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SAS2008: Growing the Pie, or, How Many Times Can I Type "Pie?"

A favorite metaphor to for code-monkeys to make fun of is “growing the pie.” That’s the story, stronger than ever from Sun at their analyst event today. “Growing the pie” is the story of creating a larger market for IT and then being there when people want to spend money.

The story from Sun is that this pie is just about done cooking, and that big MySQL topping is the pie-accelator. As I Twittered earlier, Sun’s head sales dude, Don Grantham comments at the analyst event boiled down to:

Sun is anticipating an avalanche of service/support contracts for MySQL.

Throw in emerging markets, companies that want to build out their IT to establish web-bases relationships with customers, and you’ve got some more pie-potential.

The ever green issue with Sun’s pie baking is that they don’t break-out their revenue by pie-slice. They only want to talk about how big the whole pie is, not each part. Obviously – one hopes! – Sun knows these numbers internally, but they don’t share them with others.

At the moment, there’s pie-profit – yay! – but what people like myself want is a more open look into each of those slices. That’s the key to understanding future pie-potential. Otherwise, all we have to go on is Sun’s word – “just trust us, this pie is awesome” – that the pie is big and each slice is contributing.

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Categories: Conferences, Enterprise Software.