In Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz's video blog series reviewing the company's three major strategic imperatives, he tackles the second one identified as Commercial Innovation in his third installment of four.

The Shift Toward General Purpose Products

He begins by pointing out that the datacenter systems market is more than $150 billion annually. Sun is known to build exceptional systems, he explains, and Sun products are built upon general purpose parts, from microprocessors and operating systems to storage devices and an upcoming networking platform line. "This allows us to innovate in software, where others have to build custom silicon or add cost," he writes, later emphasizing that Sun's "software business is among the fastest growing businesses at Sun."

Continuing with the general purpose product idea, Schwartz then proposes that the three industries of servers, storage and networking are converging and "at the heart of this convergence is Solaris - enabled by technologies such as ZFS (around which we're building our entire storage line), and Crossbow (around which you'll see us build some very compelling networking products)."

Leveraging inexpensive, general purpose components gives Sun a big advantage in this merging industry picture, Schwartz notes, as does the company's general purpose OS since Sun's technologies are able to incorporate specialized components like flash memory, or adapt to new storage or networking protocols entirely in software. "The underlying OS and server are so fast, these extensions and enhancements are simple feature updates, and ones we can leverage across servers, and storage and networking," he says.

Systems Business

Getting down to systems business, the Sun CEO indicates two areas of weakness:

• The high-end market where customers are holding off on making big ticket purchases.
• The 1990's decision to cancel Solaris on Intel, in the belief it would protect Sun's SPARC hardware business. Instead, in Schwartz's view, it destroyed a generation of Solaris developers, and accelerated the rise of alternatives to traditional SPARC hardware.

"And now you understand why we prioritize developers," he says, "they are the seeds from which great forests grow. If you don't water the roots, the trees wither."

The Open Source Plan: Time vs. Money

He then addresses the open source software giveaway model and how that translates into a money-making equation. It simply comes down to time vs. money.

"...most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it," he writes. "For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support - for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions per minute. ... that's our business model, we offer utterly exceptional service, support and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It's a good business."

Network Innovations

He concludes by explaining what Sun's network innovations are:

"We deliver the world's most effective and efficient Systems portfolio, spanning x86 and SPARC servers, storage and networking. And the world's most appealing Software and Services products, spanning embedded software to high performance file systems.

"We call all these products network innovations. I know that defies industry categorization, but that's what innovation's all about, defying categorization."

More Information

Sun\'s Network Innovations (3 of 4)

Schwartz: Video Blog 1

Schwartz: Video Blog 2 [...read more...]

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