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An interview with Jonathan Schwartz

Sun 'pre-configured for the downturn' says Schwartz

By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld, 02/02/09

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Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz thinks that the economic downturn and Wall Street meltdown will make IT managers more open to change -- and that, in turn, will benefit Sun's open-source strategy. Computerworld's Patrick Thibodeau sat down with Schwartz for a candid chat about Sun's strategy for surviving the current recession.

What are you doing to help your customers with their economic problems?
We are preconfigured for the downturn. If you think about the discretionary expenses that go into operating a data center, first and foremost there's the physical plant itself -- the physical space, the power consumption, the HVAC. So all the work that we do around energy efficiency and on getting optimal performance -- it's because the environment ends up being a huge operating expense for our customers. And to the extent that we can help them lower their environmental impact, we're also lowering the economic impact on their businesses. That's clearly Job 1.

The second element of discretionary expense is software licensing, and probably the single biggest license that customers have to buy is [for] proprietary databases. Second on that list are proprietary application servers and an application infrastructure. I just was with a customer who didn't recognize that he had roughly 2,000 developers working with MySQL because it wasn't a purchase standard [in his organization] -- but it had become the de facto [database] standard. He didn't recognize that he could get that level of productivity [from an open-source database].

The same is true for the application server marketplace. OpenSolaris -- now that it is multivendor and multiplatform and the source [code] is available, those environments where you don't need support don't have to pay for it. And then we enable customers that want to subscribe in production environments to pay for the supported version.

Dossier

Name: Jonathan Schwartz
Title: CEO
Company: Sun Microsystems Inc.
Location: Santa Clara, Calif.

Best books read this year:

Favorite nonwork activity: Cooking and eating, with friends and family.

Philosophy in a nutshell: "The harder you work, the luckier you get."

Fantasy dinner party guests: "Larry Ellison -- I'd love to have him over. We both love databases; we'd have a lot to cover. I'd even cook. Heck, that's probably unrealistic.

"I guess I'd love to have dinner with John Maynard Keynes, Steve Martin, Alice Waters and all three of this year's Nobel laureates in physics. Alice cooks, Steve picks the wine, we all learn about broken symmetry."


For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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