I Don't Believe in Walled Gardens

For those interested in Sun's organization charts (which are, in effect, an expression of my priorities), what's below is the message I sent to all of Sun earlier today. Keeping everyone up to speed on where we're headed is a big part of my job (I'd argue, one of my biggest) - so if you're interested in such things, read on. (And yes, I thought about simply posting this on my blog this morning - but I didn't want folks inside Sun finding out about an organizational change via an external source - thus, the courtesy of an internal email first.)

______________________________________

To: All of Sun
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Subject: Announcing a new business, and a new leader (or two)

I announced a few organizational changes this morning, and I want to be sure everyone hears directly from me about my motivations and expectations.

As you know, we've opened a world of opportunity by ensuring Solaris is available on Dell, HP and IBM hardware. We can now talk to what were traditionally non-Sun customers. Similarly, our moves to build an x64 systems business, and bring Linux to the SPARC platform, have made us relevant to non-Solaris customers. As of today, I'm seeking to repeat that effect with our Microelectronics, or silicon investments. I'd like to see our chip business grow beyond Sun's own systems, and more broadly in the marketplace.

So I've formed a Microelectronics group, which will be led by Dr. David Yen (yes, that David Yen). David and team will focus on building Sun's Microelectronics business - embedded within, and beyond, Sun's systems.

Why now?

Because we have innovations (in platforms like Niagara, Rock and our Neptune project) that companies beyond Sun are interested in embedding in their devices. And I want to have a focused, independent team driving those opportunities and monetizing Sun's innovation - from networking and cryptography, to the future of power management and high performance computing. Our Niagara platforms, on their way to delivering their first billion dollars to Sun, prove silicon investments deliver competetive advantage. This change puts more fuel in that engine.

What happens to the Storage business? Two things.

First, I'm elevating Jon Benson to my staff to run our Storage group. He'll be responsible for all products and solutions purpose built for the Storage marketplace. These include our SAN, Tape, Archive and OEM products and partnerships. Having worked alongside Jon for the past year, I have every faith he's got the energy and innovative insights to bring new value to all of Sun. So congratulations, Jon, and welcome to the Executive Leadership Team.

Now, looking to products like Thumper (aka, the x4500) and Solaris/ZFS, it's clear the rise of general purpose systems running open source software open a new opportunity in the network attached storage (or NAS) market. NAS vendors who aren't joined up with a Systems (read, Server) company are finding it difficult to differentiate in hardware - via power efficiency, systems management or packaging. Still other storage vendors, unable to leverage a volume open source operating system, are feeling the strain of using proprietary OS's - which can't attract developer communities.

So with this shift, I'm also transferring ownership and resources for our NAS hardware offerings to the Systems group. I expect the teams to collaborate, and compete based on different approaches. And I expect us to have the kinds of insights the market wants, as customers use our offerings and innovation to manage their own information lifecycle.

Although transferring the NAS hardware team to Systems is a very small move in terms of people, it's a substantive one strategically, which I wanted to highlight. We're doubling our focus on storage - by broadening the teams with a stake in our Storage success.

We continue to see our customers's storage environments as loosely coupled, but highly aligned - those within a bank responsible for archiving teller surveillance videos have little in common with those running real-time trading systems. But they both buy and manage storage, they both worry about security and economics, and they both expect value from Sun. In recognizing the distinction and synergies, in every industry we serve, we're hoping to build an even stronger world class storage business.

So in summary - I'm creating a new Microelectronics Group, headed by David Yen. I'm elevating Jon Benson to lead our Storage Group. And I'm asking John Fowler and the Systems team to drive our NAS roadmap, leveraging Solaris and our Systems expertise.

With that, here are some of my favorite internal questions:

When is this effective?

Immediately. There are still some small organizational issues to be resolved, but the substantive transitions are effective immediately - and we're talking to new Microelectronics opportunities as I type this! Stay tuned for "interesting news."

Does this mean you're setting these businesses up to spin them out?

No, we're not setting them up to spin them out. Let me say that again, just in case you're asked - or a competitor suggests as much to our customers. No, we're not setting them up to spin them out. We're setting them up to focus their energy and attention.

By combining NAS Storage with your Systems team, aren't you defocusing them?

No, we're actually focusing them. Do customers want storage blades? NAS platforms built and managed via a common operating system and provisioning environment? A virtualization approach that spans data and apps (and the network)? The answer's yes to all the questions - and we're uniquely positioned to deliver all the answers.

Does this imply the decline of Tape or SAN storage? The dominance of NAS?

Quite the opposite - growth in storage won't decline for as long as we're on this earth. Our ability to innovate across primary and secondary storage, across SANs and NAS (and DAS), positions us to grow, not shrink. We run businesses to grow them.

Will there be any changes in Sun's field organization - in Sales, Service or Support?

Nope. Changing how we build something has no bearing on how customers buy it.

I want everyone to know I take reorgs very seriously - I know they absorb time and energy, and run the risk of defocusing teams. I also know they're necessary if we want to lead the market, vs. follow it. Now's the time to lead, in Microelectronics, Systems, Storage, Software and Services.

In closing, there's one message I'd like to convey to those involved in this shift: we are a business driven by innovation, and our ability to deliver it faster than the competition. A time to market advantage is among our most important - please work with your managers and their management to ensure we stay focused on the deliverables at hand. Your peers, our shareholders, and our customers depend upon it. Pace matters.

Thanks,
Jonathan

Posted on 10:21PM Mar 27, 2007 | Comments[30]

Share this post  | | | | | |

A Thing of Beauty

Given the diversity (and temperament) of the customers we serve, I don't normally do product plugs. But having just used (not just installed - I said used) Google Maps on my new Blackberry Pearl mobile handset, I have only one thing to say.

The grace with which it works comes close to a religious experience.

Posted on 08:12PM Mar 18, 2007 | Comments[21]

Share this post  | | | | | |

Moving A Petabyte of Data

(With apologies for the headfake of posting this entry then taking it down - my fingers were working faster than my brain, and I accidentally posted the entry without completing it. Or proofreading it.)

I made a speech last week at which I asserted it was faster to send a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by sailboat, than by the internet.

I got quite a few "how can that possibly be true?" kinds of questions, so here's the math. (Full disclosure, I am a mathematician by training, which guarantees me a lifetime of small "off by one" errors in all subsequent calculations - so if I get something wrong, be gentle).

A petabyte is a thousand terabytes, which is a million gigabytes, or a billion megabytes. Or 8 billion megabits. With me so far?

So if you had a half megabit per second internet connection, which is relatively high in the US (relatively low compared to residential bandwidth available in, say, Korea), it'd take you 16 billion seconds, or 266 million minutes, or 507 years to transmit the data. Can you sail to Hong Kong faster than that? At a full megabit, just divide the time in half. Even at a hundred megabits (about the highest, generally available, of any carrier I've seen), it's a few years.

As Hal Stern once said to me, "Never understimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of storage driving down the [New] Jersey Turnpike" - and now you understand why tape based storage has such a lasting appeal to so many enterprises recording, compiling, transporting or just plain archiving, very large quantities of data. From video surveillance to trading data. Standard tapes are 500GB each (currently), and fit nicely into cardboard boxes with overnight express labels.

One other big benefit to tape as an archive format? When the data's at rest, it consumes no electricity - just imagine a petabyte of data spinning on even the most power efficient disk storage (for reference, a petabyte of active disk-based storage is the equivalent of more than 40 Thumpers, each drawing more than a kilowatt - and tipping the scales at something north of 150 lbs, slightly tougher to put on a sailboat, or in an overnight envelope). For data to be available, disks have to be kept spinning and cool (tape has no equivalent requirement).

Now there is no one hammer for all nails, and tape isn't perfect for a lot of applications (near line storage, eg) - but it plays a prominent role in some remarkably cutting edge high performance computing applications, along with social networking and content aggregation sites (who think nothing of gathering terabytes of data every day) - tape archive isn't just for banks or telcos running mainframes (although we're good there, too).

So yes, at least for now, it's faster to send a petabyte of data via a sailboat than the internet (at least defined by the bandwidth to which most of us have access).

Which btw, is another reason we're refreshing our Solaris on DVD program - it's more efficient for many folks to get a 4 Gigabyte DVD in the mail (for FREE) than nurse our download centers, a megabit at a time. (And I apologize for how slow the DVD deliveries have been - we haven't exactly executed perfectly here, but hopefully it's getting better as I type.)

And I don't want to even think about moving a zettabyte.

Posted on 05:48PM Mar 12, 2007 | Comments[36]

Share this post  | | | | | |

The Internet and Regulation FD

For those interested in Sun's and my continuing engagement with Chairman Cox at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, related to using the internet as a vehicle to ensure broad, fair and non-exclusionary access to information about corporate performance, please see my most recent letter to him, below.

For those interested in more good thoughts on the topic, see Tim Bray's cogent analysis.

__________________________________________

The Honorable Christopher Cox,
Chairman
United States Securities and Exchange Commission
100 F Street, N.E.
Washington, DC 20549

Dear Chairman Cox:

In your letter of November 2, you raised potential challenges to permitting blogs and corporate websites to be used to satisfy Reg FD's "widespread dissemination" requirement. Specifically, you inquired whether “there exist effective means to guarantee that a corporation uses its website in ways that assure broad non-exclusionary access, and the extent to which a determination that particular methods are effective in that regard depends on the particular facts.” Some of the comments to my blog echo the same concerns: critical company information could be difficult to find, accessible only with a registration or technologically obstructed.

We understand these apprehensions, but are confident that they can be addressed with clear directives from the SEC on the presentation and accessibility of information on corporate websites. What we propose is a new policy under which online communications would fully satisfy Regulation FD’s broad distribution requirement provided that:

• for a webcast (and related slides), the webcast is made available on a company’s investor relations site and notice of the webcast is posted at least three business days in advance or as early as possible;

• for a corporate blog or individual blog of a senior official of the Company (as defined in Reg FD), the blog is linked prominently to the company’s investor relations site; and,

• for a press release, it is posted to the company’s investor relations site within the time periods specified for Form 8K filings.

To ensure broad access, these online communications would satisfy Reg FD only if they were:

• offered via a broadly accessible Web syndication format, such as RSS or Atom;

• made available for at least 1 year;

• accessible using any open, non-proprietary, free browser on any standard OS;

• accessible to persons with disabilities;

• made available in an open, non-proprietary, royalty free format; and,

• accessible without registration, restriction, or fee.

In order to ensure that the average investor could locate the information on the corporate site, we suggest that the SEC also consider requiring companies to maintain a separate page titled “Official Investor Communications” that is linked prominently from either the main page of the company’s website or the main page of the company’s IR site. This page would include a chronological list of all press releases (or all material press releases), blog entries, notices of webcasts and actual webcasts. This could then be syndicated as an RSS or Atom subscription.

Sun believes that the twin goals of greater transparency and access to information for individual investors would be served by permitting web-based, real-time disclosures pursuant to the rules suggested above. We urge the Commission to modify Reg FD so that its "widespread dissemination" requirement can be satisfied through disclosure through web-postings alone.

Lastly, I was pleased to review the creative and insightful exchanges resulting from our on-line dialogue about Reg FD. I particularly liked the following comment to your post on my blog:

“Congratulations to both Jonathan Schwartz and Chris Cox...it's astounding to read on a blog dialogue between a public company CEO and the Chairman of the SEC... It's fantastic...keep it up gentlemen...the American investor really benefits.” http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/sunlight_on_a_cloudy_day...#comments

Sun remains committed to working with the Commission on enlisting technology to the service of the American investor. I look forward to continuing this dialogue.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Schwartz
Chief Executive Officer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

cc: Michael Dillon, General Counsel, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

__________________________________________

Posted on 05:00PM Mar 08, 2007 | Comments[5]

Share this post  | | | | | |