What's next for Sun?

Last week’s announcement of Jonathan Schwartz replacing Scott McNealy as CEO at Sun has met with mixed reviews, although most people agreed that a change was long due at Sun.  Sun has been struggling for some time, trying to redefine itself in a marketplace that’s moving quickly.

Schwarz has been with Sun for more than 10 years and worked closely with McNealy over much of that time.  In fact many credit Schwartz with setting Sun’s agenda over the last couple of years, particularly with deicisons like the open sourcing of Sun’s Solaris OS.  While much of Sun’s past has focused on hardware, a successful turnaround seems to depend more on what they can do with software.

But why blog about Sun here?  How is Sun relevant to Formtek’s business and the ECM market?

Formtek has been around since 1982, and during a good part of Formtek’s past nearly every developer had a Sun workstation at their desk.  Sun was for a long time Formtek’s main software development platform.  Once a new version of software was up and running on Sun, it would be tested, built and tweeked as necessary to run on secondary platforms, like Windows, IBM, HP, and Mac.  But all that has changed and now Windows has become the preferred Formtek development environment.  Factors like cost, development tools, platform environment, and easy laptop portability have given a decided edge to Windows.

Both Windows and Linux have become major problems for Sun.  While many agree that Sun Solaris is a better OS than Linux, Linux has proved to be a reliable ‘good enough’ alternative that has been able to garner significant market share.  Unfortunately, Schwartz/McNealy’s decision to open source Solaris came too late and doesn’t appear to be able to stop Linux’s momentum.

So while I can’t count that many new Solaris machines humming in Formtek offices, the development machines we are using here all have the latest versions of Sun’s Java Development Kit installed.  The Formtek stack has been re-architected to become Java-centric.  We selected Sun’s Java because it is an elegant language with a well-defined set of APIs.  It is OS-neutral, secure, and provides Unicode support.  Java’s strong developer base has created a wealth of documentation in publications and on-line documentation.  And there are good development tools and IDEs that are available for Java, like Eclipse and Oracle’s JDeveloper, both of which are free.
And there’s also Suns’ own Java Studio Enterprise IDE.

Schartz’s decision for Sun to purchase StorageTek made Sun a player in the world of content and shows that Sun recognizes the growing demand for high-volume storage of unstructured data, especially for use in compliance applications. For example, Sun’s Honeycomb product was announced this week and positioned to compete with EMC’s Centera compliance appliance.  And Sun’s Thumper high-performance high-capacity file server can manage 48 hard drives.

Schwartz has been positioning Sun in hardware to move beyond just the workstation to areas like storage.  In software, Sun has been sitting on a gem with Java, but so far has not been able to turn it too much to its own advantage.  But Sun Java-based software development tools are beginning to show promise and Sun is making some attempt to start providing some software in the areas of compliance and collaboration. 

It looks like Formtek and Sun paths will continue to cross for some time in the future.