Vijay Sarathy's Blog Veritable Vijay

I spent the first part of this past week at the Sun Analyst Summit (SAS) 2008 meeting and talking with analysts broadly about Sun's virtualization strategy and about our Sun xVM plans in particular. For an overview, you might want to listen to Steve Wilson and Aisling Macrunnels break-out session on Sun's virtualization plans.

In my own meetings with analysts, the key message I was trying to get across was that we are committed to delivering Sun xVM - our virtualization and management platform and strategy for heterogeneous environments. The challenge we have is that the analysts - and actually just about everyone else, is having a hard time getting used to the concept that Sun is truly serious about the whole heterogeneous thing. I've been fielding the "Are you truly serious about Windows/Microsoft support?" and "Why should we believe you?" questions ever since I got here. I understand the skepticism given Sun's history and know that it will take consistent messaging and action over a long period of time to change such latent perceptions. So I was really happy to see that in the aftermath of the Sun Analyst Summit we seem to have made some progress. Consistent messages from the top and across the company do help. For example, in one of my breakfast meetings with RedMonk, James Governor was incessant about our lack of focused and concerted effort wrt the Microsoft relationship. I told him about what we are doing there from my perspective and afterwards I was not sure that I swayed him. I guess after hearing the same thing consistently from across the company his sentiment has changed a bit. See his blog post after SAS for the section titled - Microsoft and Sun get it on (at last).

For my part, let me reiterate that Sun xVM is indeed a heterogeneous play for Sun. We are committed to the strategy and let there be no doubt that Sun is serious about ensuring that "..we are the best place to run Windows Apps" - per James' verbatim suggestion.