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Sun: Sun Reaches out to the BRIC Billions
They are only four counties: Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC countries. Today their economies still are fairly small compared to the US, Europe and Japan. IDC estimates the total global IT market to be $1.16trn compared to $85.1bn for BRIC. But that is changing quickly. By 2050, 44 percent of the world’s GDP will be generated from those four countries, and by that time 18 of the planet’s 20 largest cities will be located outside North America and Western Europe.
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO for Sun, sees BRIC as a tremendous opportunity. Of course, Sun is not alone in pursuing the this huge growing market. But unlike Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and many others that are investing in these countries, Sun has a different approach: Open Source. Schwartz sees Sun’s investment in Open Source hardware and software as eventually paying off big time. But in the short term, Sun isn’t seeking huge growth in revenues from these developing nations. It will take much time and patience.
Schwartz said that “gain in revenue will be a derivative of market share gain in adoption”. Sun is following Red Hat’s model where economic success followed a period of growth and acceptance by the open source community. Sun will be increasing their presence in these countries over the next three to five years.
One example of their approach is with recent negotiations that they’ve had with the Chinese government to adopt the design for a computer processor contributed by Sun to the Open Source community. It’s not clear that high adoption rates of Open Source projects will lead to eventual long-term revenues, but the approach sets Sun apart from other companies.
“We are trying to focus in on the next wave of developers, next wave of students, the next wave of research, the next wave of economic growth to best position Sun for growth in the next decade, not the next few weeks or next quarter,” said Schwartz.
It’s a refreshing approach, compared to most of corporate America’s focus on short-term revenue and growth.
