Solaris Marketing, Day 1

Thanks to everyone who sent messages congratulating me on my new job leading Solaris marketing. I've been particularly impressed by the large number of OpenSolaris community members who took note. I don't have time to say anything too useful just yet, so I though I would point out my blog entry from June 14, 2005, the day OpenSolaris was launched. While I think we still have a ways to go to be able to say OpenSolaris created a defining moment for the IT industry, it certainly was a defining moment for the way we at Sun develop our flagship operating system. If you are a Solaris 10 user and have taken a look at the various OpenSolaris distros or OpenSolaris source, you might wonder just how new features and source code from OpenSolaris makes its way into Solaris 10. Right now, the answer is, "slowly". Some of that slowness is good. If you are running a global telecommunications company on Solaris 10, you don't want operating system updates being installed every week when your own internal QA process takes months. On the other hand, Sun has a lot of customers who really need that change that showed up in OpenSolaris last week. So we are working on ways to bring the two closer together while still preserving the OS characteristics that each type of customer wants.

By the way, if you are using an older Solaris release, you are really missing out. Moving to Solaris 10 couldn't be easer. We have a Solaris Application Guarantee Program that guarantees if an application runs on Solaris 7, 8 or 9, it will run on Solaris 10, even if it has not been recompiled for Solaris 10. In part because of this guarantee, more customers than ever are deploying Solaris 10. That's goodness, it means there are more customers than ever ready to try one of the OpenSolaris distros. What I would love to see, and I am sure there are some out there, is an example of a customer that has moved directly from Solaris 7, 8, or 9 to an OpenSolaris distro. If you know of one, let me know. Maybe we will highlight them on the two year anniversary of OpenSolaris.

Posted on: Apr 09, 2007

Posted by: marchamilton

Category: General

Tags: none

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Comments:

Marc- Not just customers, but also ISVs need to know about, understand, and support the application compatibility guarantee. A large part of my time spend on my job is trying to convince our internal users to migrate to Solaris 10. The answer I get most often is "we can't because Vendor X only supports version Y on Solaris 10; we're still on Y-1 and don't intend to upgrade to Y until two years down the road, where it will be Y+1". The ACG is "good" if the application is unsupported anyway (really, really old, or the company has gone out of business), but is pretty much worthless if the application is recent (one or two versions back).

Posted by Stephen Potter on April 10, 2007 at 01:11 PM PDT #

Stephen, good point, we are quite aware that some ISVs don't yet support Solaris 10, compatibility guarantee or not. Many ISV's feel they have the customer locked in and are not interested in responding to customer requests to update their OS support in a timely fashion. Luckily, as more and more open source options are available, I believe software ISV's will have to be more responsive to customer's requests.

Posted by Marc Hamilton on April 10, 2007 at 01:44 PM PDT #

Looking forward to working with you Marc - hope your first week has gone well, and hope to touch base with you soon.

Posted by Glynn Foster on April 15, 2007 at 09:22 PM PDT #

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