Thursday December 08, 2005

Go Right. Go Left. Score.

Sitting in a room with 10 or 12 of your top customers telling you what you do well - and where you need to improve -- can be enlightening and humbling. For me, our customer advisory council is some of the most valuable feedback I receive. I just got back from a meeting with a dozen CIOs and CTOs from around the world.

My favorite comment from that meeting came from a CTO for one of the largest global telcos. After sharing strategy and roadmaps for technologies like Solaris, our Opteron servers and the upcoming T1-based Niagara, horizontally-scaled systems, this CTO said, "Two years ago I asked you guys why you were even bothering with SPARC. Why not just move to industry-standard chips? Well, now I get it."

It wasn't long ago that Sun's reputation was only for Solaris-on-SPARC. In basketball--a sport I played about a hundred years ago--if you can only dribble and shoot with your right hand, you are a one-dimensional player. Opponents can exploit your inability to "go left." Competitors did the same to us when we could only play the SPARC/Solaris game.

Now, we've committed to broadening Solaris to run on more than SPARC and expanding SPARC to run on more than Solaris. Of course, talk is cheap. Doing is hard and--when it involves such major changes--agonizingly slow. But we've made tremendous progress.

Today, Solaris runs everywhere. My everyday laptop is a Sony VAIO X505 with a Pentium M that runs at a whopping 1 Ghz, has a massive 20 GB hard disk and 512 MB of memory - and it's running Solaris 10. If Solaris can run on the smallest (1.5-pound) PC that I could find, it can easily run on any two-CPU server you throw at us. In fact, Solaris runs on nearly 450 Solaris HCL non-Sun, Opteron and Xeon systems today.

And now, SPARC is not just for 72-processor, mainframe-class servers. It's also for inexpensive, horizontal-scale systems announced today that are priced just like PC servers. Now we can "go left." Many today are still only playing the GHz game, which is like stocking your team with only 7-foot centers who can dunk. We've decided to to focus on the ability to increase scoring throughput by mixing in players who can hit a three-pointer, a skill that has revolutionized the sport.

And further, SPARC (like Solaris) is now open OpenSPARC, meaning it should likely run OS's like Linux and BSD soon.

Solaris that runs on SPARC, Xeon and AMD. SPARC that runs Solaris, Linux and BSD. Both open source. Hmmm. We can we go right, left, and most importantly, we can score too.

Monday December 05, 2005

This Makes Me Feel All Warm and FOSSy

How will you make money with free and open sourced software?

I get that question every day.

If you really want to know who we are targeting with our new software strategy, Solaris Enterprise System, look to what's happening in emerging countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC).

One of my people based at our engineering facility in India just sent me an email about the Free and Open Source Software conference in India, FOSS.IN. It used to be a Linux event, but the organizers realized Linux isn't the only open source game in town and renamed the event and expanded its focus. Smart move that's paying off with nearly 3,000 attendees!

Sun is giving numerous talks there and showing several demos on the tradeshow floor. Most of the attendees are young, technically savvy developers and students. The perfect crowd for free and open sourced software like , NetBeans, and Glassfish. Remember, this isn't the crowd that can afford to buy things. They join things. They download things. They form and participate in communities. These are the very same people who graduate, start companies (or go to work for companies) and then "recommend" the best way to build that next application or service to their managers and clients.

Our perfect target audience.

We want them educated and trained on Sun technology, just like they were educated and trained on free and open sourced Linux, MySQL, JBoss, Mozilla and Google over the past four years.

Our booth at FOSS.IN has been packed--even when some of our competitors' booths are empty! We're giving demos of DTrace, the Solaris Management Facility(SMF), the new ZFS filesystem, Belenix(Solaris Live CD), Solaris Zones and, of course, Glassfish and Netbeans(our open source application server and tools).

My email from India said, "In the first two days we have had at least 600 people walk through our stalls and talk to our engineers. We started with a single demo station for DTrace and we have had to expand it to four stations! Belenix CDs are going like hotcakes. One engineer (from a company we won't name) saw the ZFS demo and is still looking for his jaw!"

Some press and analysts may still be skeptical of Sun's aggressive software strategy. That's to be expected. But it's nice for me to see such strong interest so fast with the people we are aiming our strategy at in the first place.

Very cool. Oh, and apparently there was not much talk about Windows, AIX or HP-UX there. Not long ago they weren't talking about Sun either... what a difference an innovative, disruptive change in approach makes!