2008 Resolutions
HNY 2008. Headline reads "Credit Repricing = Budget Cuts". True or False? While we are seeing some evidence of negative impact from asset write downs, many firms have insulated themselves successfully from the down draft caused by the subprime mortgage crisis. Just spoke to a VC who said "we are adding 12 months of runway to many of our firms' business plans". Translation: economic slowdown. If there was ever a definition for "toxic cocktail", it's the CDO. But on to more interesting topics.
In the category of "Long Overdue" is thin client technology. That's the capability to manage an end user computing environment from a more centralized or server-based infrastructure. Many customers employ Windows-based desktop environments. Maintenance costs can be a killer. And with Europe (and slowly North America and Asia) going to a carbon-neutral economy, all of a sudden taking all of those dead desktops to the "dump" is not so cost effective. We are seeing geometrically expanding interest in our thin client Sun Ray technology. And at a 4 watt power draw, not a bad pitch for energy conservation! Check it out.
In the category of "SaaS News You Can Use", I still see lots of chatter, but not many applications that matter. Our colleagues at Salesforce.com seem to be one of the few who have perfected the art (and I'm certain I'll now get multiple posts objecting to this characterization). Would love to hear about other SaaS business applications out there in user land. What's the challenge? Is it cost to develop, customer adoption, ability to integrate, or what?
In the category of "Open Source or Open Wallet", the market has a definite bias toward software infrastructure as the premier open source candidate software category. One of the more interesting offerings in this area comes from www.alfresco.org. Those guys over in London have built a killer enterprise content management solution on the FOSS model. What I hear is that perhaps the evolution of software is SaaS for end user applications and FOSS for infrastructure applications. So if SaaS is really a "utility pricing" model, then SaaS and FOSS are opposite sides of the same coin. Both are "pay for use" business models, no?
In the category of "Surround or Subsume", legacy platform refresh seems to be in vogue. Again. Perhaps. At Sun we coexist with the mainframe every day. Our tape storage business relies on lots of mainframe data archival demands. Our software integrates applications and authenticates users. But a number of firms are re-evaluating the mainframe. I could say "SOA what?" but I won't (that's a tale for another day). Instead, stay tuned for an interesting approach to enterprise class transaction processing.
Finally, in the category of "Lean and Green", congratulations to Citigroup on their recent award for their new, eco-friendly data center in Germany. No doubt your colleagues around the industry are "green" with envy. Sorry, could not resist! But speaking of green, check out Sun's Green programs. Green is definitely the "new black"
Posted at
01:48PM Jan 11, 2008
by lscott97 in Sun |