A Contrite yet Aggressive Sun

It was a slightly different Schwartz during today’s tightly packed session – he even conceded that Sun basically dropped the ball during the dot com craze – but it was on another level simply a reaffirmation of the charge he’s led since taking the helm of the software group; reinvent the business, not just the technology. For all the talk of freedom of choice, technical innovation, and customer wins, for my money the most revolutionary undertaking from Sun may yet be its simplified pricing.

Whether it’s the JDS/JES suites on a per employee basis, or the compute cycles announced today for a buck an hour, Sun is driving simplicity into the usually actuarial world of enterprise infrastructure pricing. It’s not enough by itself, of course, to turn around the fortunes of the firm that put the dot in dot com, but of course that’s where the innovations we hear so much about come in. The trick is going to be getting more ISV partners to come along for the pricing ride, but as Schwartz put it this morning, there is a certain inevitability to it.

There’s a long way to go yet in any comeback, but if what I heard this morning from Bill Morgan of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange is any indication, there’s life yet in the firm that’s been written off on an almost daily basis for the past few years.

Other interesting tidbits from today’s session:

* One large bank’s CIO reports that of 63 funded projects under his group, 60 are compliance related. COA‘s looking pretty good then methinks.

* According to Schwartz, Sun expects the rising Linux tide to affect all boats, including Solaris, particularly given that it promises to run Red Hat apps on Solaris unmodified.

* Scale out? Another CIO reports via Schwartz that his two biggest concerns today are heat and floor space.

* Pricing is poised to become an even more significant issue for ISVs with the rise in multi-core architectures. How do you price on a per CPU basis with CPUs that perform as multiples of themselves?

Now it’s time to head into my 1:1’s here at the W. Which reminds me – can you get kicked out of this place for not wearing all black? 😉