Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Makes a Compelling Argument for Sun’s Future
Robert Scoble published an edition of his new ScobleShow on PodTech last week with an interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Scoble’s first question got right to the heart of what a lot of people are wondering: “Why does Sun matter?”
The general impression that many of us have had of the Solaris-maker is of a aging and decreasingly relevant hardware provider and promoter of an old OS that seemed to be great 10 years ago. A company who’s dotcom bubble burst as big as anyone’s in the early 2000’s, Sun has just seemed to be struggling along selling big, expensive hardware and an old OS.
Mr. Shwartz makes the best case I’ve heard for a truly positive and exciting future for Sun. They’re basically in the network infrastructure business, but have a very global view of where the business is going. They’re trying to capitalize on a service and support-rich experience they offer while at the same time making real innovations in server hardware and software.
Sun’s decision to make Solaris opensource had a lot of people thinking that they were taking the one big asset they had (recurring licensing revenues) and giving it away. However, Mr. Shwartz wants to be as relevant to the opensource community as he is to the high-end service providers who don’t have any free software in their data centers at all.
In fact, what struck me the most in Mr. Shwartz’s discussion was how relevant Sun seeks to be in the still-developing global market of IT and delivery of network services. Relevancy to the Web 2.0-ish environment is the last thing I would have associated with Sun, but he is clearly working hard to make his company and the products and services they offer better than RedHat and IBM and as relevant and cool as Google. For one, see the Google-like blogging activity of Sun employees, and check out Jonathan’s own blog as well.
Perhaps they still have some ground to cover, but I’m looking at Sun a bit differently after hearing Mr. Shwartz’s views.
I have been looking for sites like this for a long time. Thank you! »