As many are already aware, we embarked upon a journey a couple years ago to formally separate the Solaris operating system from Sun’s hardware business – as well as bring Solaris to the free and open source software world via a community effort named OpenSolaris. None of these changes were easy, but I’d like to believe both were successful. What’s my proof?
By now, you’ve seen the news that Sun and IBM have struck a deal to support Solaris on IBM hardware.
Words alone cannot describe how great it feels to type that sentence. In fact, I think I’ll type it again.
By now, you’ve seen the news that Sun and IBM have struck a deal to support Solaris on IBM hardware.
Through the relationship, IBM will become a Solaris OEM, and will resell subscriptions on their System X and BladeCenter hardware – in addition, we’ll both work on optimizations for drivers and system performance, and collaborate to serve customers that want choice. (As I said to a journalist today after the announcement, vendors that don’t offer choice can only serve customers that don’t want choice… while IBM and Sun can serve the rest.)
To me, this is a tectonic shift in the marketplace – bringing together erstwhile competitors to serve a marketplace IBM and Sun agree is bigger than the both of us. By working together, we can serve customers wanting to run Solaris on IBM hardware, and deliver a unique set of solutions (including IBM’s middleware, the majority of which is certified on Solaris, too). This isn’t about displacing partners or revenue streams, it’s about growing both – and as the first Tier 1 x86 system vendor to sign on as a comprehensive Solaris OEM, IBM is clearly in the pole position to capture that growth.
Does this change the world? Answering for Sun, I think yes – it does. The announcement validates what we’ve been saying all along – the momentum around Solaris as a cross platform, open source operating system is indisputable. Driven by integrated virtualization, extreme performance, the integrity of the open source OpenSolaris community, and most of all… driven by tons of new developers and customers, across the world, building new solutions and businesses on the web.
We’ve also said, all along, that a groundswell of developer adoption is the best leading indicator of commercial opportunities – for us, our developers and partners. This relationship puts that debate to rest.
So thank you, IBM – we’re looking forward to working together. We couldn’t be more excited (but that was probably obvious). A world of opportunity awaits us both…
What I Couldn't Say... 
Congratulations! I think this is a very good day for Solaris, OpenSolaris and Sun. I am not quite sure about AIX. I think they might start realizing that the light at the end of tunnel is a Freight Train heading towards them.
– Ex-AIX Systems and Libraries Developer
Nice to see another great channel opened up. Nice job Jonathan on racking up another notch in your series of moves that can be characterized as synergistic and optimistic, and eschewing the previous regime’s mode of focusing on conflicts rather than opportunities with competitors.
Great, indeed.
Good to have at least one nice OS supported on the blades.
(FreeBSD being unsupported)
Now, all SUN has got to do is to hire some coders and get the FreeBSD ports-system going on Solaris.
Then, you’ll see even more people think long and hard about installing another Linux-box.
Its very good move for Solaris.. Thanks for that!!!
it is good IBM realizes that solaris 10 is a multi-core cpu answer stable product…having used sun OS for (12) years…my comment is.. it runs very well and it is tough as nails. my worry was/is that sun OS would survive.. what sun needs is revenue growth..but I am sure you know that.. you do don’t you?..I think you do…
So you have 4 players in the market.
HPQ , IBM , DELL and SUN.
HPQ story – We do not have a stake in OS market. But they seem to be getting the importance of software and are focussing on things like opsware , mercury etc.
IBM – a Services focussed sale. An open source leader , not surprised that 1st Tier 1 player to re-sell solaris.
DELL – pure hardware vendor , no software presence.
SUN – an open source strategy that still needs to be proved that it would generate revenue. FLAT revenues for an year.
I see the following – there have to be three players in this world. either DELL or SUNW will be eaten up.
one more thing that can through a wrench in SUNW plans – HPQ potentially buying REDHAT. by this HPQ will have an OS + middleware + opensource story.
Another Question
Does anyone have an R&D dollar comparision between HP UX , AIX and Solaris.
Who is putting in the most money ?
Very nice! This is excellent news for Solaris and Sun as a whole. It is also very good news for all the Solaris geeks out there… 🙂
Wow, words defy me… …massive increase in customer exposure, for both parties, more choices for customers and Hell just froze over. Monolithic market strategy and vendor lock in is looking decidedly old and unstable.
Rainer, why would anyone want FreeBSD’s ports system on anything, let alone Solaris? pkgsrc is already available and is significantly better than the FreeBSD ports tree. Sun actually supplied a pair of compile boxes with Solaris on them for pkgsrc work to NetBSD.
Jon, Congrats!
Any comments about Google and Star Office partnership please?
How does that grow revenue? I do understand well the ramifications of IBM-Solaris deal with revenue growth but not Google-StarOffice deal.
BTW: your predecessor signed a partnership with Google more than a year ago and I still don’t see what that means for SUN. Was it just a paper announcement?
Thanks,
Non-news – all this says is that Solaris will run on xSeries (x86). Wake me when IBM drops AIX and Solaris runs on Power6.
Hopefully we’ll start to see Solaris on system p
Great news !
I look forward to more device drivers for SATA and NIC chipsets on the x86 platform. Now all Solaris needs is more ISV support to continue for it to grow more .. Mathematica on Solaris is great, things I would like to see on Solaris is the Atmel IDE and it should be so easy to port and I don’t know why they have not, please ask them !
Any way, great news and for all you Solaris dev / home users out there keep a eye on my OpenSolaris Magazine project over at http://moonshine.opn4.org/ yes that is Joomla running on Solaris/SPARC and yes it was easy. We plan to do a HOWTO on setting up a CMS on Solaris too 🙂
Regards,
Edward.
When I installed Solaris10 11/06 6-7 months ago on IBM Server, our IBM Engineers were not happy about it and were reluctant to provide support.
I told them that i have installed solaris anticipating that one day IBM will
support it.
Great news for me and all solaris lovers!!
NIRAJ J,
Actually there are several studies over companies contributing code to open source, and in all these articles, Sun is at the top, not IBM. Sun has almost open sourced everything they have (at least all important major technology as Java, Solaris, etc)
From http://www.sun.com/2007-0130/feature/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007jan30_opensrc_read
"A recent report on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) prepared for the European Commission measured Sun’s activity within the GNU/Linux community.
The report found that Sun contributes substantially more code to a Linux distribution than any other organization, including IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Hewlett-Packard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In fact, Sun’s overall contribution is more than three times that of its next closest competitor, IBM, in second place, and more than five times that of Red Hat, in third. According to the report, Sun has contributed more than $400,000,000 worth of source code to the GNU/Linux distribution.
…
"When it comes to Sun’s contribution to free and open source software, however, these contributions represent the tip of the iceberg. Sun has open-sourced much of its technology, including the Solaris operating system, under the OpenSolaris project, the UltraSPARC T1 microprocesser, under the OpenSPARC project, and in November 2006, Sun announced the further open-sourcing of the Java technology platform.
If you look at the engineering resources required to produce all of that software, the value easily exceeds $2 billion, and that’s assuming you could even find the people to create another Java, another Solaris 10, another UltraSPARC T1," says Phipps."
This is simply awesome! Kudos to you, Jonathan, for this achievement. Time and again, from the day you took over, you have impressed upon Sun’s competitors the need to collaborate and serve the common customer base better than ever before. And everyone wins in the bargain. Sun’s prospects can only improve hereon. Please do keep the good work going.
I wonder how important ZFS was in the decision to OEM Solaris? Also, could ZFS be ported to AIX (similar to BSD and OS-X)?
What happens to Sun’s own x86 boxes – how does Sun plan to remain competitive in that segment of the market? IBM sure is a lot more aggressive than Sun, and now they got one of your kits’ key features.
Let’s do the math:
What Sun gets from this deal: Subscription revenue
What Sun may lose because of this deal: market share losss of Sun’s own x86 server to IBM
What is the net effect? Negative for SUN.
But less negative than sitting there waiting to die.
This will lengthen the dying process. Congratulations (LOL).
[Trackback] Companies that have run Sun hardware now know they can continue to get competitive gear even as Moore’s Second Law continues to bite.
…
I don’t think AIX is in any danger from Solaris x86. I’d much rather see an announcement from IBM for AIX/x86.
OFFTOPIC: For a company at the world of Networking Sun has one of the slowest websites (on the planet?) for Training. I’d encourage Mr. Schwartz to actually use the website http://www.sun.com/training and experience what we (paying customers) have to endure. Further, I’d like to encourage him to actually enroll in a class and see how broken the order flow is compared to the Amazon.com OneClick (or not.) As a side note http://docs.sun.com finally entered the Network age in the last few weeks and is performing admirably (it was slower than molases on a cold winter morning before the change/upgrade)
This is awesome news but apparently nobody told IBM… There are still quite a few pages on their site that dig, dig, dig at Sun. These are some of the most relevant links when you search ‘Solaris’ on IBM’s website:
Guide to porting from Solaris to Linux on x86
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-solar/
"Migrate from Sun: Don’t get burned"
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/migratetoibm/sun.html?&ca=qapromo-s0stg-b0stg-l0mig-d0stgsmb-n033-o0fromsun-g0usen
Solaris to Linux Migration (a WHOLE BOOK!)
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247186.html?open&ca=qapromo-s0sd-b0sd-l0rb-d0sdrb-n050-o0solaris-g0usen
Obuiq-
Let’s do the real math here….
Service revenue has a much higher margin than server revenue.
Companies (like people) often have "brand loyalty" for commodities (hardware). People who are brand loyal to IBM xSeries probably would not have bought Sun X-servers anyway. So, Sun is unlikely to loose significant server revenue in this way.
Plus, Sun now has a foot in the door at these companies to try and change the brand loyalty and/or move to the SPARC at a later date.
What does IBM get out of this? More hardware sales.
What is the effect of this: Net win for both companies.
Misc Guy-
You missed out on the major part of the announcement if you think this is only "Solaris will run on xSeries". Solaris already ran on xSeries. This is an OEM and cooperative engineering agreement, vastly different.
It is great IBM will be putting Solaris on some of their boxes. Great for the customer that is. As for a Sun shareholder, this is a non event or even worse, a net negative to revenue growth.
I just don’t get it. I kind of sense Sun is throwing up the white flag. Sun’s one big selling point (Solaris) is now available from IBM. I can see the hardware revenue dropping over the next several years with a Sun prayer that Solaris licensing/support revenue picks up the slack. The Titanic is now departing…..
Is it beginning of the story :IBM acquiring Sun?
Nika,
where is pkgsrc for Solaris?
The pkgsrc-website lists a bootstrap-kit for Solaris 9/i386 that is from 2003, apparently.
I’m seriously looking for a solution to this problem (mainly to be able to build a modularized PHP quickly, like on FreeBSD).
To all the people who think SUN looses big sales: most IBM-shops are die-hard IBM-shops – they wouldn’t take a Galaxy-server if it was free and came with a gift-basket…
Just browsing the internet, your blog is very, very interesting.
Will Solaris on IBM systems only be limited to x86/x64 offerings or will it also support the POWER and PowerPC architectures as well? I know that the current fastest supercomputers in the world still depend on IBM POWER processors for the brute force performance. Will Solaris be able to handle/manage those types of workloads at the same rate of returns (work done/calculations performed) as we’ve traditionally seen with IBM POWER/AIX/Linux combinations?
Dear Jonathan Schwartz,
Sun’s strategic alliances with large companies such as IBM is path breaking. Erstwhile competitors, who remain competitors and will continue to be so, on one sphere, are brought from across the table to be seated by your side as Partners. In the computer industry this thinking will cause waves.
I dusted up a corporate planning project report that I wrote for Maruti Suzuki in India twenty one years ago as a business student and pulled out a network diagram showing the Transnational links in the automobile industry. The interesting, complex diagram, if summarized in simple statements showed that GM worked with Ford that worked with Toyota that worked with Mitsubishi that worked with Fiat that worked with Mercedez Benz, through a complex maze of arrangements.
World over the motor cars today are seen rolling on four wheels. The wheels are round.
All these motorcars take gasoline from Shell, Esso, Indian Oil or British Petroleum. All these cars seem to have enough room for a 9" LCD screen; a Sony DVD player plugs into any car without the need for a Mercedez media player driver which needs to be recompiled for a Toyota which would be useless in a Fiat.
In India we have the Congress Party whose idealistic rivals are the BJP and the left parties. All three of them bitterly oppose each other to win my vote, but India moves ahead and prospers because and only because there is tremendous amount of understanding between these bitter rivals and they benevolently work together at all times.
Sun works with Oracle, IBM, Microsoft (We are wooing with Sun, the same Sun that we never used to work with, Yes, the same Sun that we never used to work with, Yes, the very same Sun that we never used to work with … Steve Blamer -not quoted verbatim- on stage a Microsoft event before he happily pulled out a fan from a live Sun fireX or Niagra to demonstrate a Windows feature)
If the IBM Solaris alliance is a part of the beginning, where could all this lead the computer industry ?
Ten, twenty or fifty years from now I will plug in an Intel processor co-developed by Sparc on an AMD socket, or feature a Turion processor in an Intel notebook. And pull out a processor fan from a Dell and cool my Sun desktop. What works in Red Hat will work in Windows.
All computers will be square and all sockets will be round. Developers may not have to rewrite software twenty three times.
Congratulations on the IBM Solaris move.
EWEN,
There are efforts to port Solaris to Power CPU. The project is called… Polaris. Google it up.
Sun has this as news on its home page. IBM does not. Simple.
Johnason, make sure check out how many IBM boxes running Solaris10 sold in next quarter. Compare with the number generated by your sales force. It’ll be very very interesting. Then you’ll know how to spend the 100-150M h/c reduction budget.
As has been stated further above, most of these IT managers in the various industries are loyal to brands (in spite of managing around wildly on the surfaces, leaving traces in the technical press).
Conservative, not always doubtlessly upright (and most often not really interested in technical things) as they are, they stick with partners they have known for a long time, they stick with systems and decisions that have been established resp. taken in the past, they spend millions unneccessarily every year.
Not few of these typical IT managers have chosen IBM as their typical IT partner, as IBM is the typical IT partner of these typical IT managers.
And knowing IBM, IBM will not urge them to swith to Solaris if they are happy with Windows or Linux. So first of all, nothing will happen.
But: as many IT departments are forced to save money, due to the unneccessarily spend millions mentioned above. Some of these IT managers (those poor guys that need to stick with the job a little longer than originaly intended) have to find ways to optimize the utilization of their server hardware, finding that these small Windows and Linux systems are mostly loaded less than 25%, costing fortunes in terms of electricity and space, cabling and infrastructure. Here they start clutching at all straws they can find and they start to even throw overboard their faked profitability plans of the past.
They start to be open for innovations. They start to calculate with facts. This will then finally be the moment when they find that Solaris is much cheaper than Windows or Linux. It is so cheap even, that they can buy more costly servers from IBM instead of the cheaper ones from SUN. And not bothering about reasonable technologies like the T2 or the AMD64 server lines of SUN they will buy Xeon based servers from IBM instead.
And IBM will be in the good position to offer Solaris too with these. The not always doubtlessly upright people can solve their cost problem and will stay in the job. They get rewarded and trusted. Meanwhile IBM mainframes will learn to run zSolaris and then be used as consolidation platforms.
In short: IBM customers will stay IBM customers, as long as their life endures and not doubtlessly impossible it is, that they remain true IBM customers even after that.
But surely the OEM business for SUN will increase by that decision and Solaris, as a mature and modern Unix technology will get a still better stand in the computation centers (now being an IBM-approved trend-setting platform again) and us, the system enginers, architects and developers (those poor guys who are always upright and thus will never be IT managers) will have less trouble and less heterogeneity to manage.
So there is nothing wrong about that decision. A good decision for a better IT world.
Synergy and Co-existence have shown results which benefited the user community. Erstwhile competitors become friends and good friends, history repeats not only in Politics but also in Technology. I remember the scene which showed Scot McNealy said not to "NT and Microsoft" later both changed their views and co-operated. I am off the feeling that both SUN and IBM will benefit from this and user community will welcome and reap the benefit.
Posted by Sebastian Francis
HI
I am trying to establish the effect of blogging on company’s communications with their customers/stakeholders.
I.e. does the fact that it facilitates two-way communication
fundamentally alter the dialogue process?
I am doing the research as part of my dissertation for my course MA
Communications Management. It would help me greatly if you were to answer the short questionnaire below and send it to
r.crutchley@londonmet.ac.uk
Let me know if you require any additional information.
Kind regards, Rachel
Rachel Crutchley
Student ID 9901912
Questionnaire on corporate blogging – please return to r.crutchley@londonmet.ac.uk Many thanks
Corporate blogging is a relatively new addition to the communications mix. In what ways do you think its evolution has affected corporations relationship with their customers/stakeholders?
In your view what role does corporate blogging play in the communications mix of organisations?
In your view what is the appropriate level of blogging in a company e.g. who (what level) should blog? How frequently?
What arrangements/safeguards (if any) are in place to manage your corporate blog? E.g. are comments censored before they are made live on the site?
Do you have, or have to adhere to any kind of corporate code when blogging?
Could you briefly outline how you feel blogs add or should add to the functionality of a company’s communication with its customers/stakeholders?
In your view as blogging becomes more widespread how can we ensure corporate blogs are effective and useful?
Please comment on the future of blogging and communications and anything else you feel relevant?
Please pass this questionnaire on to anyone else in your company that also blogs on the company blog.
Many thanks
J – wonderful stuff.
Possibly IBM will be able to make Sunsolve work for downloads….even for contracted customers ?
Having your core support site unusable for weeks on end isn’t a very good advert for Sun’s ability to make things work, what’s the good of all the bright ideas and marketing puff if your people can’t deal with delivering basdic technical solutions. Or maybe thery just don’t care, in whih case no many how many ‘big deals’ you come up with you’re probably not going toget much of it working.
There was a time when Sun get technical services correct – you’re obviously on the slide despite the big headlines.
Maybe you should just get IBM in big-time. I’ll bet AIX support doesn’t have he problems that Solaris does
OO
Great news about IBM. Now take advantage of an opportunity that will not last long: BUY CITRIX CORP. They bought Xensource as you know, and along with the Citrix Customer base, makes this an amazing opportunity that if missed………? Keep up the great work! Doug
What’s Next after Web 2.0?
I do not like those buzz words like Web 2.0, Business 2.0 etc., however in order to communication, you have to conform to their protocols, otherwise they might think you are speaking in a foreign language. So far Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 lead by Youtube, FaceBook, same Amazon, New Yahoo! and New Google is successful, though at not successful as Web 1.0/Internet 0.0 led by Old Yahoo!, Ebay, Amazon and Old Google. Why? Not a big surprise anymore when from Web 1.0/Internet 0.0 to Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 as opposed from nothing to Web 1.0/Internet 0.0.
I believe the next after Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 is Web 3.0/Internet 2.0, however we’d better to call it Internet 2.0, since at that time, Web is not that important any more. Why?
Web 1.0/Internet 0.0 – Informed, you as a reader
Web 2.0/Internet 1.0 – Inform, you as a writer
Internet 2.0 (as opposed as Web 3.0/Internet 2.0) – formation of Information, you as a reader, writer, and much more
– BTW I am writing this post while I am watching a lecture C++0x (yes, C++0x) on at Univ. of Waterloo made by Prof. Bjarne Stroustrup – Prof. Stroustrup, think about C++ 3.0, borrow somthing nice from Ruby, the world is way too different now as opposed to 1980s
Frontier Space – http://www.hwswworld.com/space
Frontier Blog – http://www.hwswworld.com/wp
Great news?
For IBM it sure is a great news.
For Sun I’m not really sure.
Yawn. Show us the money. From $6 to $4, no hype is saving SUNW. PIPE financing is the leading cause of a stock price’s retreat and death to shareholder value. Comments Johnny? Now $2 off SUNW’s more recent highs…we’re waiting.
I’ll bet you used Cut-and-Paste for that! 🙂
Great news, as everyone else has commented. I find it odd that when Big Blue went "open" years ago, everyone responded in a similar fashion – "how will you ever make money." They responded with "by selling whatever the customer wants, as long as they keep paying us." It worked for them, and it should be able to work for Sun.
One thing that I truly HOPE comes out of this is increased innovation from Sun. Sun has a way of creating really useful, broad-ranging solutions. But they can’t market it worth squat. "Sun shops" are the only ones who ever really adopt them. Perhaps IBM can do this. At the very least, their huge Global Services operation could put Sun tech in front of a lot of existing customers…
Charles
One more thing – VMware needs to put Solaris on its road maps. Their Virtual Infrastructure products are strategic for many of us, and Solaris support is trailing far behind Windows support. Very little in the way of their new features are directed at Solaris, and there are still things very wrong about Solaris on ESX 3…
Charles
Solaris is the content, IBM is the distribution, now to push the brand. 🙂 "Solaris" subliminal messages everywhere. You hear it at work, at play, in your sleep…solaris. 🙂 I think this is a great deal for Sun, by far. IBM made Microsoft. Just shows what great distribution can do for a so-so(trying to keep it nice;)) software company. Now, imagine what IBM distribution can do for a great bit of ‘ware. 🙂 Dare I say that SUN is becoming a real software company? 🙂 Will, SUN become more known for it’s software, rather than it’s hardware? Stay tuned! A Nu Sun rising–Solaris. (applause).
Mark
"… and that’s assuming you could even find the people to create another … UltraSPARC T1"
Dear Simon Phipps,
You could find the people.
Looking good from a Solaris user perspective, but I’m not sure how this actually boosts revenue for Sun. I’m not sure Sun will see a lot of support contracts coming in, given IBM is always very happy to provide commercial Solaris support – like the hundred plus E25Ks in Australia supported by IBM.
Seeing some T1 (or N2!) blades in IBM Blade frames would be amazing, given IBM’s blade solutions have an industry record of running out of power capacity as performance increases. Perhaps this could be the first big "win" for Sun’s new commodity processor strategy.
Many in the industry predicted this – but it is surprising that it took so long. It would be great to get a timeline of the negotiations.
Great move by Sun and IBM and I believe both will benefit. The benefits for Sun are obvious (IBM are THE main competitor) but IBM will also benefit, as they are are a massive Strategic Outsourcer and Solaris will now be an OS that they can select, to meet their client demands.
Hopefully, IBM will do as good a job as HP to certify Solaris on their hardware (the HP/Sun cross-site links are excellent).
I’ve worked for a team that manages the "hundred plus E25Ks in Australia supported by IBM". IBM support for Solaris in Australia is not doing Sun/Solaris much good. Technically Solaris MAY have all the goodies to be able to compete with AIX, but poorly trained Solaris staff within IBM(most of them retrained mainframe and HP admins) are giving Solaris a bad name to some of Solaris’ biggest customers in the world. It’s blame Solaris where they can, when even the designs are flawed. BM may be good at service, but they sure don’t know (or care to know) Solaris
At least SUNW has been doing better long term than IBM
See http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=SUNW&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=ibm
JS, Looks like a nice deal for IBM to shore up their CMT in the future, we would hate to see them run 16 cores and 128 threads on Windows NT or Redhat, their ain’t that much customer support in the world.
Andre, IBM is indeed more than happy to provide commercial solaris support. They have many Sun support contracts, esp. for the BIG servers, but also for other hardware. So do many other large integrators/3rd party support organizations. Nothing new and don’t expect that to change.
This is in response to Anantha that had some concerns about the performance of sun.com/training. I work in support of the sun.com/training Web site and while we are continuously making improvements, I would like to get more information on the problems you experienced to determine if there are some currently unseen issues that we should be addressing. If you are willing to share this detail, please contact me at greg.alexander@sun.com. Thanks in advance for your feedback as it helps to make the user experience better for all.
Is it me or do you guys think this is the first step toward a merger between the two leading Unix companies. Sun needs the money and IBM has it. IBM needs the market share of Solaris and Sun has it.
Nice news. Solaris virtualization features on IBM hardware. The Mainframe is dead. Long live the Mainframe!
a handful of misc musings:
— given pros and cons noted above, sounds verygood to me on balance.
— solaris on power would be attractive.
— AFAICT sun seems to be doing less mass media advertising than ibm or hp, instead putting resources into developing cool stuff and giving it away to get attention and generate good will. i mostly prefer the latter, but must admit that there are benefits to being a household name. folks who recomend sun may value technical advantages over hype, but those who approve those requests and sign the checks may get a warm fuzzy feeling from a familiar name. perhaps having ibm as a solaris OEM will permit sun to benefit a bit from ibm’s big budget tv commercials, etc. [just an aside, but sun really could be more aggresive about product placement in movies, tv shows, other folks’ commercials, etc. apple and ibm/lenovo have done very well with this, and it’s relatively cheap. this recalls the topic of a sun desktop machine with a distinctive appearance mentioned by another poster recently.]
— will we see this technology flow become bidirectional? would it be easier to sell niagra-based boxes into ibm shops if they could run AIX? is there potential in building large smp boxes using both niagra and cellBE (or something similar) processors? (imagine being able to create domains with as much or as little vector processing muscle as required.)
— off topic but important: i agree with posting above about the impact of the perceived performance of sun’s products on the web. any site closely associated with sun should be fast! fast! fast! that goes for sun’s own sites, as well as ebay, or any other site known to running with sun technology. (these days more folks are probably exposed to the sun brand via ebay than in any other way and the impression they get of sun is probably very influenced by how well ebay is performing when they happen to be using it.)
— is there an appropriate place for posting new product requests, marketing ideas, etc?
afterthought re sgi:
as sgi has some attractive software technology and might benefit from being able to run solaris, some sort of OEM or technology sharing arrangement between sun and sgi could be a win-win. [frankly, if sgi didn’t have so much baggage in the form of old, incompatible product lines to support i’d suggest considering a merger or acquisition.]
I cant believe you and your so-called chief open source officer are getting paid 6 digit salaries to come up with some BS publicity stunt like this. While thousands of employees are laid off in order to increase your margins.
whoa, I don’t really follow JAVA and SUN this closely but from the looks of these comments this CEO just got destroyed – ouch
OK great but where are all the Solaris books – I want to upgrade from Solaris 8 but cannot find books for Solaris 10 or Open Solaris so we have to stick with 8 or move to Red Hat.
"As I said to a journalist today after the announcement, vendors that don’t offer choice can only serve customers that don’t want choice… while IBM and Sun can serve the rest."
One of the most hypocritical comments I’ve heard in a long while. With the supply chain constantly strained and customers needing product immediately, customers look to open market options when Sun can’t deliver. Sun’s answer to their own brand-loyal customers who have looked to Sun, want to buy Sun in channel, but cannot because of leadtime or budgetary constraints? IF YOU PURCHASE SUN HARDWARE ANYWHERE OUTSIDE OF OUR CHANNEL WE WILL NOT MAINTAIN, LICENSE, OR HONOR ANY WARRANTY. How’s that for Choice? Sorry, Mr. Customer, we can’t help you, and since we can’t you will have to change your business needs according to our delivery schedules. If you purchase our branded hardware from any other reputable companies outside of the channel, we will treat it as a leper and will punish you financially for your decision to keep your business running.
Customers are getting tired of the games and are looking elsewhere for vendors that offer true options and have the wherewithal to actually empathize with customer needs rather than serving up bigger revenue numbers. $4 stock price says it all.