Eco Sun rising with the UltraSPARC T1

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Sun is the next Digital ....

Jonathan is correct in that "volume begets value", however Sun is not a volume company. In 2001 we at META Group wrote an article called "Sun is the next digital unless?" on the basis that server infrastructure had shifted to a commodity market where volume is king and Suns traditional technology leadership in SPAC and Solaris where of little value.

* In CPU architecture x32/64 is the volume play, not SPARC. Sun was very late to this party and brings minimal value. Their AMD systems are very impressive but easily copied by the other vendors.

* In the OS space Windows and Linux are the volume play, not Solaris. Sure Solaris is superior, but wasn?t MVS in its day! By failing to adequately support x86 though the '90s Sun failed to establish Solaris as the alternative volume OS. Now with two strong leaders, Sun's chances of capturing this are slim.

* In the web server market ISS and Apache are the volume leaders, not iPlanet/Sun ONE. In the app server space .NET and WebSphere & JBOSS are the volume plays, not Sun. In '00 Sun failed to leverage its then strong Solaris brand to drive volume in either of these spaces.

Over the 5 years that I covered Sun as a META Group analyst not once did they get it right in the volume market! Sun has been a classic victim of ?disruptive technology? (x86 and Linux) in the sense of Clayton M. Christensen?s ?The Innovators Dilemma? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology) While open sourcing Solaris and building a brilliant new CPU architecture are interesting, I don?t see this halting Sun?s long slide into irrelevance.

Posted by: kevin.mcisaac@...   Posted on: 11/14/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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