Solaris on Nocona, Sun's new comp plan, and other interesting items...

Just got an update from John Loiacono (EVP, Software) - in his words, "It's alive..." - Solaris is now up and running on Intel's new Nocona platform.

This is really good news for Solaris users - more platforms to choose from for customers running small, medium and large enterprise systems. Ultimate choice.

And proving our commitment to building Solaris as the cross platform standard, we're now compensating Sun's hardware salesforce for selling Solaris on non-Sun hardware. So if a sales rep sells Solaris on Dell or IBM, or even HP (Xeon or Nocona), we pay them as if they sold the hardware. This is a huge culture change, obviously. It also focuses everyone on keeping customers happy - and driving hardware choice. (And Fedora upgrades.)

I'm not sure we could make the point more clearly that we're committed to making Solaris the volume leader on all systems - and building the most price performant systems a customer can find. How confident are we Solaris customers will choose our new SPARC and Opteron systems? We're comp'ing our reps the same, no matter which systems the customer buys. We're putting money where our mouths are. Want proof? Got a farm of legacy Xeon systems, supplied by someone other than Sun? Talk to your rep to license Solaris - and let me know how it goes.

Our partnership with AMD is going great - with all the design work and collaboration we've done with them on Solaris, running Nocona was pretty straightforward - it's good to see Intel so faithfully following industry standards.

It's a bit of a bummer that Nocona's only available in up to two-way servers, though - love to see a 4-way to open up even more choice for customers. The way things are set, AMD's got an early lead in 1 and 2 way systems, and they're looking unopposed on 4-way and above. I'm sure customers are going to want some x86 competition!

btw, if you're interested in some good geek theater, click here. Or here.

And just in... looks like we've just added the Microtel PC WalMart is shipping as a Java Desktop System machine to the Solaris Hardware Compatibility List. Customers should expect us to unite the Java Desktop on linux, on Solaris/x86, and Solaris/SPARC. One desktop, multiple platforms. It's easier on everyone... most of all, ISV's.

Posted on 02:57PM Aug 30, 2004 |

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Continuing Along the Theme

Like I said, we're really focused on innovations consumers care about.

To that end, hey, Dave, welcome to Sun Microsystems.

js

Posted on 08:11AM Aug 30, 2004 |

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Vodafone, Nokia and Sun

And apropos of what I said yesterday, you now know the fundamental motivation behind our partnering with Nokia and Vodafone - two companies that are exquisitely familiar with the very consumers we see as the future of enterprise computing.

It's doubly gratifying to see Java, and the Java Community Process, ensure this innovation remains open, compatible, and available for anyone to leverage.

Posted on 08:51PM Aug 26, 2004 |

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Who picked your search engine?

Does constantly being within reach of the network cause your work to follow you home - or allow you to take your personal life to work? Either way you answer, I'd argue the latter phenomena is one of the most important trends in the technology industry. And has been for more than twenty years.

In that period, the technology in your personal life has had a massive impact on enterprise infrastructure - and there's no sign it's abating. The most interesting trend is that it's moving to an even younger generation than the one likely reading this blog.

And that's been my thesis for a while: true power in the IT industry is moving out of the enterprise, and into the hands of ever younger consumers.

Look at history. 50 years ago, if you wanted to buy a piece of computing technology, where did you go? To one company. They happily appeared, and made a call on your CEO or board. Because realistically, if you wanted to take advantage of what they had to offer, you needed some serious money - and a board level commitment.

Then what happened? Well, first timesharing took off (today we call it "utility computing," but that's another blog). Second, prices came down (all those Amdahl coffee mugs helped when talking to the IBM sales rep) - and realistically, technology became more affordable/commonplace. CEO's lost interest. Partially because the expense went down, and partially because the technology issues overwhelmed the business issues. So the issue was delegated into the world of data processing - from which CIO's ultimately emerged.

Now the history of the CIO is an interesting one (to some, anyways) - and as technology became more affordable, and complexity increased (along with opportunity), they hired staffs who built up their own agenda and expertise. Which gave rise to, among other things, the era of client server computing.

Which put a lot of power in the hands of the IT staff - to determine what technology was used, when and where. And over time, follow the trends, employees started taking work, and luggables, home - only to modify that technology for personal needs, and bring new challenges to their IT staffs. Thus began the PC revolution, which put many CIO's and IT staffs into a defensive mode of reacting to the needs of the workforce - it was enormously empowering for employees, and a royal pain for CIO's.

Why? Over time, employees brought PC's into their lives - for budgets, for taxes, for letters and gaming. And that started driving IT decisions - in that employees weren't just bringing work home - they were bringing their home life to work. How many PC's in your enterprise have CD players? How many of your employees look at consumer web sites at work (can you imagine watching the news at work 30 years ago vs. peeking at cnn.com today)? Do you limit your daily email to colleagues and customers? Ever IM at work? 10 years ago, the consumer eCommerce wave began - has it had an impact on the enterprise? Clearly.

And continuing that trend, think about the following: who picked the search engine you use most often? It wasn't your CIO. Yet is a search engine a part of your business toolbox? Certainly, yes. And who picked your cell phone? Likely not your CIO, either - yet do you use it for business purposes? Surely, yes. And given that over a billion were sold last year - to a vast population (some 58% (!) of the US population, says the Yankee Group in the New York Times last week). Many of those buyers had jobs. And there's no doubt mobility will have a growing impact on IT infrastructure (accelerated by its security attributes, in my mind, but that's a separate blog). The era of command and control has come to an end. Long live massively scaled shared services.

All this is interesting to me - influence in the IT marketplace over the past 50 years has migrated out of the boardroom, out of the executive suites, and increasingly out of the IT workforce to the consumer - who, it turns out, has a vast amount of money to spend on discretionary technology (I won't remind you how large the ringtone industry is - and I ask you to find one industry analyst who predicted that one!). Which drives the economics and strategies behind enterprise IT.

All this makes businesses interested in finding consumers and driving new business by connecting to them over the 'net. Businesses are following consumers - and adapting their infrastructure to prioritize that pursuit. It's also beginning to change the assumption base - if you hire kids from college, or expect to reach them, you should no longer assume they have wireline phones. If your business runs over a wireline phone (or is built upon selling wireline lines), you've obviously got a challenge.

And here's an interesting customer example - tangential, but related.

I was up in Seattle last week, meeting with the folks at Boeing's Connexion. If you don't know them already, they're the people responsible for putting network connections on airplanes (thank you thank you thank you, Boeing). They are a very cool crowd. 5Mbs to the plane today, going up.

If you fly as much as I do, this is better than real silverware. I can get work done, I can stay up on what's happening, and I can send mountains of action items as the altitude gradually relieves me of restraint.

I had a great conversation with their President, Scott Carlson - who told me an interesting story.

He decided to fly Lufthansa a year or so ago, just after they went live with Connexion onboard. Once he was aloft, he sent email to his team at work, and his wife - and then he received an email. But it wasn't from an individual, it was from a phone number. It was a family member sending him an SMS message from her mobile handset (while she was driving to work, no less). To an airplane. How cool is that?

And just wait until they start running video chat over that network... something tells me they're going to need a tad more than 5Mbs real soon.

Which is all to say - the enterprise technology industry is now being balanced by a need to appeal to, follow and embrace consumers and consumer preferences on the internet. 15 year olds have a bit more sway today than 50 years ago.

And at least in my case, the issue isn't whether I bring work home - that's a choice I've made for years to spend more time with my family. The issue is driving the technologies that consumers take to work. That's a big a driver of our business.

And more than likely, yours.

UPDATE: Is this cool, or what.

Posted on 09:15PM Aug 25, 2004 |

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Red Hat's Proprietary Full Disclosure

I have been unabashed (and bashed because of that unabashedness) in stating that open source and open standards are entirely different things. Open is all about substitution, not source access. I know I'm not exactly Mr. Popular in some circles for that stance, but I'm at least consistent in the belief.

Proving my point, I was heartened to hear a Red Hat executive at a recent Wachovia Securities conference agree with my comments on consolidation in linux - by providing a real life example of how Red Hat's managed to dupe the linux community with their proprietary distro, and erect barriers to switching (according to Red Hat's calculation, the cost of switching is $4M per distro for an ISV - and the guy is bragging about it). Not exactly a pro-open stance to take.

It's in the following video transcript - which requires registration, and Windows Media Player.

UPDATE The question which prompts the response starts at 16:58 into the breakout (not the main) session.

And before you ask, I tried to post the mp3 version, but somehow our blog infrastructure blocks mp3 files (something tells me we need to fix that).

Folks in the IT community need to be more aware, in my view, of the lock-in to which they're exposing themselves if they don't take a more active role in understanding the difference between and open source and open standards. All the more reason more and more are seeing Solaris as a migration platform as they move off Fedora.

On another note, one reason we could watch Red Hat's proprietary confession is Regulation Full Disclosure (known fondly as Reg FD) - the singular piece of legislation, in my mind, most related to blogging. And speaking of Reg FD, RedMonk has written an interesting piece about the evolution of what they're calling "compliance oriented architectures." A concept to which I totally subscribe - as legislative priorities continue to emerge around privacy, disclosure, accountability and security (SarBox, RegFD, SEC 17a, HIPAA, etc.), the IT industry should rest comfortably knowing their role is secure in the world: going forward, legislative compliance will be impossible without IT. RedMonk focuses mostly on identity - but to me, it's far, far broader. Someone should write a thank you note to Congress. Minimally, those of us in the storage business. And maybe even the blogosphere...

Posted on 04:25PM Aug 18, 2004 |

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HP's Problem? It Ain't the SAP Install...

So we all saw that HP had a bad week. My bet? It's only going to get worse - and it has nothing to do with their SAP implementation.

Personally, all cards on the table, I'm a fan of their CEO - I think she demonstrates courage, is willing to buck conventional wisdom, and has a titanium spine. (Last week's public firings notwithstanding.)

But that said, I think HP faces an enormous challenge. And it's not related to the cancellation of PA-RISC, or weakness in their Itanium transition. Or even Dell's printer onslaught.

To me, HP's problems spawn from the death of... their operating system, HP/UX. Like IBM, they've elected to ask their customers and ISV's to move to Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows on x86 systems. And if you're an ISV, how does that differentiate HP? - they're a box vendor. If you're a customer, where does that leave you with your HP/UX investments? Facing untimely change - with a vendor no longer in charge of their OS.

On the hardware side, Sun, IBM, Dell and HP will all vigorously compete for the x86 hardware space. I'm confident our industry standard Opteron systems will lead everyone in price/performance - especially in multi-processing environments. But as Fowler points out, that's just the box side of the equation. On top of that, our systems story will have one big advantage, an advantage spawning from the fact that a server without an operating system is a space heater.

As you well know, our operating system, Solaris, continues to set land speed records on SPARC, while branching into new territory on x86 - and it's the least expensive in the industry. I continue to hear customers disappointed in the realization that ISV's don't qualify to "linux" (or specifically, Fedora) - so they have to pay big bucks for RHEL if they want commercial support. And while HP stumbles into that reality, our commitment to Solaris (did I mention we're open sourcing it - check out http://www.blastwave.org) highlights the demise of HP/UX. HP/UX won't even run on HP's own industry standard servers. As an ISV told me last week, "I come to sun, you tell me to write to Java, then write to Solaris. Clear as a bell." If you're an HP customer or ISV, have some fun, ask your HP rep the same question - "what should I write to?"

While HP tells its customers to "change" (we're still not sure 'to' what, I'm more comfortable with the 'from' part), we're going to continue redoubling our investment (with partners, too) in super scalable SPARC systems, the fastest industry standard servers in the market - and the only commercial operating system deployed at scale in both environments. Because no matter what the ads say, what customers don't want is unnecessary... change.

We hear consistently that what they do want is a vendor committed to its operating system roadmap.

Posted on 03:03PM Aug 16, 2004 |

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Communicating Corporate Priorities

I sent out a Sun wide email yesterday, reviewing Sun's corporate priorities for FY05. The priorities are pretty basic - and distill down to eleven words. Which I asked folks to try to remember - lest we have to resort to one of those awkward stickers to put on employee badges.

Notwithstanding the confidentiality breach, it's wonderful to see that some enterprising Sun employee made sure our global workforce and partner community could enlist their dogs and kids in helping them meet the objectives of priority 4...

Maybe next year, we should release the t-shirt first.

UPDATE

Where are my manners? To our friends at AOL, and to the StarOffice and Java Desktop community - CONGRATULATIONS!

Posted on 10:10PM Aug 12, 2004 |

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The Word "Open"

Only a customer can define the word "open." That's my view.

There's been a lot of discussion of "open systems," "open source," and "open standards," over the past - well, 30 years - and I'd like to add some refinements to the current debate. Granted, I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of my time defining things, but it seems like a lot of industry rhetoric right now depends upon redefining history and vocabulary.

So let's start with my friend David Kirkpatrick. David just wrote an interesting piece which suggests "open" is really defined by the degree to which a vendor seeks interoperability with other vendor's products. I agree with much of the article, but my view is David's article misses a critical subtlety.

Which is that for the most part, the definition of open that matters most is the one experienced by a customer or end user - "openness" is defined by the ease with which a customer can substitute one product for another. If you love a product, but the vendor providing it triples its prices, how easily can you move from that product to a competitive product? If it's an open product, the customer will say it took no work. If it's not open, the customer's choices will be impeded - their options will be closed (and they'll find themselves paying big bucks for products).

And although I know I'm about to (once again) annoy an entire demography on slashdot, this discussion, of enabling substitution, is largely orthogonal to whether the source code to a product is available. In the sense that by the definition above, if the barrier to entry in providing a substitute is complicated by issues other than access to source code, then the product cannot be considered open.

Let me offer two examples, and how the concept of "open" is made operational at Sun.

The two examples are the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (known as J2EE), and lest I run afoul of my good friends in the linux community, Unix.

First, let's look at Unix (not linux, folks, relax, I said Unix).

Let's start with a little known fact: the source code to Solaris is available. The odds are good, somewhere in your enterprise or academic institution, you have a complete copy of the source tree (especially if you're reading this from Wall Street). And I'd like to start off by completely dismissing the relevance of that fact to the determination of whether Solaris or Unix is open.

Let's instead look at what it takes to move off Solaris, and onto, say, IBM's AIX.

How easy is the move? It's not particularly easy. There are features in Solaris, like the Java Enterprise System Directory Service, N1 Grid Containers, dTrace or ZFS that don't show up in AIX. Nor is there an industry agreed upon definition of Unix to enable a neutral test, or a certification, of what you're using. There was, it was called POSIX, but then all the vendors (Sun among them), went well beyond POSIX in delivering operating system distributions - we added app servers and directory engines and web services infrastructure, innovations that saved customers millions of dollars, and tons of effort. But using those features made it difficult (but by no means impossible) for customers to substitute Unix vendors - and as IBM slows AIX investment, Solaris is bound to leapfrog even further. So is AIX open? Does it promote choice? Well, by that sword, is Solaris? Or moreover, Red Hat?

Ask a customer - open describes the level of effort it takes to enable substitution. If it's tough, it ain't open.

So what if a customer wants to move today? It takes work. Is it doable? Sure, but depending upon the sophistication of your application, or the extent to which you've taken advantage of Solaris's innovation, it's far harder to move from Solaris to AIX, or Red Hat to SuSe, than from IBM's WebSphere to BEA's WebLogic. Run the same analysis on moving a reasonably complete .net application (eg, not IIS) from Windows to a substitute. You have to rewrite it (which, of course, many people do - but that's beside the point.)

To make matters worse, if you're running your Solaris app on industry standard x86 servers, and you want to move to AIX - well, you can't, because IBM doesn't make its operating system available on even its own x86 servers. Of the Unix suppliers, only Sun makes Solaris available on x86. Even IBM's x86 servers.

Open as in door, is different than open as in source. Unix, linux, Windows - none are open, I'd argue. There is no agreed upon specification, no neutral test to determine validity, and no guarantee made by vendors other than rhetoric.

Now, onto J2EE.

As you're well aware, there are several great application servers in the world, all adhering to a publicly available specification - BEA swept the market early on, and continues to drive some extraordinary innovation; IBM has made great fanfare of WebSphere; Sun has made its application server the backbone of JES, and free as the J2EE Reference Implementation; and of late, a few open source entrants have entered the field. There are probably 20 others I've missed - from Oracle, Borland, Sybase, JBoss, Pramati, many many others. And for any of these vendors to fly the "J2EE" flag, to use that brand as an assurance to customers, they must pass a common compliance test, contained in a Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). Fail the test, you can't fly the flag. That's how we preserve compatibility, and portability (which as you probably know, we're a bit touchy about).

So imagine you elect to move off Sun's app server, to move to IBM's WebSphere. To check to see if you've written to an instruction that isn't in the J2EE standard, you could have your development staff run our Application Verification Kit. The AVK tests to see if you've inadvertently defeated portability in your application. You'll soon realize there's nothing stopping you from moving off of Sun's app server to WebSphere - so you move the application over, and resume running your business.

If you think about it, industry participants are incented to enable substitution - if they impede it, they can't fly the "J2EE" flag. In this instance, the measurement of "open" is ultimately made by a customer swapping out one app server for another.

Where's proof? Imagine you come to your senses next quarter when IBM asks for a big license fee (did I mention Sun's app server is free on all platforms?); you run the AVK again to see if you're gotten hung up on any IBM "enhancements" that go beyond J2EE; and if the answer is no, you move back. Substitution is enabled.

Is the source code available? It doesn't matter - what matters is adherence to a standard to enable substitution. An Open standard, publicly available, for which a neutral test can be supplied (the TCK/AVK). If I failed the AVK, and had source to WebSphere, would it matter? No. I'd have to invest time and resources in moving, far more than if I'd stay faithful to J2EE. Open standards promote substitution, and thus competition. They are the standardized rails of the network - and the customer's best friend.

And before I conclude, I'd like to make one final point - one that I've skipped over, above. It's that the true cost of substitution is, as Chad Dickerson points out, seldom defined simply by the technical effort to port. It is as much, or moreso defined by the economic cost of qualifying or requalifying applications running on one production stack to another production stack.

For example, as we continue porting Solaris onto IBM's Power architecture (demo coming soon!), the real issue we have to grapple with isn't the expense of moving our software over - it's the expense of requalifying all our, and all our ISV's infrastructure once the port is done.

We're hopeful IBM will support us (there are certainly enough of their employees reading these blogs to suggest they're paying attention) - and not close off choice and substitution to its customers.

Were I a CIO facing these issues, I'd stay focused on the one thing definitively under my control - keeping the cost of substitution, of at least application portability, as close to zero as possible.

How?

You guessed it, I'd write to Java. And I'd keep my options...

open.

Posted on 09:26AM Aug 08, 2004 |

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IBM's Pickling Continues

I'm heartened to note that SuSe has added in an application server to their linux distribution - increasing the pressure on IBM to defend its increasingly curious linux strategy. Why bother with WebSphere when you get an app server in Solaris, Red Hat, Windows, and SuSe? Great question for IBM customers and ISV's to ask before they re-up on WebSphere - you've never had stronger pricing leverage.

I particularly enjoy the jockeying between the companies on the definition of "low-end" vs. "high-end" application servers. I wonder whose definition will matter most when their sales reps are trying to close a big app server deal.

And continuing the pickling, now it looks as though IBM is launching its first IP threats through the press. By limiting patent protection to only the GNU linux kernel, the very component IBM has gone to great lengths to avoid, it looks like IBM just put the industry on notice of their intent to enforce higher level patents.

The kernel is made available to customers only in the much broader distributions made by Red Hat - so will IBM agree not to enforce patents across all of Red Hat's products? All of Novell/SuSe's? If I were a linux company, I'd certainly want written documentation that IBM wasn't going to litigate against me for patent violations. Remember, we're talking about a company that pulls in more than a billion dollars a year in patent settlements.

And surely if IBM were serious about their largesse, they'd make these statements in written policies, and not use the press to confuse the issue.

If I were the subject of litigation by IBM's technology sales team, I'd certainly want details of what IBM just said. And if I were an IBM stockholder, I'd wonder how they planned on keeping the money flowing, and whether the recent disclosures regarding concentration in the linux community represent a material risk to their business. Does it?

Dan Farber has a good note - as does BusinessWeek - on the recent goings on. And Doc Searls has an even more interesting point about the moebius nature of cluetrains.

Posted on 11:16AM Aug 04, 2004 |

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IBM is in a Pickle (Again)

IBM has a problem. The problem is called history, and in its current incarnation it's called Red Hat.

The 'history' to which I refer is the experience of a former IBM CEO, John Akers. Akers and his staff had the wisdom to enter the PC market in its early days, but the short sightedness to suggest customers source their PC operating system from a little company in the Pacific northwest. The company turned into Microsoft, and they continue to generously return the fruits of their coup to their stockholders.

A few years back, IBM and HP both hopped onto the social movement called linux. It's a wonderful movement. But the bad news for IBM is that the vast majority of enterprise datacenter deployments are now occurring on Red Hat's linux. 100 to 1, depending up on where you look. And with Red Hat increasing price, while adding in an application server that competes with WebSphere, IBM's finding itself in the uncomfortable position of having lost control of the social movement they were hoping to monetize. They're beginning to look like the IBM of Mr. Akers's era - having missed the forest for a tree, and finding themselves without an operating system.

IBM has been among the most aggressive (and ironic) in positioning itself against the world of "proprietary" technology - in stark contrast to its history as the world's most pernicious patent litigator. It's against that backdrop that IBM brags about its "thousands of programmers working on linux." But ISV's can't build their business on a social movement - they have to pick a base software distribution and web service stack. And with most enterprises having picked Red Hat on IBM's recommendation, IBM now clumsily realizes it's invited the fox into the hen house. With Red Hat running on the majority of IBM's proprietary hardware, Red Hat can now direct those customers to HP and Dell. Even Sun.

Now if you're an IBM customer, you've probably received (or should prepare to receive) the pitch from IBM incenting you to move off Red Hat to SuSe - it's clear they're worried that Red Hat's lock on customers is divorcing IBM from their customer relationships. At this week's Linux World, I wouldn't expect to see Red Hat in many of IBM's press announcements.

From my view, that's a rather tenuous position - as Red Hat garners strength, and locks customers into its Red Hat Enterprise Server offerings, bringing in SuSe at the last minute isn't having nearly the effect IBM desires - at least from the customers, developers (and press) I speak with. Moving from Red Hat Enterprise Server to SuSe's Enterprise Linux is very complicated (eg, which application server do you pick?), and with IBM's consulting bill, very expensive.

Nice tree for IBM/Global Services, ugly forest for IBM Corporation.

IBM is in a real pickle. Red Hat's dominance leaves IBM almost entirely dependent upon SuSe/Novell. Whoever owns Novell controls the OS on which IBM's future depends. Now that's an interesting thought, isn't it?

But if IBM preemptively acquires Novell/SuSe, the world changes: linux enters the product portfolio of a patent litigator not known for being a social-movement company. But where else will IBM go? With it's current market cap, Red Hat seems unacquirable - but absent action, IBM's core customers will be eroded by Red Hat's leverage. And Sun's ability to leverage our open Solaris platform (on industry standard AMD, Intel or SPARC), or Java Enterprise System, even on IBM's hardware, gives us a significant - and sustainable - competitive advantage. With the demise of AIX, IBM is once again vulnerable.

Me, I'd keep a close eye on the Novell/SuSe conversation. If IBM acquires them, the community outrage and customer disaffection is going to be epic... but where else does IBM go?

Posted on 08:45PM Aug 01, 2004 |

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