{"id":222,"date":"2007-02-23T10:15:08","date_gmt":"2007-02-23T18:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=222"},"modified":"2007-02-23T10:15:08","modified_gmt":"2007-02-23T18:15:08","slug":"sun-turnaround-sun-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/sun-turnaround-sun-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Sun Turnaround == Sun 2.0?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Employees at Sun<\/a> are feeling good again.\u00a0 “Inside the company, the energy level is dramatically different.” said<\/a> Sun CFO Mike Lehman.\u00a0 The turnaround is coming after five years of poor to mediocre fiscal performance at Sun.<\/p>\n

Sun’s financials from last quarter show 18 per cent growth of their SPARC servers (compared to 9 percent average growth in the industry) and good growth in x86-based server sales too.\u00a0 That’s the first quarterly profit<\/a> for Sun in more than 1.5 years.\u00a0 Sun grew<\/a> market share in the server market by 1.2 per cent, putting it in third place behind IBM and HP.\u00a0 That’s great progress, but some analysts<\/a> still think that Sun has a way to go — the cost structure\u00a0remains bloated and\u00a0their $2 billion R&D budget lacks\u00a0disciplined product focus.<\/p>\n

Sun’s strategy\u00a0under Schwartz is\u00a0to target selling into companies who view IT as a competitive advantage rather than as a cost center.\u00a0\u00a0That means higher-end sales and higher margins.\u00a0 In particular, Sun is providing innovation in the areas of Storage and Web Infrastructure.\u00a0 Sun’s relationships with AMD and Intel have given it some credibility as an x86 vendor.\u00a0 Sun is also active in the area of virtualization<\/a>, and they have come up with innovative ideas like their BlackBox<\/a>-Project datacenter-in-a-box.<\/p>\n

Sun has embraced Open Source software as a tool for promoting and selling their hardware.\u00a0 After the lull from the dot-com bust,\u00a0web development and deployments have accelerated again and Sun is attempting to position<\/a> Solaris as the “premiere platform for this environment”.\u00a0 In an effort to popularize open source Solaris, Sun is offering as an alternative to the popular LAMP (Linux\/Apache\/MySQL\/PHP) open source development stack one that is based<\/a> on Solaris: SAMP<\/a> (Solaris\/Apache\/MySQL\/PHP).<\/p>\n

Sun’s open source Solaris hasn’t gotten the buzz that Linux has, and many people don’t yet even realize that it is now open source.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see if SAMP catches on and if it isn’t too late for Solaris to go after Linux.\u00a0 Recent departure<\/a>s of two top-level Solaris executives have generated some questions about what’s happening in Sun’s Solaris group.<\/p>\n

Sun’s acquisition of StorageTek in 2005 looks to have been a good move and has allowed them to round out their offerings of enterprise storage products.\u00a0 For example, Sun offers\u00a0a general-purpose x4500 hybrid server\/storage box as an alternative to other vendor specialized proprietary systems.<\/p>\n

Overall, Sun has\u00a0started a\u00a0turnaround that few predicted, but they still have a lot of work in front of them.<\/p>\n

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Employees at Sun are feeling good again.\u00a0 “Inside the company, the energy level is dramatically different.” said Sun CFO Mike Lehman.\u00a0 The turnaround is coming after five years of poor to mediocre fiscal performance at Sun. Sun’s financials from last…<\/span><\/p>\n

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