Solaris Rising

Is Sun reshaping itself from a vendor known mainly for its RISC-based workstations and servers into a software intellectual-property powerhouse?

That's my main takeaway from a recent briefing by Sun executives, who visited VARBusiness to tout the company's renewed focus on its long-time financial-services customer base on Wall Street.

While Sun certainly has been going gangbusters on the hardware front -- its Opteron-based servers have become wildly popular -- much of its success moving forward will be tied to what it does with its Solaris operating system and Java software platform.

The first leg of Sun's new strategy is to broaden the appeal of Solaris beyond its Sparc roots. With an update called Solaris 10 due for release by year's end, Sun is embarking on a major marketing push to emphasize the OS as a solution for all platforms. (Interestingly, that's a back-to-the-future plan, initially attempted with Solaris-on-x86 in the early 1990s; however, that never took off to the extent the company hoped.)

The not-too-subtle subtext behind the current all-platforms push is that Solaris isn't only an alternative to Windows, but it's also an option for customers who might otherwise consider Linux.The Linux angle dovetails with some recent talk swirling throughout the open-source community, to the effect that Sun might consider opening up Solaris. True, Sun is looking to mirror what Linux has achieved by widening Solaris' base of software developers. As a result, it will work harder to court third-party developers. However, Sun plans to maintain final control of all code that ends up in the OS itself, signing off on production releases.

"We want to build a thriving community around Solaris, but simultaneously have the ability to create industrial strength commercial versions of Solaris," says Anil Gadre, Sun's chief marketing officer.

Explains Stephen Borcich, Sun's vice president of market development: "There is a difference between the open-source community around Linux and what we're trying to do."

For resellers, though, this may be good news. Sun could well succeed in positioning Solaris as a major platform around which resellers can make money selling support and other services.

Sun has taken a first step toward broadening Solaris' installed base by putting its direct sales force on notice that it wants to move more units, even if the software will be running on systems made by the likes of IBM and HP."We have 'reincentivized' our sales force to Solaris independent of the hardware," Gadre explains. "This filters down to the resellers as well."

When was the last time you heard of a Tier 1 vendor forward-looking enough to embrace such a bite-the-bullet strategy?

Sun president Jonathan Schwartz explains the thinking.

"So if a sales rep sells Solaris on Dell or IBM, or even HP, we pay them as if they sold the hardware," he writes on his blog (which, not coincidentally, is considered a pacesetting example of a CEO reaching out directly to his company's customer and reseller community). "This is a huge culture change, obviously. It also focuses everyone on keeping customers happy and driving hardware choice ... I'm not sure we could make the point more clearly that we're committed to making Solaris the volume leader on all systems."

After Solaris, Java is the second major prong of Sun's software IP plans. Sun, which invented Java in 1995, has successfully promulgated the platform in both the enterprise and embedded spaces. (For the latter, its J2ME, or Java 2 Micro Edition, is used on millions of cell phones.)Now, Sun has embarked on a strategy to widely deploy Java alongside Solaris via its Java Enterprise System (JES) platform. JES functions as a potent middleware stack and also supports Java-based network services.

Writes Schwartz: "I'm a big believer in the idea that volume wins. And we invest to support that thesis -- most notably in the propagation of our programming platform, Java."

As with Solaris, Sun is positioning JES as multiplatform. Add it to Solaris 10, which Sun says it is pricing below competitor Red Hat's Linux OS, and VARs have a potent tool to address the SMB market.

"This is a wealth-creation engine for our reseller partners," Gadre says.

This sounds like a plan with strong potential. However, as Gadre notes: "The channel continues to be huge for Sun, although we continue to have to go through the cycle of [VARs asking], 'Does Sun love us or not?'"Long term, Sun's software-focused strategy has implications beyond the burning partner-community issue of direct vs. indirect sales. Namely, will Sun's expertise in software that's both an alternative to Windows and an effective replacement for Linux make the company an ever-more-attractive partner for Microsoft? Remember that the two companies are already working together. Moving forward, it seems to me that Redmond will only want to strengthen ties between the two, as it looks for a strategic way to blunt open source.