Sun Microsystems aiming to regain trailblazer title
Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Singapore
Last week the computer world was abuzz with news of computing technology firm Sun Microsystems Inc. teaming up with Internet search site king Google Inc. to promote and distribute its software technology.
Although the significance of the collaboration -- which hints at a challenge to the current dominance of software giant Microsoft -- is yet to be felt, it does highlight one thing: that Sun is carefully using every available opportunity for its comeback into the industry, of which it once reigned supreme.
Indeed, it cannot be said that things have been going too well for Sun, not since its business of selling SPARC-based servers bundled with Solaris operating system burst along with the dot- com bubble in the late 1990s.
The Santa Clara, California-based company reported a US$107 million net loss for the 2005 fiscal year, which ended June 30, despite an $11 billion net revenue. It booked a $388 million net loss a year earlier.
Sun's dominance in the server market is doubtful as well. Although market research firm Gartner still puts Sun's 33 percent market share ahead of HP, IBM and Dell for this year's second quarter, Sun has continued to slip against its rivals. Research firm IDC, meanwhile, has put Sun behind IBM and HP.
Nevertheless, Sun is upbeat that it is heading down the right path to steal the show again, touting its decade-proven Java software platform technology and "network computing concept for an age of participation" among its winning themes.
It has recently adopted a more open view for its businesses to expand its market -- off-shooting its once proprietary Solaris operating system and StarOffice productivity suite into the open sourced and freely available Java Desktop System and OpenOffice.org.
At the same time, Sun, realizing a growing market demand, did not hesitate to take up AMD's 64-bit processors for its latest line of Sun Fire servers, along with its own UltraSPARC processor.
Speaking at a symposium for South Asian media and analysts last month in Singapore, Sun chairman and CEO Scott McNealy shared the company's vision, in which he said everybody would be able to share and participate through their cell phones, PDAs and laptops on top of a network-based, grid computing landscape.
"We're out of the Stone Age, Iron Age, Information Age, Internet Age and into the Participation Age, where people blog and pod cast from home. If you are not participating, you're missing out. You've got to get active, get involved, start contributing to the Net," he said.
"Our mission is to provide the technology and services to drive this participation age."
Indeed, McNealy expects Sun's technologies to be the center of this future, with Java -- which provides a platform for software to virtually run on any device -- and its blade server and storage devices hardware playing as the main systems integrator.
"Java is already available in the millions of cell phones worldwide, and we already have 25 million Java developers out there," he said. "Our recent StorageTek, meanwhile, has put us now managing some 30 percent of the world's databases."
McNealy did not hide his hopes that all of Sun's recent efforts was the company's "waiting for that iPod moment" in monetizing them, referring to Apple Computer's hitting the industry's spotlight with its popular MP3 player.
However, it remains to be seen how far Sun's recent strategy to once again rise and shine over the computer industry's future will take it.