Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols responds to my previous post, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols == Sensationalist, and I take the time to respond back.
Clearly you don’t know your own company. Sun alternates between embracing Linux and trying to kill it. And, the same could be said for Solaris x86. A case in point, Sun _refused_ to bring StarOffice to Solaris x86, until vocal and public comments finally forced them to. So, Sun is pro-Linux? Fast forward a couple of months, I ask the Director of x86 marketing what their plans are for Linux. He tells me that Sun will Not push Linux sales unless a business already has a Linux infrastructure, so what do they recommend? Solaris x86, of course.
What I want is for Sun to make up its mind as to what the heck it’s x86 strategy really is. I’m not being contradictory, I’m simply expressing my frustration at a company, to pick another example, that says it’s pro-Linux one minute and then the next its president is telling everyone that its primary Linux partner’s, Red Hat, operating system is proprietary. Argh!
Steven
Thanks for the comment Steven.
I understand Sun quite well, having spent seven and a half years in customer facing roles. In that time I have never seen Sun try to kill Linux. In fact, the opposite is true. Since people began to embrace Linux we’ve said that it helps our cause. Why? Because Linux is a Unix-like OS and makes it much easier for people to adopt our technology. Just because we are very bad at marketing doesn’t mean we are trying to kill Linux.
At the coal face we sell Linux all the time. Again, Sun may be terrible at marketing, but it’s pretty clear that we are embracing Linux when you look at the products and strategies we sell. We have Red Hat and SuSE, and a whole desktop solution based on it (Java Desktop System). Currently we sell the v60x, v65x, v20z, b100x and the b200x that are supported with Linux. Look out for more soon. All our storage is support on Linux, and has been for years. The Java Enterprise System will soon start to ship for Linux, and that doesn’t include all the software we currently have that runs on Linux like the N1 Grid Engine, Star Office, Web Server, Directory Server, Portal Server, I could go on.
The basic premise behind our x86 strategy is that it is great for the edge devices that companies run. In general these systems scale horizontally and redundancy is based on cheap replaceable systems. Given the economies of scale that x86 systems have, it fits that mold perfectly. However, we firmly believe that the years of investment in building Solaris into a robust and massively scalable environment means that for organisations that rely on the data at the centre of their business, it makes more sense to put Solaris on systems that needs these features. That’s why some great companies that really rely on their data use Sun. For the same reason it’s why the telcos embraced Sun. Linux is great, but it currently doesn’t have features like domains, linear scaling up to 106 CPUs, containers and DTrace, that have taken millions of R&D dollars to put into Solaris. So that’s probably the reason you hear mixed messages. Every IT manager will tell you that different OSs have their place, whether it be Windows, Linux or Solaris, not one of them suits all applications. I’m sure with your experience you agree.
If your article picked on Sun because it’s marketing was hopeless, then I’d have agreed with you. Sun has inspiring technical people. That’s it’s culture. What we lack is the ability to interface with the press, like yourself, analysts, and most importantly clear and clever marketing. Lets face it, anyone that names a product N1 needs a serious reality check.
Even though your comment suggests that what you want is a clear strategy from Sun, what your article suggested was that Sun’s strategy was clear by saying that we are using Solaris x86 against Linux. If that was the case then why would we sell Linux, support Linux on our hardware, develop a Linux desktop, update Star Office on Linux before Solaris x86, and port all our software to it. There is no conspiracy, just bad marketing.
Thanks again for the comment.
Kind regards
Richard.
