock-in and are looking for the best
> price/performance on the market. That becomes a perception challenge.
> So what we've done is begin proving ourselves to Wall Street. We're
> currently conducting a sizable handful of very strategic pilots with
> the top firms on Wall Street, running whatever Sun systems they choose
> to run whatever applications they want. Give them choice and let them
> decide. People like what they see.
>
> WS&T: In a year-or better, what measurement should we look at to see
> if you've succeeded in this market segment?
>
> Schwartz: You probably know this better than I do, but Wall Street is
> a tightly knit community, a community I am getting to know better
> every day. I'm not permitted to give forward-looking statements,
> particularly about our financial results, but once our pilot customers
> start being as vocal about Solaris running on AMD Opteron as they were
> about Linux two years ago, I can assure you other industries will be
> following close behind. And we're seeing incredible momentum already,
> literally triple-digit growth in AMD Opteron server units shipped
> quarter over quarter coupled with huge Solaris download numbers.
>
> ____________________________
> NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene Fair Use - because it's
> either fair use or useless....
> NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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