Sun's 2006 analyst event kicked off today with a clear message from both CEO Scott McNealy and COO Jonathan Schwartz – growth in core markets is where the company will be focused. This simple message is critically important for the company. While it has stated this as a goal in the past, it appears that moves Sun has made in the last 12 months are indeed setting the company up to participate to a larger degree in overall industry growth.
It's clear that Sun is still betting its success on some hard-to-convey concepts, for example, the notion of the participation age. This idea puts forth the concept that the future of the IT industry is no longer about the "hot box," but about connectivity and working together across a wide set of industry standards. For this reason, the company has made a number of choices, including the open sourcing of Solaris, and has aggressively supported standard architectures such as AMD's Opteron.
Interestingly, what the company did not say about some of its accomplishments might be as important as what it did say. In high-level terms, the company talked about making cost reductions across it's product line, but did not mention some important facts. For example, Sun's Niagara (UltraSPARC) server line and its Galaxy (Opteron) server product line now share almost 100% common components outside of the processors and associated chipsets. This drives significant cost improvement. Sun has also made significant improvements in power consumption on Opteron based servers. By working out key interdependencies around power supplies, airflow, and mechanical design, the company is reporting a 20% power reduction over its previous Opteron based product. That's strong innovation in a "commodity" market.
Another area of progress is in its identity management offerings. Sun outlined a strategy to leverage both its 2005 StorageTek acquisition and its 2003 acquisition of Waveset to help IT managers manage not only how data is protected, but also a compelling architecture to control the right of access to data.
While the company is always long on vision, it's clear that they are in a better position to execute than they have been in the recent past. Sun is making progress. It's a long haul, but some of the important tools necessary to deliver growth are starting to come into place.
It's clear that Sun is still betting its success on some hard-to-convey concepts, for example, the notion of the participation age. This idea puts forth the concept that the future of the IT industry is no longer about the "hot box," but about connectivity and working together across a wide set of industry standards. For this reason, the company has made a number of choices, including the open sourcing of Solaris, and has aggressively supported standard architectures such as AMD's Opteron.
Interestingly, what the company did not say about some of its accomplishments might be as important as what it did say. In high-level terms, the company talked about making cost reductions across it's product line, but did not mention some important facts. For example, Sun's Niagara (UltraSPARC) server line and its Galaxy (Opteron) server product line now share almost 100% common components outside of the processors and associated chipsets. This drives significant cost improvement. Sun has also made significant improvements in power consumption on Opteron based servers. By working out key interdependencies around power supplies, airflow, and mechanical design, the company is reporting a 20% power reduction over its previous Opteron based product. That's strong innovation in a "commodity" market.
Another area of progress is in its identity management offerings. Sun outlined a strategy to leverage both its 2005 StorageTek acquisition and its 2003 acquisition of Waveset to help IT managers manage not only how data is protected, but also a compelling architecture to control the right of access to data.
While the company is always long on vision, it's clear that they are in a better position to execute than they have been in the recent past. Sun is making progress. It's a long haul, but some of the important tools necessary to deliver growth are starting to come into place.
