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.