| Title: |
Sun Microsystems Manages the Services Stack |
| Author: |
David Sprott |
| Publication Date: |
12 March 2003 |
| Report Type: |
Journal |
| Report Class: |
Vendor Insight |
| Abstract: |
Sun has been through a stormy period over the past year in the tough economic climate, with a lagging position on Web Services, increasing competition from Linux platforms, falling market share and diminishing investor confidence. Last month Sun started an aggressive fight back with some significant announcements. In this report we examine the evolving Sun stack and assess how new management functionality strengthens their overall competitive position, and provides some tough challenges for their competitors. |
| Backgrounder: |
If you listened to the media, the financial analysts and of course their competition, Sun Microsystems is in trouble. Clearly Sun's share price speaks volumes, and the valuation reflects an amazing fall from grace since the heady days of Dot Com when Sun was right inside the tornado. Sun also took a body blow recently with publication of market share numbers showing a strong move to Linux and away from Solaris. Popular sentiment today suggests the rise of Linux will deliver a fatal blow to Sun's long running Solaris strategy, and they have already entered a period of slow decline as the hegemony of IBM and Microsoft dominate the industry.
In the last month however Sun has started to push back against these assumptions. In January Sun made some strong announcements on product platforms and in late February they gave a pretty thorough update on their strategy right across the board, and in particular provided some interesting strategic guidance on their hardware and software strategy.
Sun is moving progressively to a more tightly integrated stack than their Java based competitors. The conventional layers of the stack will become increasingly blurred, and the feature function of individual product components such as app servers and portal servers, will become subordinate to overall effectiveness and critically, economics.
Sun is also extending its platform coverage, and whilst this may be seen superficially as a defensive response to the increasing capability and rapid acceptance of Linux, it should also be viewed as an innovative move to provide better management of platform transparency, a really important cost related issue for CIO's and service providers. |
| Report Size: |
7 Pages |
| Report Access Type: |
 | Silver/Gold (Premium) |
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