Over the last couple of weeks I've been fielding numerous call, emails, comments and tweets from colleagues, customers and partners. I want to share with all of you here our renewed focus. Please keep the questions, text messages, comments and tweets coming. I will get back to you.
1. What exactly has changed?
The Communications & Media Industries have become a very large part of Sun's business. On April 1st we decided to separate these into two, separate groups.
a. The NEP/OEM Sales & Industry Group, led by myself.
b. Communications & Media Industry Group led by Greg Calhoun.
In my 5 years at Sun as the VP, NEP and CMP we have built a strong business with growing revenue resulting in great relationships with multiple NEP/OEM customers. Focusing on this sector therefore is truly exciting.
2. Why the change?
In a word: "focus". The Communications business at Sun has outgrown both Sun's and the markets' averages. Sun leads in this market, and it has picked up market share. This growth has been the result of Sun's focus on the Communications market. Focusing on our customers and markets has allowed Sun to do a better job of addressing customers' needs. The natural result of this has been our growth. Sun is now improving this focus by splitting the NEP/OEM business from the Service Provider business. These customers are in contiguous and complimentary markets, and they have different requirements. By focusing on their distinct needs more intently, we expect to be a better business partner for our Service Provider and NEP/OEM customers.
3. What does the new NEP/OEM Sales & Industries Group
do?
We deliver value to our customer in three ways:
a. Deliver Innovative, Enabling Products and Technologies:
Our objective is to develop the right products, at the right time. These products enable our NEP/OEM customers to develop cost effective architectures for next generation IP networks.
b. Product Life Cycle Solutions:
Sun has a suite of services, delivered by a team of people with deep NEP/OEM business experience, that allows our customers to reduce their product development and life cycle support costs. This allows our customers to re-focus their product development investments into product attributes that add value for their customers, and differentiate them from their competitors.
c. We Work with Best of Breed Partners:
Sun is an honest broker. Because we don’t have captive SI business units, we have the ability to partner with our customers and their partners in ways that make sense for our customers' businesses. We work closely with the ISV's and SI's already engaged with our customers that address their most critical business problems. This helps us deliver real value and ensures we understand the bigger picture.
Our team has industry-leading expertise. Many of our people came from NEP's and SP's. We understand our customers' businesses. Even though the SP and NEP teams are now separate, we continue to work closely together to coordinate industry strategies, market requirements, and how to best solve our customers' problems. It is in our interest to continue working closely with SP's to truly understand our customers' customer.
4. How is the new NEP/OEM Sales & Industries Group different from CMP?
We are no longer responsible for sales to the Service Providers. This is now handled by the Comms & Media Industry Group. We will be working closely with our Comms and Media team to pursue common events and business development opportunities.
5. How does new NEP/OEM Sales & Industry Group solve problems our customers are facing?
By inserting ourselves so deeply into the product development cycle and focusing on industry-changing innovation in the network we are better positioned to really create products that our customers want. By simplifying the decision-making processes we're also able to give our customers extremely competitive turn-around times.
6. What about the Oracle announcement?
Until the deal is done, we operate as separate, independent companies.
Do you care if your readers understand what NEP/CMP stands for? As a VP is that the level of communications you can afford of?
Posted by 192.18.43.225 on April 29, 2009 at 01:21 PM EDT #
NEP...Network Equipment Provider
SP...Service Provider
CMP...Communications & Media Practice, Sun's former combined NEP and SP sales organization.
Posted by A Close Observer on April 29, 2009 at 04:36 PM EDT #
Well,
This is "deja-vu" at Sun. This type of re-organization is useless. It just keeps people busy until Oracle deal is confirmed.
It simply brings no value to an end customer.
Why?
a) "Deliver Innovative, Enabling Products and Technologies"
What do you mean ? Again Solaris and Hardware....nothing new....
b) "Product Life Cycle Solutions"
What does this sentence mean ? I could not understand. No sense.
Where are your people able to deliver solutions ????
Where are they ? How much ?
Apart from installing and tuning HW and Solaris, Sun is not able to understand what is a complete solution, a real solution that solves a real business problem.
Sun partners can do that but not Sun. Nevertheless, this is really what Telco customers were expecting from Sun, but they have been very disappointed.
c) "We Work with Best of Breed Partners"
You should say partners works with best of breed OS and HW for telco.
This is certainly not the way your group is treating partners the true reason for that success, this is because customer wants your hardware. And this is happening despite your own will ! Sun is enable to provide a simple and usable web site for its partners so they can enter a HW/SW configuration and get a quotation in a reasonnable amount of time and even for simple configurations.
My conclusion is that this yet another iteration of the "do nothing machine".
Posted by Andy on May 04, 2009 at 03:34 PM EDT #
@ Andy
Hi Andy. I work on the inside of Sun, in the Life Cycle Solutions group. I have a different perspective that I wanted to share with you. Allow me to outline a few points...
The recent reorg will allow us to focus more closely on our customers. This is always a good thing. It's key to delivering better customer service. The reorg was in process for several months before the Oracle announcement. The level of focus that we had prior to the reorg allowed us to deliver solid year-over-year sales growth numbers. That's the inevitable outcome of having a strong focus on customers and markets. The reorg now allows us to extend this model more strongly to Service Providers. This will be good that group of customers, too.
The enabling technologies note in the blog post goes beyond the "Solaris and Hardware" in your comment. Sun has products like SailFin, GlassFish, Open Storage and NEBS servers (Sun is /the/ market leader in the specialized NEBS server market). All of these, and other products, are the components that our customers use as the building blocks of IP-based networks.
Life Cycle Solutions (LCS). My sandbox. "What does it mean?" Thanks for giving me an opportunity to comment. LCS is a suite of services that Sun offers to its NEP customers. This group, and these services, allows Sun and the NEP to co-develop products. Sun will work with the customer to architect, engineer, complete regulatory certifications, build and support full frames (and multi-frames) of Sun and third-party components across the product's entire life cycle. These are the highly engineered frames on which our NEP customers develop the apps and services that they sell to service providers. The benefit to the customer? (1) It allows them to reduce their product development costs, (2) reduces the time required to develop their products and, (3) allows them to re-focus their product development investments into features and services that add greater value for their customers and differentiate them from their competitors. NEP's love it. We sell a boatload of these services. It's a great business for Sun, and a great service for our customers.
Re: your comments on the Best of Breed issue, it sounds like you might have some specific experiences in this area. If you're not getting satisfaction, you should escalate your concerns, or ping Darrell. From my POV, we work with market leading ISV's and SI's to bring a lot of exciting services to market that consumers and businesses want.
Taken together, these are all good things for our customers and, as a result, they become good things for Sun.
Thanks.
Posted by The LCS Dude on May 05, 2009 at 03:04 PM EDT #
To LCS Dude:
I see your point of view, but I am sorry to have to say I strongly disagree:
To summarize, BEA, IBM Websphere, Oracle and a few others have monetized the Java technologies by selling very good products and have an army of consultants to deliver END USER solution to top 500 fortune customers. In the meantime Sun was just delivering behind Solaris and Sparc with continiously shrinking margins.
On the other side, Sun along with the java community created J2ME. What a great idea! ...but Sun was enable again to monetize this effort. Afraid by Nokia, afraid to think and act out of the box. So what is the picture today ? Apple is monetizing these great ideas. Apple is also going to buy your favorite twitter and make some cash out of it.
Things have changed in the very recent past, Oracle acquired BEA and all the weblogic suite. Oracle bought also Orbix and a few players in IdM. Oracle has been able to build a complete and strong Middleware platform. Now Oracle is having Sun (for a few cents) and be honest if you were a Sun Telco Customer how much would you put in: Glassfish, IdM, MySQL, etc... I bet nothing...you would wait and see or go for another solution.
Finally, Open Storage and NEBS servers are still the old fashion of entering customer account...by the smallest door, the hardware door. Margins a very limited. What a telco customer wants is End to End delivery, just like what HP does.
Sun is still too far away from being able to do that.
It was a big mistake and now it is too late.
The world is changing quickly, what the market want is innovation, think out of the box, create new business models, deliver new solutions, new products that either solve customer problems or permit the large Telcos to increase revenu, get more customers with new ideas. Sun has the money, the people and ideas but has been lacking of strong upper management leadership, vision and strong decision making.
Posted by Andy on May 05, 2009 at 03:47 PM EDT #
@ Andy
I'm enjoying the conversation.
I need to be clear in my comments that I differentiate between the NEP group and Sun as a whole. I understand many of your points. Sun hasn't done well. I'll stay away from commenting on why this is so. Clearly, though, had things been managed better Sun would be in a different position.
By contrast, the NEP business has been great. We have a group dedicated to this industry and we provide more fully integrated solutions for our customers. You and I can differ over what "end-to-end" means, but I would submit to you that we do have a robust set of offerings. It's not 100% of everything that we might want, but one never has everything that one wants. We don't...and neither do our competitors.
Perhaps the easiest way to remove the subjectivity from the conversation is to simply look at the objective financial results. Sun's results are clear. I wish I could share the NEP results with you, but I can't. Sun doesn't report numbers down to that level, so I would get hung for disclosing private information. But I can tell you that the NEP sales growth results stand in stark contrast to Sun's results. This is very simply the result of being tightly focused on our customers, and working with them to help them use Sun's products to solve their problems.
Life is so much simpler when we we focus on our customers and help them solve the things they care about. In the NEP group, we do that every day.
Posted by The LCS Dude on May 05, 2009 at 05:13 PM EDT #
Well, if the NEP group is doing well it is obviously not enough to keep Sun going on.
If Sun was able to deliver high added value services to its customers, then Sun would have sold along with the box, a bunch of services and experts that the NEPs really need. Sun could have multipled by 10 or more its revenue in the NEP area using its strenghts in HW/SW to attach many more services to the deals.
As I said, now its too late. Lets see now what will happen with Oracle ?
How long Oracle will wait until thy will resell the HW division to another player such as Fujitsu.
Posted by Andy on May 07, 2009 at 05:16 PM EDT #