Will open source save Sun?
Sun Microsystems' most recent quarter took a hit from a slumping U.S. economy, according to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Revenue from Sun's server computers and storage products fell 2.8 percent. The company plans up to 2,500 job cuts as it seeks to balance expenses with growth.
But from where will the growth come?
Sun is betting big on open source to drive adoption, which should, in turn, drive revenue (done right). I spoke with the executive vice president of Sun's Systems business, John Fowler, the other day, and I asked him about whether the strategy is, in fact, working. How much growth is Sun seeing in its software business?
As he indicated, separating out software tells an incomplete revenue picture. Software for Sun is a driver of software, hardware, and services revenue. It's not an end unto itself.
If last quarter is any indication, however, software--whether open or proprietary--has yet to provide a real spur to its hardware and services business. This is perhaps worrisome, given that so many open-source businesses with which I'm familiar are thriving in the economic downturn. A bad economy has been very good for open source.
But Sun's slowness to feel these effects is perhaps not surprising, given that its renewed commitment to and investment in software is of fairly recent vintage. The company will need time to plant the software seeds and let them grow.
The question for Sun will be one of time. Will it be accorded enough by Wall Street to let its software strategy blossom? Using Novell as an example, Wall Street gave it several quarters to get it right. It's unclear whether Wall Street will give Sun the same leeway, though Sun has a history of proving detractors wrong and eventually getting its ship back on track. (How many times has the death of Sun been predicted?)
Another question for Sun will revolve around how much open-source software will be required to move the hardware and services needle. MySQL, with more than 70 million downloads, is a good candidate to jump-start movement in hardware and services. Will it be enough?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I think for Sun to improve it's business through opensource, it must be able to abide by opensource untold but enforced rules. 'Till now, open is a very vocally used by Sun (as for others, by the way) as far as marketing goes, but it's failling to live by its words. Sun still is enforcing control of those things it's promoting as opensource, and the community it's not buying, at least not in the way it should to be an effective driver of adoption. Sun still has to learn some new tricks, something that has been difficult for old dogs to do.
- by jharrop2 May 2, 2008 10:45 PM PDT
- I think Sun needs to do 2 things better:
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(3 Comments)1. strengthen the nexus between hardware purchase decisions and use of Sun sponsored open source
2. support their open source code bases better
Re (1), see my post http://dev.plutext.org/blog/2008/03/18/suns-bug-votes-on-steroids/
Re (2), see http://dev.plutext.org/blog/2007/12/12/running-a-community-lessons-from-jaxbdevjavanet/