Value of Design

Last week, we joined our friends at Intel at their Intel Developer Forum, to unveil the second generation of our Systems platforms. A few of our folks from the event took photos with their phones and sent them my way.

A few evenings later, I was at a dinner presentation with about 30 CIO's - one of whom had seen some of the IDF coverage. The customer (who does no business with Sun currently) asked me, "why should we bother talking to you? How can you possibly differentiate - it's all a commodity to me."

This is one of our biggest opportunities - and biggest challenges. But not as you might think. Most of the world doesn't do business with Sun - that's the good news. That's also the challenge - how do we reach customers when we don't have a pre-existing purchasing relationship based on PC procurement (like our peers)? On a global basis, it's a tough nut to crack (and no, it's not as simple as "Just advertise on TV!").

So this was the picture I showed during my presentation - see any difference between our system (codename, Tucani, real name, x4450) and the others? (Answer: we're half the size - the power and performance difference is admittedly harder to see in a picture.) If your business or datacenter's in a place where space, power density or performance is at a premium, we'd be pleased to engage - running, of course, Windows, VMware, Linux and Solaris.

Step one of reaching new customers is being better by design - and fueling word of mouth. After all, the internet reaches more people than a television.

(And for the technical among you, what's shown is our first four socket Caneland system, with 32 Dimms, 6 PCI-Express slots, built in RAID, up to 8 hot swap disks, redundant power & cooling, full remote systems management... all in 2U). Read more here and here. Also available as a two socket/1U platform...)

Posted on 09:00AM Sep 25, 2007 | Comments[46]

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