Newsletter sign-up

View all newsletters

Enterprise Java Newsletter
Stay up to date on the latest tutorials and Java community news posted on JavaWorld

With the economic downturn, do you really expect customers in the near term to, say, swap out an Oracle database and replace it with MySQL?
Unquestionably. Now, that doesn't mean they are leaving Oracle -- Oracle is a fantastic company, and they've built a fantastic database. But there is no longer one-size-fits-all in the enterprise database marketplace.

In your blog, you talked about aggressively expanding your customer base. How does the new four-socket Sparc Enterprise T5440 help you do that?
It's a little unlikely that this server is going to be the first system that a new customer buys from Sun. I don't want to close off that option, [but] it's more likely that they pick up a one-socket Niagara system. Just on price point, you seldom spend $50,000 to $100,000 on your first server, and that's the price range that these [new] systems start at.

Niagara as a whole, though, gives us access to a market that really is representative of a unique problem space. We don't see IBM with [its System p line] at all in the Niagara space. What brings new customers to Sun is differentiation and innovation. [They] want to be 50% faster, or 50% more energy-efficient, or half the size. Those things, when added up across really large data centers, mean real money to real customers.

Sun fosters a reputation as a disruptive company, from a technology standpoint. But what will it mean to be disruptive going forward?
You want to be careful. You want to be disruptive to the industry; you don't want to be disruptive to your customers. I'll give you a great example of the kind of disruption that the market is going to see from Sun in the next 12 months. We have been very aggressively promoting OpenSolaris in the marketplace, and there are a lot of storage vendors that have been really excited to embrace open-source operating systems -- so long as they stay on servers.

As you have seen with Thumper -- a 48TB storage platform based on the ZFS file system -- we're planning on taking Solaris and extending all the skills and knowledge and ecosystem that we built in our server business to our storage business. That now means open-source platforms will be at the heart of open storage as it evolves as a market category, and we plan on being a leader there. That's very disruptive to the competition.

What role does FUD -- fear, uncertainty and doubt -- play in the server market these days? (I'm asking this because Linux advocates don't seem to miss an opportunity to explain why that operating system will crush Solaris at some point. How do you counter that?)
We don't pay a lot of attention to that; we pay a lot of attention to customers. We are very well aligned with the Linux community. We're not the enemy of one another -- and I know there are folks who get emotional about that now and then. But our focus is going after the proprietary vendors that are causing our customers a lot of grief and a lot of pain. And the more we focus on solving those customers' problems, the more they embrace open source.

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