The Field: Stories from the Field

Well, since everyone is asking, I thought I would post on this.  The full article is here.  Bottom line, Sun is right sizing.  We have made a ton of puchases and need to right size.  I think the below from the article Sum's it up.

Andrew Kotarba, president and CEO of Dewpoint, a Lansing, Mich.-based solution provider and Sun partner, said that while he hates to see 6,000 people lose their jobs, the Sun partner community agrees it needs to be done.

"You have a company that still has a healthy revenue run rate," Kotarba said. "It needs to get profitable. It gets the pressure off their back from the earnings report."

Kotarba, too, sees a big opportunity for the channel in the layoffs. "Sun placed bets on its channel partners to go to market for them," he said. "With the cuts, they will depend on us more. Dewpoint is heavily invested in Sun. This is an opportunity for us to do more."

Whether the cuts are enough remains to be seen, however. "Sun said it will save $700 million to $800 million annually," Kotarba said. "If there are no other serious downturns, it should be enough. We all go through this as business owners. We need revenue to be higher than expenses."

Kotarba said a lot of the questions about Sun's viability are actually started by competitors, but that Sun's balance sheet and technology show it to be a very viable company.

"Sun's technology is second to none," he said. "Some customers ask about it, some don't. We don't have that discussion with Sun's installed base of customers. They know Sun and its technology. But when trying to displaceDell (NSDQ: Dell) or HP (NYSE:HPQ) or IBM (NYSE:IBM), you need firepower. With all the noise in the marketplace, it's hard. We need the merits of the technology to stand on their own." 

Is SUN going any where, I don't think so.  Though we have to make a profit.  That's what we are trying to do. 

So that's my thoughts as well.  We have a great Free software stack.  I've been called by many customers, and in the first breath they ask if I'm ok, and in the second they ask if we can help them save money cause they are doing Layoff's as well. :-}

Yes we can:

1. Glass Fish Application Server $7,875 for Platinum Plus support per 4 sockets, not cores.
2. Mysql 5K for Mysql Enterprise per Server
3. Amber Road - Unified Storage - 1-7 Dollars per GB or less

Can we help you save money?  YES WE CAN, just ask us.

 T