Sun prides itself on being contrarian and this attitude begins at the top. Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy has always been one to challenge the conventional wisdom and continues to do so as is evident in the company's drive toward open standards, pay-per-use computing and innovative business models.

"If your strategy isn't controversial you have zero chance of making money," he philosophizes in a Sun feature article. "I want people to take the risks necessary to drive innovation."

According to McNealy, conventional wisdom within the IT industry is at an all-time high and he is setting his sights on continuing to stir up interest by steering the industry into thinking past the proverbial box and into more innovative and productive methods of computing.

Sun's N1TM Grid Computing pay-for-use service along with this week's announced Sun Grid compute utility and Sun Grid storage utility presented at the company's first quarterly Network Computing product launch for 2005, are part of this ingenious plan. This service is a first-of-its-kind capability for customers to access grids of secure computing power as easily as buying utility services such as phone, power or water. Using a pay-for-use pricing model starting at USD$1 CPU or GB per hour, grid cycles can now be purchased in one hour or monthly increments through Sun and its partners.

The challenge with this type of innovation is breaking past the conventional belief held within the IT industry that owning systems is the only way to operate.

"We're turning heads with our N1 Grid program -- compute power for one dollar per processor per hour," McNealy said. "We just have to get people comfortable with the fact that their money is safer in the bank than in their mattresses."

Over the years, McNealy has steered Sun from the desktop to the server, and now from the server to the Web, which is still in progress. "We've still got to finish that transition," he says. "Then we'll have the next big shift, which will be to a computing environment with components that network to each other as opposed to big monolithic server infrastructure environments."

These type of contrarian strategies are risky and are not sure bets, but McNealy believes that is the only way to truly improve and advance the industry as a whole. "You have to have a wildly different strategy and you have to be right," he proclaims. "It's that second part that gets tricky."

He is the first to admit that mistakes have been made along the way, specifically, "Hiring too many people and signing too many leases during the boom years of the 1990s. Underestimating the longevity of 32-bit microprocessors for use in Web servers. Paying too much for certain acquisitions. Not offering Solaris bundled with x86 hardware seven years sooner," states the article.

"I have yet to meet the perfect human and I'm certainly not it," he admits. "When I admit mistakes, it lets my team know that it's okay to take risks. I want people to take the risks necessary to drive innovation."

To read the complete Sun feature article on McNealy's contrarian approach, visit:

http://www.sun.com/presents/minds/2004-1207 [...read more...]

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