Sun Shines In 2006

Emboldened with a new generation of hardware, Sun Microsystems is betting big that it has the best prospects to reverse its fortunes since the dot-com bust.

The company's new line of AMD Opteron-based, dual-core servers and a new SPARC platform that opens up what was once a proprietary architecture--with more competitive pricing, to boot--should give customers their best reason in years to give Sun a second look. But speeds and feeds are just table stakes these days. As with its larger rivals Hewlett-Packard and IBM, growth for Sun and its partners will come mostly from services. For example, Sun's new SPARC servers, the T1000 line, will come bundled with a three-year service contract.

Sun's $4 billion services business was up 9.9 percent last year, not including an additional $1 million in services revenue it gained from its acquisition of StorageTek in the fall.

"It's inorganic growth, but it's growth," says Don Grantham, executive vice president of Sun Services.

Now the vendor is planning to grow in unfamiliar turf: heterogeneous data-center management. Sun's acquisition last year of SevenSpace gave it the key intellectual property it needed to provide proactive systems management. Using the telemetry capability developed by SevenSpace, a service provider can pinpoint a problem using agents and correct it, say, by bringing down a server that's about to fail. Further, that can be done remotely, via what Sun officials have dubbed Sun Connection.

Like the popular vehicle-tracking system, Sun Connection can pinpoint the cause of trouble within an infrastructure and report it to an administrator. "We want to create data centers that are connected by our version of OnStar," Grantham says. "We made a decision that every product Sun ships going forward will be connectable, whether a server, storage product or piece of software. There's huge value in that it gives a platform [the ability] to roll out these value-added services."

Grantham says Sun anticipates that a good portion of its data-center management services will be delivered by channel partners. "It's going to give them a higher attach-rate," he says.

Mark Teter, CTO of Sun partner Advanced Systems Group, likes the strategy. "It's going to create a windfall for the Sun community at large," he says. "Creating reliable products in the long run is what everyone wants to see. It's going to be a challenging position for other systems vendors to ensure they have something similar."

Not that Sun's key rivals, HP, IBM and even EMC, haven't articulated similar strategies. For example, HP has begun talking about its Next Generation Data Center, which is very much a blueprint for how it sees its systems-management components evolving. Describing its vision at HP's analyst conference last month, CEO Mark Hurd described it as autonomic and self-healing. "Instead of having a lot of humans running it," he noted, "I want to have a 24/7, lights-out computing environment that's going to be run, monitored and controlled remotely."