Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)

Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4): "We've been making a fair number of announcements recently - on both the product and the partnering front. That's generated a lot of interest, and a fair number of questions. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to deliver this overview and the upcoming focused discussions on what makes Sun tick in a video format. Let me know if this is useful, or what else we can do to keep you informed via the comment field at the bottom.

We're approaching the end of our fiscal year, and given all the swirl in the economy, I thought it worthwhile to restate where Sun's headed as a company, to let customers, partners, employees and investors see and understand where we're headed. Clarity's always useful, doubly so in times of uncertainty.

Let me start by joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy. I am routinely talking to customers now partially owned by governments, whose share prices have declined 95% or more, whose balance sheets and basic business models are under extraordinary duress. Like every business, our health is a derivative of our customers', and to that end, we've got our challenges - sure, innovation loves a crisis, but only after customers have stepped out from under their desks.

The glass isn't only half empty. I'm also seeing customers who've never had it better, from media startups and telecommunications firms, to government agencies flush with new funding - but they're certainly a cheerful minority.

Sun is privileged to have an exceptionally strong balance sheet, over $3 billion in cash, and a nearly two decade history of generating positive cash flow. We've also got a set of technologies and people that continue to play an ever more vital role in the economy. Sun's products help companies grow and help them consolidate, and they help governments stimulate the economy, as well. From building bridges to automating health care, government stimulus will undoubtedly drive technology investment, and we're well positioned to participate globally.

Which is all to say, I'm neither worried about the role information technology will play in the economy, nor am I worried about the relevance of Sun's offerings. I'm not worried about the future, I'm focused on its arrival date.

So I'm going to divide my comments on Sun's future into three or four blog entries, of which this is the first. You're going to see an accelerating series of announcements over the coming year, from amplifying our open source storage offerings, to building out an equivalent portfolio of products in the networking space; from the addition of new and potentially surprising Solaris and MySQL OEM's, to our newest cloud offerings and startup programs. I want to put all this in context, to be as clear as possible about our priorities and market approach, and help everyone understand both the parts and the sum of the parts.

Let's get on with it.

In my view, we have a very simple business - when I talk about Sun, I talk about us needing to do 'only three things.'

1. Recruit every developer on earth to use our software or services.

This is a strategic activity, not a financial one, so don't look for revenue here. I'll devote an entire entry to understanding the motivations and mechanisms driving technology adoption, and to discussing the varied audiences we target. As the head of developer technologies from a very large customer said to me last week over dinner, 'I haven't visited Sun in five years, but all of a sudden you seem to matter to my developers.' I'll help parse that statement in my next entry.

2. Deliver the world's most compelling commercial offerings - focused primarily, but not exclusively, on deployers of the technologies whose adoption we're driving.

Our software and service products target those that find free to be a more expensive alternative than commercially supported, for whom the cost of downtime exceeds the price of a commercial license. That's a small fraction of the planet, but it's a lucrative one. On the systems side of the house, our products reach across rack and blade servers, storage and networking systems - basically, everything to power the cloud.

I'll talk about the reliance this business has on developers to drive differentiation, and gross margin dollars, and the competitive advantage such reliance creates as we broaden our market offerings into storage and networking.

3. Execute the world's most effective selling/service connection between 1. and 2.

I spend a lot of time talking publicly about the first two points, and very little talking about this last one - in part, because it's been a work in progress, and because the scale of our sales/services channel has been one of our biggest strategic challenges.

But the ordering matters - our first financial priority is to generate free cash flow; our first strategic priority is to grow our available market. When they're in sync, as I believe we are in our Open Storage business right now, you have to beat us in the free software community and then again in front of paying customers. That's a tough combination, especially if you're a proprietary storage vendor that pretends to like free software, so long as it doesn't compete with your products.

As you know, simplicity takes a lot of engineering, so it's easy to say 'just three things,' but I'm not in any way suggesting these tasks are easily accomplished. But our intent is to create, promote, and commercialize the highest quality network innovations. Innovations that captivate developers, and deployers.

To understand Sun, you have to understand both, you have to see what drives our financial performance, as well as read our financial statements. Absent both perspectives, you'll miss the bigger picture, the bigger threat, or the bigger opportunity.

With this as a backdrop, you should expect me to focus on the points enumerated above in the next few blogs entries. Focusing on today's market, and - independent of the economic slowdown - on tomorrow's.

Thanks for reading.

(YouTube version of video here)

"

Technology Adoption (2 of 4)

Technology Adoption (2 of 4): "As I referenced in my prior entry, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are:

1. Technology Adoption

2. Commercial Innovation

3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.

This entry focuses on the first, Technology Adoption. Adoption is a non-economic phenomena, no money is spent, only time - yet it has extreme financial consequences. Let me give you an example.

I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said 'we love where Solaris is headed.' I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... 'I banned it.'

Not exactly a buying signal.

I was stunned. I asked, 'why?' He responded, 'Oracle is our global standard, and with 20,000 developers, people need to follow the rules.' I said we had a very good relationship with Oracle, and started talking about how fast Oracle runs against our new Open Storage products.



Until he interrupted me, '...but my ban failed.' What? 'We hire lots of people out of college every year, and they all come in knowing MySQL. All my prototypes are written to MySQL, and now I have a big base of MySQL apps I don't want to port, and a bunch of MySQL programmers I don't want to retrain. So I'd like a commercial relationship.'

In a nutshell, that's adoption in action. Change in IT isn't just a top down phenomenon - it's more often bottom up*.

Innovation vs. Reselling Innovation

What's the cost of missing that adoption? For Sun to resell a 1-way x86 server running Microsoft's Windows or Red Hat yields (at best) a 10% gross profit margin. Very few companies have the scale to survive on those margins. More to the point, when you resell someone else's products, your customer relationship isn't built with the CIO or technology directors, it's built with their reverse auction web site. For technology companies, the same applies to reselling any product you don't own - it's impossible to differentiate with anything more than a cheaper price. A price your supplier can, and will always, undercut.

Alternatively, when a user picks our products - when they build their storage on ZFS, their network on Crossbow, or their application on MySQL, independent of whether they've paid, they've created an opportunity for Sun - going forward, there's only upside. It's called positive option value.

Not to dip into finance 101, when the net present value of a lifetime revenue cycle exceeds the value of a one time purchase, a product or service that initiates the payment stream is either freely distributed (if it has no marginal cost, like software), or subsidized (if it has a hard cost). That's why you see so many free credit cards, free checking account, free mobile phones, free month's rent, free social networking, etc. In the technology world, free is the new black.

Free Markets

That's also why the internet's most valuable brands are *all* free - Amazon, Google, EBay, Skype, Yahoo!, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Baidu, TenCent, etc. Those brands reach more and have greater affinity than just about any other consumer brands. And in the technology marketplace, Linux, Java, MySQL, Firefox, Apache, Eclipse, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, the same applies - free is a universal price, requires no currency translation, and reaches the longest tail of the market.

Now, could Amazon charge you to shop? Could your bank charge you to open an account? Google charge you to search? Could Sun charge people to download MySQL or OpenOffice.org? Sure, we could also destroy those brands in a matter of days. If you're not free, by definition you miss serving those that can't afford, or aren't ready to pay - which means your audience is capped, or destroyed if your competition is already free.

Microsoft's the only company I didn't include in the above list - and although I consider them a stupendously great brand, they're the only company that can really approximate free while making money on the distribution of their products. The fact is they're bundled on almost every PC across the planet, and appear 'free' to the users who use those PC's - they've amassed immense power with their distribution, and few users believe they're paying for Windows when they buy a personal computer.

Thus, to developers (Sun's target market) with Windows PC's, Microsoft's product are, in effect, already free. (As an aside, notice Microsoft inexorably moving toward free distribution, too, to reach new users - at some point, you can't bundle every product on every computer, it'd be like printing a Sunday edition of the newspaper every day of the week).

This is exactly why we freely distribute our key software assets all over the world - if we didn't, users and developers might pick someone else's free product (or simply use the one they assume to be free). And if they picked someone else's product on which to build their business or their application, Sun becomes a reseller - which isn't our mission or business model. It's a free market, in every sense.

The customer I referenced in my first entry

that said, 'I haven't visited Sun in five years, but all of a sudden you seem to matter to my developers' was saying he was seeing exactly that, a lot more of our products used by his developers - from VirtualBox to MySQL, Glassfish to ZFS. For some users, and nearly all developers, budgets aren't measured in dollars, they're measured in time and attention - if you want those audiences to spend their time and attention with you, you have to earn it. If you earn it, a preference forms. For Sun, we drive that preference over our competition, primarily proprietary alternatives.

Our Products are Our Ads

Now, the words 'driving preference' are used by the advertising industry when talking about branding. Businesses brand or advertise to drive awareness of or preference for their products. In the case of a Nike or Toyota, both have to spend fortunes to 'buy media,' or acquire the ad space (or airtime) through which they'll present, free of charge to consumers, the images or content they feel best represents their brands.

Why doesn't Facebook advertise? Because Facebook itself is a branding experience. Using Facebook drives preference for Facebook. And their audience, in users, outreaches just about every media company on earth. It would make no sense for them to buy media, they are media.

For the audiences Sun cares about, those building, deploying or buying technology, we've got a similar reach. By being freely distributed, our products build their own audiences. And using the products, from Glassfish to ZFS or NetBeans, creates a branding experience (and a wildly positive one, if we're doing our jobs well). So why don't we advertise in traditional outlets? Well, every day, the number of people using our products, getting that positive branding experience, eclipses nearly all major newspapers globally, combined.

By proliferating Sun innovations, even encouraging derivatives that will never drive revenue to Sun, we are creating preference for open source, awareness of Sun as an innovator, and displacing proprietary vendors that can't build comparable audiences. That preference has value to us, and to the broader communities in which we participate. The value spans awareness, market penetration, skills development, ecosystem expansion - a healthy community is a growing community.

How else is adoption or preference valuable? Volume adoption attracts application developers, and can drive tipping effects - once one independent software vendor, or ISV, picks your platform, others that work with that ISV follow suit. If you do a good job, you lead an avalanche of ISV's to pick your platform - which makes it more appealing to end users. That's why Red Hat has such a durable Linux model - once Oracle picked Red Hat as the Linux to which they'd first certify Oracle's database, the ISV's that relied on Oracle certified only to Red Hat, which tipped the market to Red Hat so strongly that not even Oracle has been able to undo that grip.

So adoption drives the ecosystem, which drives more adoption and more expansion... you get the idea. It's a virtuous cycle, a cycle that starts with volume adoption.

What Adoption Looks Like

So what does 'Adoption' look like? Here's a picture, which shows the ramp we're seeing from free software adoption across the world for some of our key datacenter assets.

For competitive reasons, I won't specify which products are shown, but suffice it to say we're very happy with the ramp, and we love great product reviews - that's what drives the spikes. The troughs are weekends. Bear in mind these are datacenter assets (like Glassfish and OpenSolaris), not consumer runtimes (like Java or OpenOffice.org), so these downloads influence datacenter design. Every day, our software is working hard to drive preference in startups, in government agencies, dorm rooms, ISV's, fortune 100 IT shops, everywhere the internet reaches. Free products reach everyone interested in them, no barriers.

On the consumer side, OpenOffice.org, which certainly promotes Sun's vision of open standards and data formats, reaches nearly three million new users - every week. Adding them to a user base we estimate to be between 150 and 200 million users. Talk about global circulation.

Our products are our brands and one of our most effective means of driving design wins - in front of users, developers and OEM's. In markets as diverse as high performance computing and grid scheduling, web databases, application infrastructure and desktop virtualization. Free distribution and access to source code is our investment in the global developer community. We invest with our code, our ideas and time, and we promote and encourage derivatives. We gain by reaching people we'd otherwise never reach - and earning their attention and engagement. Even if we're never paid, that's positive option value.

Another way of looking at adoption are these 'pink dot' maps - they show us where our products are gaining users via opt-in registration. My favorite dots on the map shown are in places we clearly have no sales coverage - I'd like to say hello to our users on the Falkland Islands, thank you for choosing Solaris :)

What's the value of all that adoption? Like the value of search, shopping, or opening a bank account, there's no instantaneous value beyond the fact you've chosen to invest your time and energy in our ecosystem, and not our competition's. At global scale, that makes us an enormously tough competitor for proprietary companies, or those without true innovation. For example, to get a sense for what our proprietary storage competitors are facing everywhere around the globe, Google the phrase, 'love ZFS'.

But as with all free business models, the real value arises in what comes after free - and that's my teaser to get you to read the next blog entry, focused on our Commercial Innovations.

Thanks, again, for reading, watching and commenting.

---------------------------------

* as I often say to groups of CIO's, 'which one of you gave permission to your employees to search on Google?' No one ever raises their hand :)

And to my readers/viewers for whom English isn't your first language... I'm doing my best to talk more slowly. I will redouble those efforts in the next video... thank you for watching!

"

Sun's Network Innovations (3 of 4)

Sun's Network Innovations (3 of 4): "As I referenced in my prior entry, I'm reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and our progress going in to next fiscal year. Our strategic imperatives, in order, are:

1. Technology Adoption

2. Commercial Innovation

3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.

This entry focuses on the second, Commercial Innovation, and reviews our core revenue products, services and strategies.

By now, you understand Sun's approach to growing the market - driving adoption of key technologies drives Sun's addressable market. Once you're using one of our fundamental technologies, Sun's innovations focused on those technologies are relevant to you. The beauty of free distribution is you don't have to pick customers, they pick you.

Three very valuable markets emerge from this adoption. I'll focus on the first two here, the products and services we sell.

The first market is obvious. Software isn't downloaded onto air.

Systems Innovations

There's always some system platform underneath software - sure, it might be a laptop in a dorm room*, but it's just as likely to be into a Fortune 500 company, attached to servers, storage and networking equipment. All told, this datacenter systems market is more than $150b annually.

And in this datacenter market we build exceptional systems - screaming fast entry level servers, all the way up to the most efficient mainframe class systems. We build super fast storage, from our new flash based platforms to eco-efficient tape and archive solutions. We also build the world's fastest networking switches, powering the planet's largest supercomputers. We cover the entire spectrum, and work with the smartest partners in the industry to serve customers across the globe. Although we focus on our own technologies, like Java, MySQL and Lustre, we also optimize for VMware, Microsoft's Windows and we're generally recognized to run Oracle better than anyone on the planet.

Now, you heard me call these our Systems products, not just hardware products. These systems are obviously more than just naked components, they're engineered with remote management and monitoring, component redundancy, integrated virtualization, and on board storage and networking. That's why our margins are higher than the industry's***. I'm very proud of our Systems team, they are the most talented platform engineers on earth, and they earn consistently stellar reviews.

But where's this first market headed? Here's where it's going to get interesting.

Datacenter Systems Convergence - Who Plays? Wins?

As I've said before, general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server - notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.

To demonstrate this point, we now build our entire line of storage systems from general purpose server parts, including Solaris and ZFS, our open source file system. This allows us to innovate in software, where others have to build custom silicon or add cost. We are planning a similar line of networking platforms, based around the silicon and software you can already find in our portfolio.

We believe both the storage and networking industry's proprietary approach, and their gross profit streams, are now open to those us with general purpose platforms. That's good news for customers, and for Sun.

At the heart of this convergence is Solaris - enabled by technologies such as ZFS (around which we're building our entire storage line), and Crossbow (around which you'll see us build some very compelling networking products). Technologists interested in ZFS and Crossbow can visit OpenSolaris.org, or request an OpenSolaris CD (click the CD image).

I've provided a picture here to make the point - these three industries (servers, storage and networking), are converging, driven by the raw performance of the underlying server operating system and microprocessor.

That means these adjacent markets are all open to Sun and the Solaris community. Leveraging inexpensive, general purpose components is one big advantage for us, but there are others - using a general purpose OS allows us to easily embrace specialized components (from flash memory to GPU's), or adapt to new storage or networking protocols entirely in software. The underlying OS and server are so fast, these extensions and enhancements are simple feature updates, and ones we can leverage across servers, and storage and networking.

This isn't to say the networking or storage companies don't have their own operating systems. They do, but in both instances, they're proprietary, have tiny volumes, and despite paying lip service to open standards and the Linux community, their core operating software is unavailable to developers, it's truly proprietary. Their niche OS's also lack cross industry support, which is why our Solaris OEM agreements with IBM, Dell, Intel, Fujitsu and HP are so important to our end customers - they know they'll never be locked in. Today's storage and networking vendors remind me of the server vendors in the late 1990's - with expensive software bolted to expensive hardware. Ultimately forced open by innovation.

At Sun, open source isn't for servers. Open source is for datacenters.

Where's the Money?

Let's also look at the financial backdrop to this convergence. For these networking and storage vendors, entering the server market means suffering profit degradation - the server industry is vastly more competitive than the storage and networking marketplace.

On the other hand, as Sun grows into the storage and networking markets, we're thrilled with higher profit margins. We're unique among platform vendors in being able to deliver Servers, Storage, Networking and Virtualization on our own terms, very well integrated and at our own prices. How will we differentiate against our peers?

Simple. Integration, innovation, and as a result of building atop open source and commodity components, we are the low cost supplier. They, on the other hand, will be forced into all kinds of contorted partnerships and complex reselling arrangements. They may ship the boxes, but they won't control the platform software - or profit streams.

How is our Systems business doing? The portions of this business sensitive to software adoption, primarily the low end of all these products, is doing quite well, growing double digits**. The weakness in our Systems business is really focused on the high end. This reflects really two things - the first is the deferrability of high end system purchases. Our high end business was up 20% a little over a year ago, it was down more than 20% in the December quarter of 2008 - across the industry, customers are holding off on big ticket purchases.

The second, and arguably more important headwind was a decision made back in the 1990's to cancel Solaris on Intel, in the belief it would protect Sun's SPARC hardware business. Conversely, that mistake destroyed a generation of Solaris developers, and accelerated the rise of alternatives to traditional SPARC hardware. And now you understand why we prioritize developers - they are the seeds from which great forests grow. If you don't water the roots, the trees wither.

But how do you make money giving software away to developers? Well, let's switch gears, and talk about Software and Services.

When Free is Too Expensive

One of my favorite customer stories relates to an American company that did nearly 30% of its yearly revenue on Christmas Day. They were a mobile phone company, whose handsets appeared under Christmas trees, opened en masse and provisioned on the internet within about a 48 hour period. When we won the bid to supply their datacenter, their CIO gave me the purchase order on the condition I gave him my home phone number. He said, 'If I have any issues on Christmas, I want you on the phone making sure every resource available is solving the problem.' I happily provided it (and then made sure I had my direct staff's home numbers). Christmas came and went, no problems at all.

A year later, he was issuing a purchase order to Sun for several of our software products. To have a little fun with him (and the Sun sales rep), I told him before he passed me the purchase order that the products were all open source, freely available for download.

He looked at me, then at his rep, and said 'What? Then why am I paying you a million dollars?' I responded, 'You can absolutely run it for free. You just can't call me on Christmas day, you'll be on your own.' He gave me the PO. At the scale he was running, the cost of downtime dwarfed the cost of the license and support.

Numerically, most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it. For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support - for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions per minute. If you're tracking packages or fleets of aircraft, running an emergency response network or a trading floor, you almost always have more money than time. And that's our business model, we offer utterly exceptional service, support and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It's a good business.

All in/all up, our Software business is among the fastest growing businesses at Sun. I've attached our latest financial summary at the end of this blog. We span network identity (built with the OpenDS community), application infrastructure (biult with Glassfish and OpenESB), data management (built with MySQL, ZFS and Lustre), embedded software (such as Java, and the emerging JavaFX), alongside our core operating system and virtualization software (Solaris, OpenSolaris and VirtualBox). These open source platforms generate, alongside the services attached to them, over a billion dollars a year, making Sun by far and away the world's largest open source software company. (For those that continue to ask if we make money with Java, the answer is yes, it's on a ramp to hit about $250m this year - one of our best businesses - and that's just Java on consumer devices, excluding servers).

Every day, these products are being adopted globally, driving university curriculum, corporate trials and design wins, influencing skills, even supporting Presidential campaigns. We know not every download yields revenue or users, but they do yield awareness and trials - a small, but intensely valuable portion of which yields revenue and profit. Our sales reps see the purchase orders at the point of value, not at the point of download. The revenue's recognized over the period of the Service contract - a business model the rest of the industry, at least for mass market products, will inevitably adopt. Fighting free and open software, like fighting free news or free search, is like fighting gravity - and btw, gravity gets a lot stronger during economic downturns.

Conclusion

And in a nutshell, that's how we monetize adoption - with targeted, high value innovations.

We deliver the world's most effective and efficient Systems portfolio, spanning x86 and SPARC servers, storage and networking. And the world's most appealing Software and Services products, spanning embedded software to high performance file systems.

We call all these products network innovations. I know that defies industry categorization, but that's what innovation's all about, defying categorization.

I've only touched on two of the three opportunities opened by mass adoption. And with that as a teaser, I invite you to return for the final blog entry, talking about what might be the most valuable of them all - a market enabled by the innovations described above, and set to transform the entire marketplace. Embodying the phrase, The Network is the Computer.

See you then.

-----------------------

* and before you dismiss those users, some of the world's biggest internet companies/datacenters were started on laptops in dorm rooms... a trend I expect to accelerate.

** Sun's x86 systems business, for example, grew over 11% last quarter, when both HP and IBM's comparable businesses shrank in double digits. For those wondering 'how do you differentiate?', just ask our customers.

*** Compared to other industry standard server vendors.

"

Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest App Store?

Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest App Store?: "

To say the past few months have been a whirlwind is an understatement.

And thanks for the reminders, I recognize it's been a while since I've posted a blog. For reasons why, just click here to read the background. And before you ask, SEC regulations and securities laws limit what I can discuss about the Oracle transaction, so don't expect any insights on the topic.

But there's still a ton going on at Sun - with JavaOne (June 2nd, in San Francisco) coming up fastest on the horizon. We're preparing to reveal what I believe is one of the most important advancements ever for the Java community - and this time, it's all about revenue and business opportunity.

As you know, we're fond of throwing great big numbers around when talking about Java's distribution: billions of PCs', mobile devices, and smartcards, millions of enterprise servers, set top boxes, Blu-Ray DVD players and a growing number of very cool Kindles (buy one here). Very few technologies on the internet have anywhere near that kind of distribution muscle. Adobe's Flash, and Microsoft's Windows are just about its only peers when measured by runtime volume.

But not all Java runtimes are the same. For most devices, from RIM's Blackberry to Sony's Blu-Ray DVD players, original equipment manufacturers (known as 'OEM's') license core Java technology and brand from Sun, and build their own Java runtime. Although we're moving to help OEM's with more pre-built technology, the only runtimes currently that come direct from Sun are those running on Windows PC's.

And oddly enough, that's made the Windows Java runtime our most profitable Java platform. I thought I'd provide some insight into that business here, and then introduce a project we're planning to unveil at this year's JavaOne, known internally as Project Vector.

As a business model, traffic for traffic's sake isn't that interesting (but never confuse traffic with adoption). Free internet traffic is only interesting if a third party is willing to pay to drive distribution of their content to your audience - from highway billboards to internet runtimes, businesses will pay for exposure and distribution to drive their business, whether through branding/advertising, delivering news, or selling movies or retail products. 'Getting distribution' used to mean getting access to bricks and mortar distributors in shopping malls - nowadays, it means having another company propel your content into the market via the internet.

Now to that point, a few years ago, we called our friends at one of the world's largest search companies (you can guess who), to talk about helping them with software distribution - because of Java's ubiquity, we had a greater capacity than almost anyone to distribute software to the Windows installed base. We signed a contract through which we'd make their toolbar optionally available to our audience via the Java update mechanism. They paid us a much appreciated fee, which increased dramatically when we renegotiated the contract a year later. Distribution was becoming quite valuable to us and to them - and given the 'take' rates, or the rates at which consumers were choosing to install new content, the Java audience saw value in the new application.

The year following, the revenue increased dramatically again - when an aspiring search company (again, you can figure out who) outbid our first partner to place their toolbar in front of Java users (this time, limited to the US only). Toolbars, it turns out, are a significant driver of search traffic - and the billions of Java runtimes in the market were a clear means of driving value and opportunity.

The revenues to Sun were also getting big enough for us to think about building a more formal business around Java's distribution power - to make it available to the entire Java community, not simply one or two search companies on yearly contracts.

And that's what Project Vector is designed to deliver - Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we'll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world's largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX. What kinds of companies might be interested?

If you talk to a Fortune 500 company or a startup, pretty much everyone craves access to consumers - which is the one problem we've solved with the Java platform. Most folks don't think of Sun as a consumer company, and largely we're not, but our runtimes reach more consumers than just about any other company on earth. That ubiquity has obvious value to search companies, but it's also quite valuable to banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers - basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers.

How will it work? Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won't be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution - but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That's clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world's largest audience.

This creates opportunity for everyone in the developer community - and specifically, for any developer (even those not using Java/JavaFX) seeking to reach beyond the browser to create a durable relationship with their customers (and btw, don't forget to join us for CommunityOne - the day before JavaOne, June 1st, same location - click the graphic to learn more). Remember, when apps are distributed through the Java Store, they're distributed directly to the desktop - JavaFX enables developers, businesses and content owners to bypass potentially hostile browsers.

For details on how Vector will work, when it'll be available, how to submit your content or application - alongside insights into Project Vector's technology, roadmap, features and business model, come see us at JavaOne... In the interim, you can learn more about the latest JavaFX news at sun.com/javafx, and download the latest JavaFX design tools at netbeans.org.

And although we obviously don't comment on rumors, we might even have a special guest or two at JavaOne.

See you in San Francsico (or on the webcast...)!

"

Yahoo! Enables Cutting Edge Research Projects With Donation of Cloud Supercomputing Cluster

Yahoo! Enables Cutting Edge Research Projects With Donation of Cloud Supercomputing Cluster: "

Today, Yahoo! is proud to announce the donation of a supercomputing cluster with 2,000-processor-cores to the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a cloud computing testbed for research on large-scale data clouds. Yahoo! is a founding member of the OCC, and its participants include a diverse group of universities and research institutions which develop standards, benchmarks, and interoperability frameworks for cloud computing.

At Yahoo!, massive-scale data-crunching is our bread and butter. We are the leader in use and development of Apache Hadoop and other open-source cloud computing technology to process many petabytes of data, billions of Web images and objects, and hundreds of thousands of Web requests per second. With cloud computing and the careful analysis of data, we are able to deliver highly relevant content and improve the quality of online experiences across the Yahoo! network – from the homepage to Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Mail, and more.

Academic researchers exploring everything from astronomy to genomics have the same need to analyze massive amounts of data. Yahoo!’s cloud is intended to free up engineering resources to focus more on innovation by creating highly scalable applications. We hope that our technologies can be used in a similar way by research institutions, so that scientists can sift through massive amounts of data in a smart, scalable way and focus their energy on finding real breakthroughs. The Yahoo!-donated cluster will be part of the OCC’s Open Science Data Cloud. It will be used by a variety of scientists, including world-renowned researchers such as Alex Szalay at Johns Hopkins University to study the birth of the universe and Kevin White at Chicago’s Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology to study the structure of the human genome.

This donation will enable OCC to scale their benchmarking and performance analysis efforts, significantly enhancing their capabilities to improve systems software for cloud computing. The OCC plans to distribute the processing power between data centers at the University of Ilinois at Chicago and Johns Hopkins University. The data centers are connected by a very high speed (10 Gigabit per second) network link, enabling researchers to test distributed virtualization technologies.

Our participation in the OCC is a continuation of the cloud computing research projects we began supporting a few years ago. Top research universities such as Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst use Hadoop on our M45 supercomputer for a broad range of computer science research, and are progressing with some ground breaking studies. Similarly, we are a founding sponsor of the Open Cirrus™ Cloud Computing Testbed, along with HP and Intel, which is advancing cloud computing research on an international scale.

We’re excited to play an important role in this interesting intersection between technology and academic research, and we look forward to working with our counterparts as part of the Open Cloud Consortium.

- Shelton Shugar, senior vice president, cloud computing, Yahoo!.

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The Yahoo! online holiday card is here!

The Yahoo! online holiday card is here!: "

Come build a snowman that’s totally YOU! Have fun making your snowballs, choosing facial features and adding expressive arms. Then add your background theme—everything from holiday patterns to tropical islands—and top it off with props like a Yahoo! Pashmina, sombrero, cell phone or pet panda.

And once you have created your own winter wonderland, you can share it with friends and family by sending a link with Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Messenger, or you can post it on Facebook or Twitter.

Happy Holidays from your friends at Yahoo!

Build your own snowman at: snowman.yahoo.com

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Cloud Technologies for a Dynamic Infrastructure

Cloud Technologies for a Dynamic Infrastructure: "

Yesterday, IBM announced new offerings for helping clients build dynamic infrastructures to "address today's challenges to improve service, reduce cost and manage risk, while also laying the foundation to take advantage of future business and IT opportunities."

The announcements focused on three key areas:

• Systems for a smarter planet: Workload optimized approach to system design, management and delivery
• Service Management: Improved visibility, control, and automation for services environments
• Information Infrastructure: Cost reduction and information-led transformation

A replay of the Webcast covering these announcements is available in case you missed it.


If you're not sure why building a dynamic infrastructure is important, take a look at the Gartner analysis outlining the need for a dynamic infrastructure, a strategy for developing one, and some best practices and options to consider when getting started.








Video: Responding to Today's Demands with a Dynamic Infrastructure


Cloud technologies and solutions were a key part of the Dynamic Infrastructure announcements that covered such things as integrated systems design with private cloud deployments, virtual system pools and management, and next-generation virtualized storage and security technologies.

Here are just a few of the Cloud-related offerings:

• Virtual systems pools
• IBM Systems Director VMControl Enterprise Edition
• IBM Cloudburst
• IBM Information Archive
• IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud
• Fastprotect online
• More on Storage and Cloud (the What we offer tab is particularly good)

My favorite part the day's activities, of course, was that IBM used Twitter for a question and answer session immediately following the Webcast by using the #dyninfra hashtag. Lots of great interaction and participation by the public and IBM experts and Business Partners.


You can continue online conversation and sharing around Dynamic Infrastructure and Cloud via any of these venues:

• IBM Dynamic Infrastructure on Twitter
• IBM Dynamic Infrastructure on Facebook
• IBM Storage on Twitter
• IBM Service Management on Twitter
• Information on Demand on Twitter
• Cloud Community on ibm.com

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Storage and Cloud: Smart Business, Here I Come

Storage and Cloud: Smart Business, Here I Come: "
After the new offerings around the Dynamic Infrastructure announcement this week (see my earlier blog on this topic), several folks have asked specifically about the Cloud-related Storage solutions IBM offers.

In case you missed it, IBM made a major announcement around Cloud and Storage earlier this month. The focus was on new IBM "Smart Business Systems" that can be
used on-premises for private-cloud configurations or by Cloud Computing companies who want to offer IT as a service. IBM Information Archive was the first solution to be announced in this area. IBM Storage expert Tony Pearson provided a couple blogs on this topic:

• IBM unveils Information Archive system
• Tuning out station KEFM (aka Keep Everything Forever Methodology)
  

A "private cloud" implementation for PACS medical images is IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS). Doctors, Radiologists, and other medical professionals can access these images over the intranet between multiple locations, such as hospitals and clinics. Spectrum Health, the largest healthcare system in Western
Michigan, discusses their experience with this solution.





Video: Spectrum Health improves productivity with GMAS


Also, see the IBM Storage and Cloud Website for more Cloud-related storage offerings.

For staying updated on key IBM storage news, I recommend following IBM Storage on Twitter (@ibmStorage).












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Cloud Delivery Models

Cloud Delivery Models: "In the early days of IT, "delivery" meant something very different than it does today. Back then, in response to a purchase order, delivery meant that a lot of computers and related hardware would show up one day on the loading dock of the customer. After that it was often anyone's guess what would happen next.

Ideally, of course, all those computers would eventually be connected, and would provide IT services to the customer.

Today, IT customers expect something very different when we talk about delivery. In the age of cloud computing, customers have the option of jumping right to IT service delivery, and no longer worry about all the intermediate steps required in an earlier time.

Cloud computing offers three distinct delivery models to reach this goal, depending on the needs of the customer: private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud. As the name suggests, a private cloud is contained within the firewalled customer IT environment. Here the customer has all the capabilities of cloud computing-rapid service provisioning, elasticity of compute resources, unsurpassed network latency, and higher asset utilization. The customer can also implement any security and compliance policies that may be required for their confidential or sensitive applications or data. Human resources and financial data analysis typically have good synergy with this cloud model.

The public cloud provides elastic IT resources as a service on the internet in the pay-by-the-drink "op-ex" model, which essentially eliminates capital expenditure ("cap-ex"), as well as the need to plan ahead. In the public cloud model, massive array of resources could be deployed in minutes and vacated just as quickly. Unlike the private cloud, however, there is less customization possible and the menu of services offered is often limited. Public clouds are frequently used for one-time processing of non-critical data and content hosting with unpredictable traffic demands.


Finally, hybrid clouds are environments that live outside the corporate firewall, yet offer an added degree of security that isolates customer networks from one another. While inherently less flexible than the private cloud, a hybrid cloud offers the compelling cost model that nears that of a public cloud, and can be used for time-sensitive spill-over loads that a private cloud cannot accommodate. The IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud beta is a public cloud today but will soon offer hybrid cloud features.

Public, private or hybrid. Whether using one or several of these cloud models in the enterprise, customers can realize significant cost and time savings over earlier IT delivery models, including the painful “drop ship” delivery method of an earlier time.

For more information, visit www.ibm.com/cloud"

what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?

what role did virtual machine play in Cloud Computing?: "i think this is a quite open question.
we can implement Cloud Computing without VM indeed, and i am sure lot of
Cloud Systems are implemented without VMs,
then what is the advantage of VMs in Cloud Computing?
(easy deployment?)
any reply is appreciated"

Red Hat Continues It’s Winning Streak

Red Hat Continues It’s Winning Streak: "One of the top performing areas for Red Hat has been its Subscription revenue which showed a 21 per cent jump. The sore spot though was it's operating income which lagged by more than $1 million due to $8.8 million for a litigation settlement. In spite of that, it has managed to chalk up an income of US$194.3 million with record billings, boosting accounts receivable by US$24 million from the same period last year.

read more

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Red Hat Continues It’s Winning Streak

Red Hat Continues It’s Winning Streak: "One of the top performing areas for Red Hat has been its Subscription revenue which showed a 21 per cent jump. The sore spot though was it's operating income which lagged by more than $1 million due to $8.8 million for a litigation settlement. In spite of that, it has managed to chalk up an income of US$194.3 million with record billings, boosting accounts receivable by US$24 million from the same period last year.

read more

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The Decade Of Windows 7

The Decade Of Windows 7: "

As 2010 approaches, Windows 7 seems to be experiencing a successful launch and warm reception from both businesses and consumers. I've just switched over to Windows 7 for my day-to-day desktop, and definitely think it's an improvement over both XP and Vista. That's fortunate, because I suspect we'll all be using Windows 7 for most of the next decade.

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ISV Cloud Onboarding: A New Business Environment

ISV Cloud Onboarding: A New Business Environment: "In the recent past, ISVs and SaaS vendors were increasingly evaluating the impact of cloud computing trends on their business. Cloud strategy has an all-round impact on ISVs, their customers and system integrators. From an ISV’s perspective, cloud strategy acts as a revenue and customer-growth engine, facilitating penetration to wider customer segments and geographies.

read more

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Yahoo! Labs Showcases Scientific Excellence in 2009

Yahoo! Labs Showcases Scientific Excellence in 2009: "

read more

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Basic Cloud Computing

Basic Cloud Computing: "

	Basic Cloud Computing This video covers the basics of cloud computing. For questions and for all the links used in this video, please visit the URL below: www.tinkernut.com	From: gigafide Views: 23217 367 ratings
	Time: 03:38	More in Howto & Style

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Explaining Data Wrangling

Explaining Data Wrangling: "

	Explaining Data Wrangling This video contains a practical discussion of the handling and long-term storage of large quantities of data, or what is sometimes now referred to as "data wrangling". It is produced and presented by Christopher Barnatt, Associate Professor of Computing & Future Studies in Nottingham University Business School, and the author of the explainingcomputers.com website.	From: explainingcomputers Views: 815 14 ratings
	Time: 06:05	More in Education

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The Large-Scale Machine Learning Workshop at NIPS

The Large-Scale Machine Learning Workshop at NIPS: "

read more

"

Basic Cloud Computing

Basic Cloud Computing: "

	Basic Cloud Computing This video covers the basics of cloud computing. For questions and for all the links used in this video, please visit the URL below: www.tinkernut.com	From: gigafide Views: 23192 367 ratings
	Time: 03:38	More in Howto & Style

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