McNealy Gives Up the CEO
Hot Seat at Sun
Editor:-
April 25, 2006 - according to industry reports Scott McNealy has
indeed, finally resigned his post as CEO of Sun Microsystems.
The
new CEO will be Jonathan Schwartz.
Sun says that McNealy will focus
his efforts on Sun's government and academic relationships globally, as well as
expand his role with key strategic partner relationships. McNealy will also
assume the role of chairman of Sun Federal Inc., which focuses exclusively on
U.S. government business.
Although McNealy's stubbornness and single minded determination to
focus on SPARC were significant assets to Sun in the period
1987 to 1998 -
when the company was establishing itself as a supremo server company, those
qualities meant that the company was slow in reacting to changes in the market,
and in particular the growing power of Intel Architecture processors, and
threats and opportunities posed by alternative operating systems. McNealy's
clouded market views and poor judgement were masked by the windfall of the
dotcom boom era which benefited Sun until its own revenue crashed in 2001.
There
is little cause for most Sun VARs or OEMs to mourn McNealy's overdue exit from
the CEO slot which the SPARC Product Directory first advocated
5 years ago. In
an article published last year I chronicled the
main culls of SPARC
Compatible OEMs and their causes from 1997 onwards.
As we've
reported in these pages, Sun shareholders too, have had many reasons to
question why after the IT recession of 2001 to 2003, Sun's rivals managed to
return to double digit server revenue growth while Sun's own server business
maintained a steady decline.
But unlike
Ken Olsen (DEC's founder)
who stayed at the wheel far too long, steering his company on the wrong course
- there are still realistic prospects that McNealy's departure, while
overdue, is not terminally late for Sun. There is still time for Sun to grow
its server revenue. I outlined these prospects in an
article 2 years ago
in which I described the unique opportunities posed by the merging of server
architectures with high speed storage accelerators.
If Sun's new
CEO fails to recognize these exciting new market challenges and opportunities
- we'll have someone new to blame.
Other commentators have suggested
that the timing of McNealy's downshift is related to
Sun's
quarterly results announced yesterday. Sun reported that its "revenue
had increased by 21%" compared to the same quarter last year. But if you
take into account the contribution from acquired StorageTek's revenue - then
the revenue growth for the sum of the parts is nearly exactly zero per cent
according to my reckoning. That's not too bad for acquisitions as a whole.
Less good, however, was the $217 million loss.
Benchmarked against
other leading storage
companies and against other leading server companies Sun currently looks
like a loser. But looks can be deceptive. Another interpretation is that the
company is at a pivotal point where it can benefit from its new storage
footprint and new SPARC chips, and that it has the potential to outperform
the rest of the rat pack. Which way the coin falls will depend on whether
its new CEO can take the bold steps necessary to capitalize on its SPARC /
Solaris/ storage assets.
See also:- a good article which includes a
graphical representation of Sun's many screwball business plans, nutty marketing
strategies, turnarounds and restarts on
Ars Technica
More Rumors Re McNealy's Future
Editor:- April
21, 2006 - an article in The Mercury News today is one of many
published this week speculatig that Scott McNealy may relinquish the
CEO slot at Sun.
This kind of speculation is not new. I published
an article Time for
changes at the top in Sun? in May 2001 suggesting he should go.
I
don't think it will make much difference now to the company either way. Its
future is looking brighter as a born again storage company - although Sun will
still have to work through several more bad quarters.
Sun Announces Progress on UltraSPARC T2
SANTA
CLARA, Calif. - April 12, 2006 - Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced
the tape-out completion of its next generation UltraSPARC T2 processor.
Sun says the UltraSPARC T2 processor is on-track to be delivered in
new systems in the second half of 2007 and will deliver twice the performance
of current UltraSPARC T1 processor-based systems.
...Sun profile
Editor's
comments:- in the mid 1990s Sun's
SPARC Technology
Business which sold its SPARC chips and motherboards promised that SPARC
would always be about twice as fast as competing Intel Architecture processors.
Sun failed to deliver on that pledge which is one of the reasons it lost server
market share in the early 2000s. With today's announcement Sun is signaling
to customers and potential oem partners that it is working on a next generation
SPARC chip and not just coasting along with the T1. But it will take deeds not
just rhetoric to convince doubters that Sun is really back in this race.
Dataram Releases First-to-Market 8GB Upgrade for Sun Ultra 40
Princeton, NJ
- April 11, 2006 - Dataram Corp today announced the release of a
first-to-market 8GB memory upgrade for Sun Microsystems Ultra 40
Workstation.
Dataram also released cost effective 2 and 4GB memory
upgrades for the Ultra 40 Workstation. Dataram's new DRSU40/8GB, DRSU40/4GB
and DRSU40/2GB are immediately available. The Ultra 40 has 4 DIMM slots per
processor and with Dataram's unique DRSU40/8GB provides 32GB of memory, twice
the amount available with the use of Suns current memory options.
...Dataram profile,
Sun Compatible
Memory
Sun Shaves Headcount in Server Business
Editor:-
April 7, 2006 - a report today on news.com says Sun is laying off 7% of
its high-end server group.
Sun Launches New Telco SPARC Blade
CTIA
Wireless Conference, Las Vegas, Nev - April 5, 2006 - Sun Microsystems, Inc.
today introduced its new carrier-grade blade server family for use in the
telecoms market .
New products include:
- the Netra CT900 blade server (a highly-reliable, 12U/14 slot ATCA blade
server)
- the Netra CP3010 blade (a dual UltraSPARC IIIi processor-based ATCA blade)
and
- the Netra CP3020 blade (claimed to be the industry's first Dual-Core
Opteron based ATCA blade).
Sun's Netra ATCA blade server will offer a
choice of carrier grade operating systems - Solaris 10 and MontaVista Linux
Carrier Grade Edition.
...Sun profile,
compact PCI SPARC
SBCs
Editor's comments:- the telecoms market is Sun's largest
single vertical market segment. In case you're wondering why Sun doesn't call
its CP3010 a SPARCblade - the answer is that's a trademark of
Continuous Computing.
Dell Says No to Solaris x86 Inside its Servers
Editor:- April 4, 2006 -
an article on news.com says Dell has no plans to support
Solaris x86 on its servers.
Like other major
Intel Architecture oems
it appears that Dell is
skeptical about whether the miniscule amount of incremental revenue from
Solaris would be worthwhile. See also:-
Surviving the
Solaris x86 Wars | |
| . |
 | |
McNealy Gives
Up the CEO Hot Seat at Sun
More Rumors Re McNealy's Future
Sun
Announces Progress on UltraSPARC T2
Dataram Releases 8GB Upgrade for
Sun Ultra 40
Sun Shaves Headcount in Server Business
Sun
Launches New Telco SPARC Blade
Dell Says No to Solaris x86 Inside its
Servers
earlier
news - archive |
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| SPARC History |
Spellabyte and
Terrorbyte loved sitting around
the campfire, discussing the good old days
of
SPARC computing. | |
|
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|
| . |
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SSD
Industry Articles and Bookmarks - #4 of 100 - March 16, 2009
suggested
by - Woody Hutsell, President Texas Memory Systems |
Here's an article written by or
about Texas Memory Systems
Flash SSD Reliability (pdf)
Woody
Hutsell says he chose this article because Flash reliability is a topic of great
interest right now, and this paper approaches the subject in a unique and very
readable manner, starting at the chip level and working up through the board
level all the way to the enterprise architecture perspective.
Other SSD article suggestions...
Woody Hutsell says - "As
you know, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) started a new group
last summer, called the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI). This new
organization has the ambitious goal of becoming a major advocacy group for solid
state storage. SSSI is starting to publish
research
papers on solid state storage topics. The first one,
Solid State
Storage 101 (pdf), is interesting for the fact that it is the outcome of a
collaboration between many companies who, in most other settings, would be
serious competitors."
Other SSD bookmark suggestions...
StatspackAnalyzer - is a website
where IT professionals can paste their Oracle statspacks or AWR reports and get
analyses and recommendations for storage performance improvements. (It's free to
use but registration is required.)
Woody Hutsell says he
recommends this bookmark because - "A key ingredient to greater SSD
adoption is a better understanding within the user communities of just how
important storage performance is to mission success. StatspackAnalyzer.com isn't
a large website, but it does have some information, a forum, and even the entire
Analyzer rules list available for comment and improvement."
Editor:- thanks Woody for sharing your SSD links.
see also:-
Texas
Memory Systems - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com | | |
