(Another) Win for Open Storage...

Wikipedia is one of the world's most visited web sites (8th in the top 10, in fact), delivering an enormous breadth of content to an audience as vast as the internet. But Wikipedia's evolved to become more than an on-line encyclopedia: they've become one of the world's largest search engines, they're a global source of real-time news, alongisde educational, political and health related content - and one of the world's most valuable brands and media properties.

Wikipedia's also a great example of a "redshift" application: a segment of the market that's growing faster than the technology industry's capacity to innovate. Technology companies have to pay special attention to such redshifted segments - not only do they eventually grow the overall market, but their innovation often drives the technology landscape. Broadly speaking, social media, from free news and social networking, to search and content sharing, is doing exactly that - defining new architectures and requirements for radical scale, economics and availability.

So I was really pleased that Wikimedia had chosen Sun's Open Storage platforms over proprietary alternatives, to help manage their evolution to rich media - bringing high quality video and time based content to their more than 250,000,000 users globally. That's a big audience waiting to upload - and interact with - high quality content.

Like Wikipedia, most of the planet's largest web sites (just look at the top 100) are built atop Sun's MySQL database. Which is why we've just introduced a line of systems platform designed specifically to run MySQL - at up to 3x the performance of whitebox alternatives (after all, it's far easier marketing to audiences that have already chosen Sun). We're now expanding those offerings with our newest Open Storage portfolio, as well - built to run ZFS from 5 to 50x traditional performance. And again, all such systems are available here for free trial - pick the system you want to try, we'll cover shipping costs to and from your site.

And while I'm on the topic of systems... I've been asked for insights into our recent software reorganization, in which we announced three main focus groups (a Systems group, an Applications group, and a Cloud group). Why'd we make that change?

First, look no further than this win for one of my main motivations: I'd like to enhance the value and alignment we offer to customers that want to run our system software (like MySQL and ZFS) at very high scale - and require, from Sun and our OEM partners, the tightest possible technical collaboration and alignment between hardware and software.

Second, this move amplifies the obvious (at least to us): the storage market will be larger than the server market, but you may not be able to tell - they're converging, built from the same systems software and hardware components (networking will follow the same path, more on that in the future).

Finally, adoption and software distribution/marketing is different than revenue generation. And with the adoption of ZFS well underway, technical and business alignment have become our dominant priorities. It's at the heart of what's fueling one of Sun's fastest growing businesses (ZFS based Open Storage was up more than 150% last quarter, growing far faster than our proprietary peers).

How large is the redshift opportunity? It's not just businesses like Wikipedia that are defining new scale requirements for the industry. It's the on-line bank I saw last week, now serving more than 100m accounts globally - contemplating the addition of video chat for customer service. It's the government customer I just visited trying to deliver driver's license and passport renewal services to hundreds of millions of its citizens. The term redshift describes applications, not customers (remember, even Wikipedia has payroll - not exactly a redshift application).

In an openly networked world, redshift applications begin to equate to social phenomena - and social phenomena don't respect your IT budget. Which is to say, neither a 10 person startup, nor a 10,000 person retailer want to go broke buying software licenses and storage, just because they've struck a chord with the planet. Which is increasingly why both sides of the industry are moving to open source.

And open storage.

________________

(And with apologies to the OpenOffice community - we are not going to be inserting ads into OpenOffice.org - we're creating partnerships to brand and promote StarOffice, and the cloud we're developing behind it.)

Posted on 06:20AM Nov 26, 2008 | Comments[12]

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The Inside Story (Java, Microsoft and MySQL)

As consumer spending slows across the world, a variety of "brick and mortar" retailers are clearly feeling the impact. Foot traffic is slowing, and it's getting harder to balance debt laden real estate portfolios and fickle consumer trends.

For consumer product manufacturers, retail distribution is key - it's how you get in front of a customer. It's why the big PC manufacturers are all working hard to score deals with big retailers (or build their own retail outlets) around the world.

But making money on PC's is tough - for most PC makers, you're remarketing someone else's operating system and someone else's microprocessor - it's not for the faint of heart (or faint of balance sheet). For Sun, our retail distribution concerns don't surround consumer hardware (we don't make PC's) as much as consumer software - the popularity of which defines our market opportunity. Said simply, if you're running Java or another open source platform, Sun can build differentiated datacenters in the clouds behind those devices. If not, it's a lot tougher (not impossible, just a lot tougher).

Consumer software, though, is defined by a virtuous cycle. Developers target popular software (like Firefox, Flash or Java). In so doing, they create applications and content that consumers use. What consumers use, they tend to use in volume (the internet's a very big place, after all). Developers notice those volumes, and target the platforms that reach the most consumers. And that defines Sun's market opportunity (someone smart once jumped up and down on stage yelling "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Amen.)

The Java runtime remains one of the world's most popular platforms used by developers - and thus, one of the world's most popular consumer software products. For the cynics about to chime in with "but I don't use it," the odds are good you do - it's become an invisible, but critical part of an enormous breadth of consumer and business services (from video uploaders on social networks, to stock market analytical tools). And as that content becomes more popular, so does the Java platform - expanding Sun's market opportunity in the corresponding datacenters. That's why we see it as a virtuous cycle.

That cycle also provides Sun with some exceptional foot traffic - just last month, we distributed more than 60,000,000 Java runtimes, to users all across the planet. The number is growing, as more content is built for Java 6 and the upcoming JavaFX, as more PC's join the network, and as more workers join the workforce (and are assigned Java-enabled laptops). At this point, I'd bet there are about 1,000,000,000 (that's a billion) Java runtimes installed on PC's around the world. With more by the day - each generating revenue for Sun.

As with most of our software products, we don't distribute products without intent - like Google, our products are both a means of acquiring customers, and generating revenue. Freely distributed software establishes a relationship with an end user - just like free search, free news or free shopping. About two years ago, we reached an agreement with Google in which they recognized the value of our relationships with Java consumers. Just as the PC makers want distribution via retail outlets, Google wanted distribution of their search technologies - via our Java update mechanism. When we present an update to a user, we may offer other sponsored software (a Google search toolbar, eg).

After a careful negotiation, we agreed, and crafted a wonderful relationship that served consumers, Google, and Sun. Last year, we renewed the agreement, and recognized even more value for all involved. This year, we decided to run an open auction, and received bids from a number of companies. It was a tough process, but given the growing volume and momentum around Java, we clearly represented just about the most popular distribution vehicle on the internet today - and Microsoft worked hard to represent the most attractive total offer.

The decision to go with Microsoft was based on overall value - it was also predicated upon their endorsement of and agreement to help promote MySQL. Stay tuned for more details on what we'll be doing together.

What's the deal worth to Sun? This deal will be one of the most valuable distribution deals ever struck in the industry - and it likely makes Microsoft one of Sun's largest customers. It'll also set the stage for an even more interesting auction next year, as more and more folks realize the value of retail distribution. Thus far, our deal with Microsoft is US only - and new auctions are in flight for international rights (alongside other non-toolbar products for the US, perhaps a browser...).

As for other high value distribution assets at Sun? I just read one analyst report questioning whether anyone actually used OpenOffice. We happen to run Sun Microsystems on OpenOffice - more importantly, it's used across the world, and we're now commercially licensing it to brand name companies wanting to save big dollars on office productivity.

To put some data around its popularity, last week, we distributed more than 3,000,000 copies of OpenOffice 3. Downloads are accelerating, giving us a reachable user base we estimate to be between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000 users - a global recession will amplify OpenOffice adoption. And 100's of millions of users drive a lot of foot traffic. An auction's afoot (no pun intended) to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution - the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them (and I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in OO.o community and features, from which everyone benefits).

With Verizon running a similar auction to integrate a search vendor into their wireless devices, they (and their industry across the world) are seeing the same opportunity. Just because a few retailers are having trouble doesn't mean the value of reaching customers has gone away. Foot traffic still counts, but in today's economy, software distribution's a lot easier to manage and monetize than a real estate portfolio.

After all, who wouldn't want to meet a few hundred million new customers?

________________

Update: I should've clarified, above: users without any interest in toolbars can simply decline the offer during install - and receive their Java update without any sponsored software.

Posted on 11:19PM Nov 12, 2008 | Comments[67]

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You Have to Stop to Change Direction

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.

Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a consumer product or two). Like Google and Microsoft, our products are both our ads and our revenue streams - our brands, and products, are recognized globally.

On Monday last week, you saw us continue to convert that brand awareness to revenue - with the introduction of a full line of MySQL optimized systems. By our estimates, there are about 11,000,000 MySQL users on earth - our new systems can triple their application performance. So we've made free evaluation units available to MySQL users (via our Try and Buy programs). Click the image to the right to listen to Marten Mickos and John Fowler talk about the opportunities ahead.

And that brings me to today. I was on a call last week with the Global CIO for one of our largest customers - one who was dramatically affected by the credit crisis. I was outlining where we were headed in open storage (a business that grew more than 150% for Sun last quarter), and he said, "One of your peers just told me flash was overhyped." I asked him if the peer happened to work for a proprietary storage company. He protected his source, but I knew the answer (I probably knew the CEO, too).

The storage industry bears a remarkable resemblance to the proprietary server industry at the bursting of the internet bubble - closed, highly profitable, frustrating customers with exorbitant charges. Plump, and ripe for change. Like a plum. Flash memory and open source file systems are about to change the landscape, and upend the industry - you read it here, first.

A notable philosopher once said, "You have to stop to change direction" - and for better or worse, I know a lot of customers stopping right now. They're rethinking their future, and it's into that thought process we're introducing our newest open storage platforms, engineered with flash memory and open software to radically scale back what customers have to spend - while radically increasing performance, capability and ease of use.

Amplifying our Thumper product line, what started as the FISHWorks Project (Fully Integrated Software and Hardware) in Sun's Labs, is now being unveiled - in the Sun Storage 7000 line of unified storage products.

Now, storing data on a disk is fairly straightforward. But administering large pools of fully replicated data, diagnosing problems on production systems, seamlessly dealing with capacity planning and disk failures, spanning every protocol known to man - all without draining your budget with antediluvian license keys and proprietary hardware - those are very high value problems to solve.

And those are exactly the problems we've solved.

The 7000 class systems take about five minutes to set up and provision (yes, five), and we've eliminated almost all the complexity around volume administration and drive failure (remember, ZFS technology is at the core). The 7000 systems are driven by the most scalable, powerful, open storage microcode in the industry: the OpenSolaris kernel. DTrace analytics provide a real-time lens into production systems - to understand performance, workloads, and help make live capacity-planning decisions (click picture at left for a sample control panel). The systems come bundled with a full suite of protocol, data management and availability features - built into the system without incremental fees or license keys.

For the geeks among you, we've turbocharged ZFS with Hybrid Storage Pools. Hybrid storage pools allow ZFS to optimize storage performance by spreading data out across DRAM, read or write optimized flash memory (they're not the same thing, after all), and very lower power commodity disks. The net result is a massive speedup in storage performance, with an equivalently massive drop in power consumption, all managed transparently - applications will just run faster. Much, much faster. For a full set of technical videos/specs, go here.

Storage customers and administrators are about to experience a radical improvement to their quality of life - all without pharmaceutical intervention. And as the price of flash memory continues to plummet, it's only going to get better.

But you have to stop to change direction.

____________________________________________________

Try out a 7000 free of charge - just go to our Try and Buy page, select a configuration, and give one a whirl.

And as we did to kick start awareness of our Niagara systems, for those capable or interested, write a blog or publish a review (use the tag "fishworks") - we'll select (at our sole discretion) from those we see, and give a few 7000's away to those with the most valuable/constructive comments. All reviews are eligible (good and bad).

A little bit of history here, too.

Posted on 08:40AM Nov 10, 2008 | Comments[24]

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Change Has Come to America

On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com.

Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.

Posted on 11:00PM Nov 04, 2008 |

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Understanding Sun's Business - Q1 Results

We announced our earnings today, and put specifics around our preannouncement from a week ago.

We also greatly increased the transparency of Sun's business by providing line item detail surrounding our most important product categories (and we broke out core elements of our Software business for the first time). If you'd like to listen to our earnings call, just click here - in addition, here's a quick synopsis of the quarter and our business overall.

At a corporate level in Q1, Sun's revenue was down 7% year over year. Growth in our emerging products was more than offset by declines in our traditional, high end products. We were surprised by the magnitude of the decline, which reflected a dramatic slowing in the US and Europe, and the effects the credit crisis is having on our customers - across nearly all geographies and industries, but clearly concentrated among financial services companies.

Unlike our peers, Sun is more exposed to high end systems - so declines in this business have an immediate impact, even if our newer, emerging businesses demonstrate fantastic growth (which many did). For example, the Tape market won't sustain 30% year over year growth for any participant - but our ZFS based OpenStorage products are growing at more than 100%. The latter are smaller, emerging businesses, driven by open source and new innovations - and will take time to eclipse more traditional businesses in our P&L.

To drive an even greater level of transparency for investors and analysts, we've added a new management report to our quarterly updates - for the first time, this will give line item detail of our performance, and a sense for how we're making some of the most important decisions at the core of our long term strategy. You can find that break out, here.

Here are a few of the major questions I'm receiving:

What went well within the quarter?

The biggest highlights were the performance of our Solaris based, chip multi-threading (CMT) systems, which again grew a whopping 80%, year over year. These systems leverage awareness of Solaris/Opensolaris and our outstanding ISV portfolio, and are driven by extreme energy efficiency and virtualization - attributes we just multiplied with the launch of our newest CMT system: the T5440.

Simultaneously, our Open Storage systems also delivered a great quarter, up 150+% year over year. These systems, known by many as Thumpers, are amplified by the awareness of our open source ZFS file system, a technology at the heart of Sun's storage business. You'll be hearing more about Open Storage at a launch event we're holding on November 10th. If you're technical, and you want some hints about what we're about to unveil, click here.

And finally, most of our software business grew - including MySQL, Java, alongside Solaris, management and our virtualization products. As we've been saying, open source is a great distribution model - and it feeds a great revenue model.

What about lowlights?

Clearly the traditional businesses slowed significantly - with enterprise systems (our largest, mainframe class systems) declining year over year. This time last year, those same systems grew nearly 20% - so the downturn is having an impact. It's crucial to understand these systems are far less sensitive to open source innovations or Solaris adoption - they're sold to customers who are scaling up existing Solaris applications, who rely on quality, fault tolerance and our capacity to deliver mainframe scale. We and Fujitsu just expanded this product line - and no matter the downturn, we remain exceptionally focused and committed to traditional enterprise computing. The expansion of scale out computing doesn't negate scale up computing - if anything, it leads to even greater demand, over time. IBM was right, mainframes will always be sexy (especially when they run Solaris :).

On the storage front, tape declined slightly, although our high end storage systems grew, yielding growth overall in storage - growth we're driving to accelerate with the introduction of our upcoming Open Storage innovations.

Why were gross margins lower this quarter?

A few reasons that Mike Lehman, our CFO, elaborated on during the call - the lull in very high end systems, along with discounting and component pricing depressed gross margins. In addition, we went through a series of product transition related expenses this quarter we do not expect to recur, that depressed margins by around 2 percentage points.

Now, how is Software growing if you give everything away?

We make our software freely available to enable its distribution to the farthest reaches of the market - which we then monetize with commercial subscriptions and services, alongside optimized hardware systems (like Open Storage, above). We continue to reach customers that have already settled on our software - the process of selling to them is simplified by the fact they're already using our core products. And unlike most university students (who typically have more time than money), our paying customers view downtime or administrative complexity as more expensive than a software subscription (that is, they have more money than time).

Thus, customers will pay, and continue to pay for access to enterprise grade features, along with mission critical support and maintenance - the Software business is both a license, subscription and services business.

To understand the total size and value of Software at Sun, you need to look at billings alongside our multi billion dollar support streams - remembering that a lot of our software is sold as a subscription service (remember, it's open source). In addition, you have to recognize that how much a "Systems Service" support contract is attributable to software is entirely subjective (we don't price them separately to customers). It's like asking how much revenue a mobile phone manufacturer should attribute to their operating system - you're not charged separately at the point of sale.

Wait, you make money off Java?

Yes, it's among the most profitable technology products at Sun - and improving. Java's one of the most popularly distributed pieces of Software on the internet, we distribute over a million Java runtimes a day to users across every OS and geography on PC's. That helps us reach a very broad community of users and, more importantly, developers. We have some exciting news coming up around these distribution volumes - and their value to us, and others.

What is Sun focusing on?

Strategically, we continue to focus on two core areas - creating the world's largest, and fastest growing developer communities - for whom we build the products, services and technologies on which they'll build their products and services. With brands like MySQL, Java and OpenSolaris - we measure and drive their adoption very aggressively.

And secondly, we deliver compelling commercial offers to those deploying applications - across a diversity of industries - through commercial subscription, services and optimized system products. That is, we sell datacenter systems, software and services.

We're focused on today's customers with our current products and services, and tomorrow's customers with our investments in freely distributed software.

Operationally, we're focused on execution - in the field, in the labs, and on behalf of our shareholders. Innovation loves a crisis, even when the stock markets don't - and Sun's positioned very well to supply the platforms on which the next generation of clouds will be built.

What are you hearing from customers?

It really depends upon industry and geography. From Wall St. I've heard, "I can't take your call until I crawl out from under my desk," (only a slight exaggeration) - at the other extreme, an executive at a professional social networking company said, "we're being crushed with new accounts."

But there are three basic themes I'm hearing.

The first is a profound concern surrounding the global economy. If the headlines are bad, you hold off consumer spending - if you hold off on consumer spending, the headlines are likely to worsen. It's tough to break that cycle.

The second is a reaffirmation of the importance of technology - for discovering drugs, running businesses, modeling supply chains and automating business processes, technology's not getting less important, it's getting more important. Even if budgets are tight in the near term.

The third is the need for change - one executive to whom I spoke recently said her entire discretionary budget was consumed by one proprietary vendor's price increase. So she's out looking for an alternative, and MySQL fits the bill. Which is to say, necessity's the mother of invention - and there's a lot of necessity going around right now.

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All in all, it was a tough quarter for Sun and our customers - but we're emboldened by the progress we made in our emerging markets and technology areas, investments we plan on amplifying and accelerating. Investments whose adoption will be hastened by customers facing new choices.

Stay tuned for our newest storage announcements on November 10th... just as the popping of the internet bubble let loose a flood of innovation for the server world, the global credit crisis is about to shake up the storage industry, too.

______________________

Safe Harbor Statement

Jonathan's blog contains forward-looking statements regarding the future results and performance of Sun including statements with respect to our commitment to enterprise computing, the demand for scale up computing, the continued business of our paying customers, upcoming news regarding Java distribution volumes and value, expectations for the OpenOffice community, our strategy and related progress, our positioning with respect to the next generation of clouds and our expectations with respect to investments in emerging markets and technology areas. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements include: competition; pricing pressures; the complexity of Sun's products and the importance of rapidly and successfully developing and introducing new products; Sun's dependence on significant customers, specific industries and geographies; delays in product development or customer acceptance and implementation of new products and technologies; Sun's ability to implement a new enterprise resource planning system; a material acquisition, restructuring or other event that results in significant charges; failure to successfully integrate acquired companies; reliance on single-source suppliers; risks associated with Sun's ability to purchase a sufficient amount of components to meet demand; inventory risks; risks associated with the quality of Sun's products; risks associated with international customers and operations; Sun's dependence on channel partners; failure to retain key employees; and risks associated with Sun's ability to achieve expected cost reductions within expected time frames. Please also refer to Sun's periodic reports that are filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. Sun assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.

Posted on 02:00PM Oct 30, 2008 | Comments[21]

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Innovation Loves a Crisis

I thought I'd share a note I sent earlier in the week to Sun's leaders - about the turmoil we're seeing in the markets, and how I want our team focusing their efforts.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:
From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: September 30, 2008 12:02:29 AM PDT
To: All Sun
Subject: Headlines, Financial Crisis, etc.

You can't have missed today's headlines - the American Congress failed to pass a critical bill authorizing the Treasury to put a floor under the US banking sector. The market swooned, and politicians in the US, and across the world, are bickering over the right long term answer - jump in and take action to save the troubled institutions, or step aside and let the market sort it out. Several more banks/insurers were shuttered or bailed out today - I'm confident we haven't seen the last of these collapses and rescues.

And I know there are questions about "how does this affect Sun?" Well, I believe almost all our core customers will be affected - not just the banks, but the telcos, hospitals, media companies, construction firms, airlines, governments, startups, you name it. Every customer that depends upon credit as a means of financing their business - whether it's a university or a Fortune 100 transportation company - is going to be under severe stress.

It's also going to create a huge opportunity - if we're on offense. Not on defense, not worried about the impact on Sun, but driving the outcomes for Sun's customers and shareholders.

And here are a few important things to remember.

1. Our customers look to technology as a means of driving value and productivity.

You're not going to hear from any of our customers, "let's stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work." They're going to default to the opposite - automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun - to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is - "how can I help?" I assure you, they'll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I'm reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help - I'd recommend you do the same.

2. That said, we are aggressively expanding our customer base.

Our concentration in financial services and telecommunications is exactly why we're working so hard to expand our customer base. We're dramatically underpenetrated in the global market - and that represents a great opportunity. I need every executive to think seriously, esp. in the market-facing portions of the organization, about growing our current relationships and growing new customers. The 'and' is important - growth matters in both contexts.

And why do I think we have permission to grow new customers?

3. Because innovation loves a crisis.

Remember the bursting of the internet bubble? The initial wave of open source adoption followed that collapse some six or seven years ago. That same zeal for breakthrough, game changing economics is back with a vengeance - and this time, Sun's positioned as the single biggest potential beneficiary. Want proof? As companies move to lower the cost of proprietary database vendors, their number one choice is: MySQL. The number one choice to lower spending on proprietary storage: ZFS with OpenStorage. How will the proprietary alternatives fare against xVM? Glassfish? Lustre? OpenSolaris? Same, from where I sit. There's opportunity everywhere I look.

We can, and should, be on offense across the board. From our newest Batoka and M-Series SPARC systems, to our newest Constellation Intel and AMD blades, from our network identity offerings (talk about automating labor-intensive processes!) to leveraging our amazing SunRay thin clients, or our PS and Support Services capabilities - we have the most powerful offers we've had in years. Imagine if our portfolio had been this strong when the dot com bubble burst - we'd have swept the floor, and been in a dramatically different spot.

Which is all to say, there will be no end of opinions surrounding what the US, or the EU, or the Asian governments should be doing to bolster economic performance. I'm not that interested in the public debate - I am infinitely more interested in the private debate - going on inside every one of our customers surrounding "which OS will we pick?" "What's my open source strategy?" "How can I radically reduce spending on proprietary storage?" "How can I save on power and space?" Which vendor understands my problems?" "Which vendors are asking if they can help - which are truly my partners?"

In times of crisis, we have a big opportunity to stand apart from our peers, to be better connected to the market, even if it's in turmoil. Yes, our customers are going to be under stress, but that's simply another way of saying "open to change." And I want Sun to be the company engaging them in the transition - with our ideas and our roadmaps. The door is open.

And yes, we will see some customers disappear - we will also see many emerge even stronger. And the market, as it's done for the past 30 years, will return to growth - led by the companies that took advantage of the downturn to become even more valuable, to grow even faster.

So I want to assure you, we are watching the market very carefully, to understand the impact on Sun, and the challenges in front of us - on a macro and micro level. But I and my leadership team know the drill, we've seen this before when the last bubble burst - *now is the time* to get in front of the opportunity, and firmly establish new ground. Now's the time our customers will be most open to change.

Let's be sure we're there to help - and to take advantage of the opportunity.

Jonathan

Posted on 03:42PM Oct 02, 2008 | Comments[31]

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Saving a Fortune in Data Warehousing

UPDATE at bottom.

I just wanted to extend my congratulations to the team at Greenplum, and our joint customers at Fox Interactive Media - the folks behind MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, FOXSports.com, and a whole series of web properties that together represent one of the single largest audiences on the web.

All three of us announced today that Fox is running a massive production data warehouse built atop Greenplum's data warehousing software on Sun's Solaris/ZFS based OpenStorage platforms (a sea of Thumpers, to be specific). That is to say, open source software is at the core of one of the world's largest - and most affordable - data warehouses.

Fox joins a series of joint Sun/Greenplum customers, from LinkedIn to the New York Stock Exchange, in looking to open source databases and innovation as a vehicle to drive better insight, faster decisions and more efficiency.

Which is to say, customers that are tired of proprietary vendors with a knack for raising license fees during economic downturns have a clear set of remarkably affordable alternatives. Based on commodity economics everyone can understand.

Congratulations to all involved!

______________________________

UPDATE: I've gotten a fair number of inquiries from folks wanting to know how the Greenplum/Thumper data warehouse discussed above prices out against its competitors - given that one recently announced proprietary entrant has suggested $15,000 per terabyte is acceptable to customers. My view is that's a pre-bubble price, and roughly an order of magnitude too expensive in today's market - and unlikely to garner more than headlines. But that's obviously a biased view, I'd check with a few customers to find out what they want to pay.

Posted on 11:59PM Sep 24, 2008 | Comments[27]

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Of Wine, Virtualization and xVM

A few years back, I remember sitting with a group of customers talking about wine, and virtualization (a natural pairing, if ever one existed). Wine, because we were at an event Sun was hosting in Napa Valley, the heart of California's wine country - virtualization, because the attendees were data center professionals who'd come to talk about the future.

The customers in attendance all ran very high scale, high value data centers, who would deservedly respond to the accusation that they "hugged" their servers with "and what of it?" They were the individuals who kept some of the world's most valuable systems running with exceptional reliability.

But they were all starting to see and worry about the same thing, running applications in "virtualized" grids of networked infrastructure ("cloud computing" wasn't yet in vogue, or I'm sure someone would've used the term).

Now, virtualization is a simple concept with a fancy name (abbreviated to "v12n" by the cognoscenti - by that method, I am "j14z"). It's simply slicing up physical computers into many smaller "virtual" computers, each of which can be outfitted with its own OS and application stack.

That is, not only does a virtualized computer take on the task of running multiple OS's (running atop a hypervisor, described below), but the OS's themselves might change over time, responding to load or schedule. The traditional view of "computer A runs OS/Application B" can now give way to a more responsive "these computers are available for high priority work," without regard to operating system or architecture. A spike in on-line shopping might reallocate more "virtual" machines to transaction processing during peak shopping hours, shifting to a different OS/app stack when the frenzy dies down. Capacity moves from fixed to fungible.

Although desktop virtualization wasn't the focus of these customers, most live in a world with multiple desktop OS's, too - it's not that they all (like me) run five different desktop OS's, most don't - it's that they have multiple generations of Windows, or no longer have the source code to legacy applications, a condition that dictates you keep old OS's (and hardware) around. Desktop virtualization enables users to run multiple OS's side by side on a single desktop, and divorces software upgrades from hardware upgrades (an innovation keeping CIO's and developers smiling).

Back to the datacenter, virtualization can enable extreme infrastructure consolidation - decoupling applications from hardware drives more efficient capacity planning and system purchases. And as exciting as that was to everyone, if things went wrong, you could also tank the quarter, blow those savings and end your career. So, why all the anxiety?

If I could sum it up, these customers worried that virtualization would dissolve the control they'd carefully built to manage extreme reliability. In essence, they could hug a virtualized mainframe or an E25K (hugging is the act of paying exquisite attention to an individual machine), but it's far harder to hug a cloud. Nor can you ask a cloud why it's slow, irritable, or flaky, questions more easily answered with a single, big machine.

As the wine soothed their anxieties, a few of them began to draw out their vision of an ideal cloud environment (our laptops were open to take notes). Summarized, here's what they wanted:

Extreme diagnosability. Datacenter veterans know that things rarely run as planned, so assuming from the outset you're looking for problems, bottlenecks or optimization opportunities is a safer bet than assuming everything will go as expected. They all wanted ultimate security in responding to the question "what if something goes wrong?" - their jobs were on the line.

Second, they wanted extreme scalability - they all believed the move toward horizontally scaled grids (lots of little systems, 'scaled out'), would give way (as it always does) to smaller numbers of bigger systems ('scaled up'). We're seeing that already, with the move toward multi-core cpu's creating 16, 32, 64 even 128 way systems in a single box, lashed together with very high performance networking.

But scalability applies to management overhead, as well - having 16,000 virtualized computers is terrific (like 16,000 puppies), until you have to manage and maintain them. Often the biggest challenge (and expense) in a high scale datacenter isn't the technology, it's the breadth of point products or people managing the technology. So seamless management had to be our highest priority, with extreme scale (internet scale) in mind.

They wanted a general purpose, hardware and OS independent approach. That is, they wanted a solution that ran on any hardware vendor they chose, not just on Sun's servers and storage, but Dell's, IBM's, HP's, too. And they wanted a solution that would support Microsoft Windows, Linux and not just Solaris. Ideally embraced and endorsed by Microsoft, Intel, AMD, and not just Sun.

And finally, they wanted open source. After years of moving toward and relying upon open source software, they didn't want to reintroduce proprietary software into the most foundational layer of their future datacenters. Some wanted the ability to "look at the code," to ensure security, others wanted the freedom to make modifications for unique workloads or requirements.

And with that feedback, the answer to the above seemed obvious to one attendee, "why can't you guys just use Solaris?" They all ran Solaris in mission critical deployment, all appreciated its performance, they loved the diagnosability (via delivered via DTrace), and the capacity to scale to the largest systems on earth. It was the perfect answer until one of the customers asked, "do Windows customers want to run Solaris? I don't think so." The "Solaris" brand didn't convey OS neutrality - and that neutrality was core to what we were thinking. But we knew the underlying inventory of OpenSolaris innovations would certainly give us a fabulous headstart.

That's the rough backdrop to what drove our virtualization announcements last week - a desire to solve problems for developers and datacenter operators in multi-vendor environments. If you look to the core of our xVM offerings, you'll see exactly how we responded to the requirements outlined above: we integrated DTrace for extreme diagnosability. We leveraged the scale inherent in our kernel innovations to virtualize the largest systems on earth. We've built a clean, simple interface to manage clouds (called xVM OpsCenter, click here for more details), to address management and provisioning for the smallest to the largest datacenters. And everything's available via open source (and free download), endorsed by our industry peers (watch these launch videos to see Microsoft and Intel endorse xVM - no, that's not a typo, Microsoft endorsed xVM). We even leveraged ZFS to get a head start on storage virtualization (the next frontier).

And why call it xVM? To make sure everyone knew we weren't simply targeting Solaris - xVM virtualizes Microsoft Windows, Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL, all other distros) alongside Solaris (8, 9 and 10). Customers can consolidate those operating systems, and similarly consolidate their hardware infrastructure - and use xVM OpsCenter to manage and maintain the whole plant.

This week, we're unveiling a full line of desktop to datacenter virtualization offerings, covering desktop virtualization (xVM VirtualBox), datacenter virtualization (xVM Server), high scale management (xVM Ops Center), and Virtual Desktop support (xVM VDI and SunRay). All endorsed and supported by the industry, and all in use by some of the most powerful customers on earth.

And to that end, I'd like to offer my thanks to the customers who were present at that event a few years ago, and offer my sincere congratulations to the teams involved in bringing xVM to market, across Sun and our partner community.

With all the celebration around xVM, perhaps our next customer event should be held in Champagne...

Posted on 10:34PM Sep 14, 2008 | Comments[34]

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Fanning the Winds of Change in Storage

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies buy/hold/sell recommendations to investors (who hopefully generate trading fees for the analyst's employers).

This one analyst hadn't historically followed Sun, and was in the process of developing his first rating. He wanted to focus on our storage plans - more and more of the customers whom he interviewed were focused on storage, and many were talking up a specific open source software technology: ZFS. (Before meeting with me, he'd talked to colleagues in his own IT shop, and was impressed to find some who admitted to running ZFS at home - nothing like touching your customers where they live... if you'd like to have ZFS sent to you, click here or on the LiveCD shown at right.)

Granted, you can see an increasing focus on storage at Sun - the acquisition of MySQL is as much a storage acquisition, as an enhancement to Sun's developer offerings. Discussions of flash memory, the economics of archiving, the Lustre parallel file system, all point to an increasing focus on what Sun sees as an exceptional opportunity for customers (and thus, investors). Storage and computing are converging - and we're about to bring the trends that transformed the server industry a few years ago (mass engagement in open development communities, and scale achieved via clusters of commodity parts vs. proprietary technologies) to the historically closed and proprietary storage industry.

Now, the notion of "engaging customers in open development communities" doesn't sit well among some traditional storage analysts (or our competition) who believe "Storage is too mission critical to tolerate open source software." Although I appreciate that wisdom and experience, I think the market's more nuanced than that - mission critical environments don't tolerate unsupported software, true, which is why we offer 24x7 commercial support for ZFS (on Sun hardware, and Dell, even). But broad global adoption of key open source projects will continue to drive change deep into the world's datacenters. Gartner's prediction that 90% of world's companies will run open source software didn't specify where they'd be running it - "everywhere" is the safest bet.

But back to the equity analyst - he patiently asked, "Great theory, but when will you see revenue results?"

"Last year," I responded. "You're seeing it accelerate."

As many folks know, we shipped our first ZFS based storage systems in 2007 - known as Thumpers. Thumpers finished up this last year generating around $100m in billings, up 80% year over year. From a capacity perspective, we delivered roughly 90 petabytes of Thumper storage in FY2008, to some of the most demanding storage installations on earth (up ~200% y/y). What's fueling the growth? Adoption of ZFS is a clear driver (this chart gives you a sense of where we're seeing adoption - thus revenue opportunity). But ultimately, customers are recognizing they can save money, space and power. Thumpers are roughly twice the capacity in half the space at half the cost of the competition - $1.20/Gigabyte. (They also run Windows and Linux with the same hardware economics).

Now, our view is "OpenStorage" (systems built from commodity parts and open source software) will grow far faster than the proprietary storage market. We plan on driving that growth, and over the next few months, you'll see a tremendous amount of storage innovation targeting the growing breadth of customers wanting better/faster/cheaper/smaller options. Expect to see flash, zfs, dtrace, and good old fashioned systems engineering play a very prominent role in an aggressive push into the storage market.

And in case you missed our announcement last week, our progress was validated by industry analysis - IDC said customers are growing their disk storage business with Sun far faster than with any of our proprietary competition. And at three times the rate of the overall market's growth. A great place to start.

If you'd like to know more, and might be interested in taking a Thumper system for a free trial run, just click here and pick the country in which you're located. We supply most systems at Sun for free trials across the globe (yes, we even cover shipping to you). If you like the system, please buy it. If not, we'll take care of getting it returned to Sun, you owe us nothing. (That's the closest we can get to free hardware downloads...)

As I said to the analyst, you need only look to the results we're already delivering to see the linkage between open innovation and revenue growth. ZFS won't transform demand for our legacy products, but it'll certainly transform the opportunity and industry unfolding before us. But don't just get our opinion, the best folks to validate our approach aren't at Sun, they're among the storage buyers finally feeling the winds of change - at their backs.

Posted on 08:20PM Sep 07, 2008 | Comments[24]

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MySQL Wins at LinkedIn!

I was with a customer last week, who leads technology and operations for one of the world's largest companies. We were talking through his priorities for the upcoming year, and on a page filled with various traditional priorities (consolidation, energy management, disaster recovery, regulatory compliance) were two interesting words.

"Open Source."

I asked what that meant, why it was there. He said they'd done an audit of the firm's development activities, and found an overwhelming number ("hundreds") of open source projects that had been completed behind the scenes, beyond management's oversight. The projects were designed to solve problems deemed too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies - from meeting a tough budget, to automating a new process. And rather than fight the trend, they figured it was delivering real benefit, something to explore more fully. And they were asking for Sun's help.

I'm seeing this with nearly every customer I meet, the invisible hand of open source - communities of individuals equally devoted to their employers, and to personal and peer productivity. These communities, within companies as well as across industries, are solving problems without having to involve procurement (while religiously adhering to policies surrounding privacy, intellectual property protection and software licensing). They're delivering unquestionable value.

Now, is unprescribed technology usage all that unusual in the workplace? I don't think so - it's similar to choosing your favorite search engine or social network, choices we all make (even CIO's) without purchase orders, that definitely bear on workplace productivity. Most progressive CIO's are trying to embrace this trend rather than fight it, figuring out how they can mandate as little as possible, not as much as possible - selecting only the most critical policies and standards to drive efficiency or compliance.

The invisible hand of open source adoption is definitely changing IT, and it's changing Sun's market opportunity - in software, servers and storage systems. Before Sun acquired them, MySQL had already established themselves among the world's open source communities, and invisibly penetrated an enormous breadth of companies across the world. From where I sit, the acquisition changed MySQL's standing not so much among developers, but among traditional technology decision makers - by bridging the divide that separated them. A well adopted product became a safe choice for enterprise deployment. The acquisition opened new doors and business dialog - we've seen a substantive increase in sales and download activity since it was announced. We've also seen a fair number of CIO's, as above, asking their teams - "where are we using MySQL?" The answers are always interesting.

As those conversations transition to sales cycles for MySQL Enterprise subscriptions (for those seeking mission crtiical support, eg), the number one question I get asked by traditional customers has become... "...but does MySQL scale?"

And there's no better way of putting that question to rest than citing the global businesses powered by MySQL - at least one of which is often used by the very individual asking the question: LinkedIn. Click here to read how Sun and LinkedIn are working together to serve one of the world's largest, most valuable, and fastest growing social networks - at truly global scale.

At the pace LinkedIn is growing, they will be managing services to far more accounts than most of the world's banks... and building exceptional value along the way. (And if you haven't signed up yet, you really ought to...)

Posted on 01:05PM Jul 29, 2008 | Comments[37]

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Solaris on Wall Street - Faster and Faster

I remember a dinner I had a while back with the CEO of a global financial services firm. As one of his first acts as CEO, he'd cancelled an enormous outsourcing contract, and I'd asked him why - his response has stuck with me. "Banking is a technology business. Pure and simple. I can't win if I don't have my own team."

Independent of his views on outsourcing, I've heard the same point made by many (but not all) financial services executives - banking (like big swaths of telecommunications, media and retailing) has become a technology business, where every ounce of performance and differentiation matters. Even, and especially, in the midst of market turmoil.

Which is a fitting backdrop for a joint press release we just issued with Intel - in which we achieved a land speed record - a million messages per second, running the Reuters Market Data System on Solaris 10 for Intel silicon (see release for details). To our colleagues at Intel and Thomson Reuters... thank you! Performance = market advantage, energy savings, or datacenter consolidation  - or all of the above. Customers get to pick.

And following up on my last post on the impact of flash memory and ZFS on the world of datacenters, our own Adam Leventhal has added a far more fulfilling technical perspective in Communications of the ACM: Flash Storage Memory.Worth the read...

Posted on 12:16AM Jul 03, 2008 | Comments[22]

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Anything But a Flash in the Pan

There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.

If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.

And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.

That's exactly why, years ago, Sun invented a storage platform called ZFS. ZFS makes a powerful assumption - that a reliable system must be built from unreliable parts. By using surplus computing cycles, ZFS constantly runs powerful integrity checks, giving data corruption no place to hide. With ZFS, customers can use the cheapest disks and simplest systems, and get exceptional data integrity, along with massive reductions in cost and complexity.

But there's a new option on the table, known to many by the memory cards they use in their phones, iPods or digital cameras - called Flash memory. Flash is very fast at reading and writing data, like DRAM (the memory chips in your computer). Its price sits squarely between DRAM and traditional disk drives. But unlike either alternative, Flash requires no power to remember data. And with the price of electricity escalating across the world, keeping 10,000 disks spinning at thousands of rpm can cost you in power what you pay for your storage. Power has become the dominant factor in high scale hardware decisions - and Flash is set to disrupt the industry.

Historically, there have been two impediments to using Flash in the enterprise.

The first was cost. Flash is more expensive per gigabyte than a comparable disk drive. But with every increase in the cost of electricity (and decay in the price of Flash memory), Flash's relative cost per available gigabyte is quickly improving - remember, disk drives have to be powered on to be available. And although a gigabyte of mechanical disk might cost you less than a gigabyte of Flash memory, the latter is at least an order of magnitude faster in reading and writing data - so the cost per gigabyte served is exceptionally low.

But simply introducing Flash as yet another tier of storage in a datacenter isn't the real opportunity - that adds new costs and a set of new management hassles. To truly change the industry, adding Flash would have to be completely transparent to users and operators, alike, with no switching or operational cost. And that's exactly what we're doing with ZFS. ZFS will transparently incorporate Flash into the storage hierarchy of a running system, using the microprocessor cache for the most performance sensitive tasks, DRAM for the next, then Flash, then disk (then ultimately tape). ZFS will allow Flash to join DRAM and commodity disks to form a hybrid pool automatically used by ZFS to achieve the best price, performance and energy efficiency conceivable. Simply put, our storage and server systems will get enormously faster - without any upgrade to the microprocessor. Adding Flash will be like adding DRAM - once it's in, there's no new administration, just new capability.

That's one reason we're so excited by Flash - the cost per available gigabyte served (the total operational cost of storage) plummets with Flash in the mix, especially for data or performance intensive applications (like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle or SQL Server). From the right systems designs, Flash has the potential of providing orders of magnitude improvements in economics and performance - and with the advent of Sun's xVM hypervisor, we can bring this performance benefit to any host operating system (running atop xVM, Windows operators can inherit the benefit of ZFS+Flash, too). 

The second problem is trickier - simply put, although Flash memory can be read an infinite number of times, writing to Flash more than a few hundred thousand times can wear it out. Now, most normal humans will never hit 500,000 writes in a digital camera. But you might in your enterprise. What to do?

Again, ZFS to the rescue.

ZFS treats Flash memory like any other storage medium - remember, all storage devices fail - and manages data integrity whether failure's induced by a bad hard drive motor, write-fatigue or a hammer drill. Increasingly sophisticated "wear leveling" algorithms are also maximizing Flash lifespans - evening out write activity to avoid hot spot failures. But the bottom line is this - with ZFS at the helm, wear is a non-issue (on hard drives or Flash - they both have wear limitations, after all).

These are the premises behind Sun's systems approach to Open Storage. We're integrating ZFS, Flash memory and some exceptional hardware/silicon innovations to deliver high performance, low power, general purpose storage and server appliances - accelerating any software that runs on our SPARC or x86 systems (MySQL users, in specific, will see a big turbo charge). For a fraction of what proprietary NAS storage ordinarily costs. Expect our first Flash systems to ship toward the end of this calendar year.

And as you might expect, ZFS and all the underlying software will be free without commercial support - OpenSolaris, ZFS, MySQL and Postgres are already available (click the image at left to get a free LiveCD - or check out Apple's release of ZFS in Mac OSX). Software revenue will come from those enterprises that want Sun's technical support for mission critical deployment. On the hardware side, Sun's Try and Buy programs allow any partner or customer to order one of our systems for free 60 day trial - if you love it, buy it. If not, we'll cover the return postage.

If the above doesn't make it obvious... our view is Flash is anything but a flash in the pan - as the price of power continues to increase, and the price of Flash continues to plummet, the combination of Flash, ZFS and true systems innovation will have an even bigger impact on datacenter economics than virtualization.

It's that big a deal.

---

UPDATE:  You may have seen we added yet another company to the list led by Intel, IBM and Dell supporting Solaris (and thus ZFS) as OEM partners - this morning, we officially announced the addition of Fujitsu-Siemens. Congratulations, all...

Posted on 03:00PM Jun 10, 2008 | Comments[41]

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Growing in the P7 (not just the G7)

De facto standards are the only ones that matter.

That's a bit of a truism in the technology world - well intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time.

To that point, I was on a panel recently, discussing the impact of technology on the world's more rapidly developing economies (what's often referred to as "BRICA," or Brazil, Russia, India, China and Africa).

One of the speakers referenced an interesting shift in the traditional media industry: western companies were turning their attention toward the developing world. GDP growth wasn't drawing their attention - as much as demographics. Teenagers and those in their early twenties represent the biggest media buyers in the world, spending a greater portion of their income on music, movies and entertainment than any other age group. And the majority of people fitting that age profile live, by definition, in population centers - not in the US, UK, or Germany, but BRICA. Whose collective population represents nearly half the entire planet's. Think of the Ovum analysis from the New York Times, pictured on the right, more as growth in media outlets - and remember, more people in the world see "the internet" on their phone, than on a PC.

The impact of that shift in buying power won't be limited to traditional media. The software industry is a media industry, as well - technically, the two have fully converged (a digital file is a digital file, whether it's OpenSolaris, MySQL, a new Jay Chou video, or a champion cricket highlight). The infrastructure to distribute and manipulate that content (eg, servers, networking, storage and infrastructure software) is increasingly geared to serve consumers - the "business to consumer" (or, B2C) segment of the IT marketplace is growing far, far faster than "business to business" (B2B). And where will the market for such network computing infrastructure be largest? By definition, where the markets are centered - near consumers (more than half of whom now live in urban environments, well covered by mobile network service). If B2B caused the IT industry to concentrate in proximity to economic centers (the G7), B2C focuses our attention on consumers and population centers (the P7?). That's a profound change.

So with that backdrop, I've made a few significant changes to how Sun's organized, focusing leadership and resourcing around two new areas.

First, as many folks know inside of Sun, I announced the addition of Lin Lee to my staff, to manage relationships with governments and NGO's across the world. Based in Shanghai, Lin will advocate Sun's vision of sustainable network infrastructure, encompassing open source and document formats to power efficient datacenters - we've already found a very receptive audience in emerging economies. Lin's focus will be helping students, universities and governments to lower the barriers to indigenous opportunity.

I also announced today a new leader reporting to me for Sun's Global Sales and Services organization, Peter Ryan. He's also added to his staff a new business region, Emerging Markets - with a new leader (Denis Heraud). Emerging Markets, representing a basket of rapidly developing economies (BRICA included), will be a peer to North America, Europe and Asia. Last quarter alone, our BRICA business grew in double digits - this change is designed to accelerate that growth by adding new focus, resourcing and strong leadership.

Peter (who disclosed to me only this weekend that he started his career as a mainframe systems engineer!) replaces Don Grantham. (Don's leaving Sun to help HP secure a Solaris license before their EDS transaction closes...)

Rapidly developing economies have, of late, started throwing their weight around in the world of traditional IT standards - and have been among the most assertive in embracing and deploying free/open source software. Quite naturally, they've also been among the most concerned about sustainable technology practices: 100,000,000 new PC users, each drawing 200 watts, certainly paves the way for social and economic progress - at the cost of ~20 gigawatts of new coal fired power plants. Now you know why our SunRay desktops, at 4 watts apiece, have been of such interest in the developing (and developed) world.

Bluntly put, we're elevating our focus on developing economies because that's where free software, and Sun's businesses, are growing fastest. Where is OpenOffice deployed in the greatest numbers? In places where saving $300 per desktop is meaningful.

No wonder those economies are so passionate about open standards - their citizenry will ultimately make them the most important decision makers in the world.

Posted on 01:26PM Jun 02, 2008 | Comments[36]

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Transparency and Making Choices

Not long ago, I was sitting across from the CEO of a media company. He showed enormous pride in the social value of his organization - in delivering news to the world via a global team of thoughtful, award-winning journalists.

He asked what made me proud to be at Sun. Among a number of things, I said I'm proudest of the role Sun plays in making sure stories like his are told - "Our technologies, after all, are how your journalists file their stories, and we play a central role in how you present them to the world via the network." I am unreservedly proud of Sun's role in making the world a more open, transparent place.

Beyond professional journalism, the network is a social utility for the world's citizenry - whose digital cameras and cell phones and blog postings and emails form a tidal wave of transparency. We live in a world whose traumas and triumphs are visible instantaneously. Sunlight's not just a great disinfectant, it's a wonderful safety net, too - you can't fix the problems you don't know about. But once you know about a problem, even small attempts to help, multiplied over the long tail of the internet, can make an extraordinary difference.

Over the past few days, the world has watched an earthquake in China lead to the death and dislocation of countless thousands. The San Francisco Bay Area, where Sun is headquartered, has felt the impact deeply - beyond co-workers, friends and family, we've suffered our own traumas with earthquakes. A cyclone in Myanmar triggered similar thoughts among those of us effected by hurricanes in New Orleans, Louisiana.

But the world's an increasingly transparent place. And any help, from $1 to $1m, multiplied over the world, makes a difference.

Which is why I'm sending personal funds to the relief organizations I trust to bring aid to those stricken.

And I'm encouraging you to take the time to make a similar choice.

Posted on 09:09AM May 18, 2008 | Comments[39]

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JavaFX as Rich Internet Application Platform

JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.

This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.

On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would suffice.

But browser based applications are hitting complexity and performance limits, and content owners are striving for higher levels of engagement (via high definition video, or advanced interactivity). Developers are demanding something new - the browser's a wonderfully accessible programming model, but it's a weak deployment model for rich/disconnected applications.

An unspoken driver of RIA is also business model evolution - many companies behind rich applications are seeking independence from browsers and search engines, whose default settings and corporate parents present a competitive threat. There's a growing appetite for locally installed applications that build rich, direct and permanent engagement with consumers. No one wants to pay a toll to meet their own customers.

With that in mind, as we looked to reinvent the Java platform, we heard a consistent set of requirements. And not just from coders, but from sports francishes seeking to directly engage their fans, media companies wanting to bypass browser defaults, to artists and businesses and device manufacturers - everyone's looking to uniquely engage consumers via the network. These audiences have nearly identitical requirements for a RIA platform - they want technology that:

• Reaches every internet consumer - on desktops, mobile, and new devices, too.
  
• Delivers high performance - and the ability to engage creative professsionals in the design process.
  
• Leverages existing skills and enterprise infrastructure.
  
• Is totally free, and open source.
  
• Provides content owners with control and ownership of their own data.
  

At JavaOne last week, we addressed every one of those issues - here's how:

First, RIA developers want to reach every consumer on earth, and on every device.

Why? Because the market is in front of consumers - no matter what screen they may be using. Desktop, mobile phone, personal navigation, digital book - you name it. The market's in front of all the screens in your life, not just a PC.

That said, on PC's a