The rise of Sun services

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You have it backwards ... Sun is a HW company

Sun Solaris was and is a big + of SUN. Is Sun's HW dead? yep!!, but SW! that is another story.

Sun since before it was even a company has always been focused on delivering the best performance at the lowest cost. You missed the whole point of the article - that Sun will not try to compete on a body basis because it drives up the cost of goods sold.

Today Sun has three main product lines, the high end which is not even threatened by WinTel. The mid tier which is barley threatened - Sun makes a huge amount of its sales out of scaling failed projects off WinTel onto custom designed infrastructure solutions. And at the bottom its Linux not Windows causing a threat but Sun is actually seeing huge success here with its Intel/Linux products - its shipping more boxes then it ever has in its history due to its well received entry level server products!

Software always has been a strange animal inside Sun, it differentiated its HW but put it in competition with others and forced Sun to pick up huge costs for R&D on the OS itself when it really just wanted to add value to an OS - Sun has never really made money off SunOS or SOlaris and it has made itself the enemy of DEC/IBM/HP and even WinTel over something that doesn't generate real profits (like it could if they were a pure SW company) and fragments its customers IT environment in an age of consolidation around management policy rather than OS platform.

My bet is you will see Windows offered on Sun's Intel boxes as long as Microsoft allows Sun to put its IP into Windows to differentiate the Sun boxes from the "me-to" Dells & HPs. If MS plays its cardfs right and opens up it could have the best partner in the business to get it off the commodity tactical desktop and into the valuable and strategic datacenter.

Customers then choose which OS goes on Sun's HW (Windows, Linux, Solaris) and Sun is in a position to put the hooks into all three to allow its subscription based infrastructure management vision to succeed.

Posted by: oldskool   Posted on: 04/14/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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