Bill Vass' Weblog Bill Vass' Weblog

The Information Technology environment is a complicated place with many messages about the future; and what CIOs, CTOs and business leaders should be investing in. As enterprises scale out to meet the demands of their mission, business, customers and employees; the need for open end-to-end IT solutions becomes more important every day to IT executives and business leaders.

People often ask me questions like "is Sun a hardware company or a software company?" or "Sun does too much, maybe you should focus on only one thing, and what would that be?" If you stand back and look at the forest rather than the trees, the reality is that Sun does only focus on one thing. In our view, it's many of our competitors that are trying to be everything to everyone. Sun's focus is on Enterprise and Web scale computing, we are not about printer ink, TVs or cameras. If you are a customer that is deploying Enterprise and Web scale computing that needs security, high availability, high performance, dynamic scaling, open architectures, at the best value....Sun is the company for you. We build Enterprise class, open source, hardware and software that is made to solve large scale problems at the most economic price point from the desktop to the datacenter.

To achieve this integrated solution, we focus our R&D in the following areas:

Sun is the #1 leader in Open Source. We have contributed more than any other company to the open source community. EVERYTHING we make is either already open source or going through indemnification to become open source. MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, Java, Glassfish, PostgreSQL, and many other products are all open source.  Our software runs on ANYONE'S hardware. Since we started open sourcing our software, SunFed's software revenue has gone up over 300 percent. We open source to improve security, increase quality, reduce cost, lower barrier to entry/exit, and engage developers. In fact, Sun's software leads the industry in security, and has passed the most rigorous government security protection profiles in the industry.

Sun has three supported operating systems that we focus on, we believe that an OS needs to at least run on the x86 Intel and AMD platforms to be viable. We focus on these three enterprise class operating systems: Linux, Windows, and Open Source Solaris. All our enterprise class middleware runs on these three operating systems.  These operating systems are supported across our hardware platforms, we even hold world record benchmarks on Windows.  Here are the support prices on the GSA schedule for each OS: RedHat - $934.78, Windows - $713.36, Solaris - $599.00. BTW, here is a copy of the production version of open source Solaris, you can get the production version for free, as many copies as you want. Also, open source Solaris focuses heavily on massive threading, since that is the way Enterprise and Web scale computing is moving.

Our servers support three chip families: AMD/Intel x64, Ultra SPARC, and the 64-way CMT. Our Intel and AMD servers are leaders in space and power reduction, and will run your Windows applications in half the space, and with 25 percent less power than HP or Dell at the same price point.Our high-end SPARC servers provide massive scale and hold world record benchmarks for large ERP and database applications. We are the first to offer a 64-way processor that will allow you to consolidate as many 64 web servers onto one low power, low cost chip (one watt per thread). Our servers start at $675.

Sun is a leader in open source enterprise class middleware.  Our SOA/ESB, Database, and Identity Management products are in Gartner's top quadrants as leaders in features, value, scalability, performance, and price. We can help you with HSPD12, with SSO, and in moving to a service oriented enterprise.

Sun is one of the top three storage vendors on the market. Thirty seven percent of all the world's enterprise and web scale storage is on Sun's StorageTek open platforms. We have a comprehensive portfolio of storage and data management products across the entire range of storage platforms.

If you are looking to reduce cost, reduce your power footprint, move to open source software, consolidate and virtualize your applications, or improve scale, performance, and security... you should be talking with Sun.  All of our products are designed to integrate together through open systems interfaces to deliver Enterprise and Web scale computing, that is what Sun is all about.