What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

More evidence that Sun's open source strategy is serving Sun's growth objectives came in my Inbox this week.  

The founder of a pre-startup company developing a specialized SaaS offering replied to my cold-contact inquiry about their business:

"We're big users of Solaris - we've standardized on Solaris 10 for our systems, and rely heavily on DTrace and ZFS - it's great that it's all open source (well, free-as-in-beer is probably our primary motivation at this stage)."

Two things about his response are strong validations of Sun's strategy.  First, no one from Sun had any prior business contact with this company, afaik.  Second, he goes on to say,

"...  We'll be considering Sun hardware, and we'll also be thinking about support contracts..."

which is precisely the market behavior Sun is trying to drive with it's open source strategy. 

It would be hard to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of a $15B company's strategy from one such response, but this is not an isolated case.   The frequency and relevance of "pre-company" contact with Sun is sky-rocketing.  These are organizations that are incubating businesses and have yet to spend significant IT dollars.  They're looking to avoid technical debt and brace for break-away growth.  They want to embed efficiency and reliability in their architecture.  They want to get started at the least cost possible.  Sun is redesigning itself to serve these objectives, and it's working.

And today at the CommunityNext conference in L.A., the CEO of Real Time Matrix, Jeff Whitehead, repeated the theme to 200+ entrepreneurs who are launching media companies on the web:

"We started on Linux.  We hit a wall ...  Now we're on Solaris.  We use Sun's Coolthreads servers.  We saw a huge performance gain ... We needed to make this switch to succeed." 

No sooner had I captured that quote, when a message pops up in my Inbox from another startup founder here at CommunityNext:

"... I'm really looking forward to a potential relationship with Sun. Our architecture and technologies certainly seem like a good fit."

Our initial introduction was through a discussion about our open source technologies, specifically NetBeans, OpenSPARC, and OpenSolaris.  He wanted to know if he could run Erlang on these technologies.  Answer: yes, he can.

More on Sun's Open Source strategy:

• Free to Innovate
• F/OSS from Sun
• European Union study on impact of open source software in the ICT sector - highlights Sun's contribution to open source project (conclusion: more than any other single institution).