Sun's gamble explained
Published: 08 Feb 2005 12:30 GMT
Describe your vision of how computing power will be consumed by the vast majority of customers five to 10 years from now.
I think you need only look to what an average consumer does to understand what the future of the enterprise will be. Most consumers use more infrastructure that's owned and operated by other people than they use their own. For example, I have my little cell phone here. I'm actually using a great deal of my operator's infrastructure to go chat with my friends and send pictures to my parents. When I go make a dinner reservation and I go to Opentable.com [a restaurant reservation service]... I'm using their infrastructure.
The laggards in this process have been the enterprise. Some -- who actually leverage Salesforce.com or Hewlett or even eBay -- have figured out that the network affords them an opportunity to stop having to own and operate everything that they use. But how many consumers run their own email server versus (those who) just use Yahoo Mail or Gmail? Very few. Should (companies) be using their $50m infrastructure budget along with their management personnel, their data centres, their real estate, their power, or should they just go out and see if a buck an hour is a cheaper way of acquiring the same computer capacity?
Scott McNealy said to "stay tuned" about the Sun database. Is it fair to say that at some point Sun expects to be supplying database software?
I think it's clear the market has spoken that open source is the path that the developer community and the customer community wants to drive down, and we're going to do what we can to try to give customers as big a set of options as we can... we take the open source developer community very seriously. It's an authentic commitment. What else can we do to continue to evolve that relationship? I don't think it's going to be limited to simply operating systems. Maybe it will extend to file systems, maybe it will extend to databases, maybe it will extend to middleware.
You've been a software guy, but as president, you're now more than that. It appears to me that software is increasingly important in Sun's constellation of products. To what extent is that because you're now number two?
That's a hard question for me to answer. I'm interested right now in creating new relationships with customers, and I believe those new relationships will be dominantly driven by the software platforms at Sun and then secondarily by the systems platforms.
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