MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-09-18 |
| FROM | From: "Steve Milo"
|
| 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 -
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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
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