Scott McNealy: Still Comedy

The Scott McNealy show is still basically.. The Scott McNealy show. It hasn’t changed much. Everyone else is a hairball. IGS is bad. Microsoft is bad. “Its mankind against…”

Sun is apparently a great partnering company – and Scott pointed to EDS, Oracle, Google, NEC and Microsoft as examples.

I am pretty sure the IBM Software Group folks would be more than happy to stack up their ISV ecosystem against Sun’s. Partnering works in a lot of different dimensions. Or how about POWER? IBM would probably be pleased to compare the economics of NEC versus the XBOX, Nintendo and Sony volumes.

I only bring up IBM because Scott does… repeatedly.

There is plenty be happy about though, and with buyer intentions in servers and identity management moving Sun’s way Scott’s shares could be worth an awful lot more by the end of the year. I wonder if any of the financial analysts here are considering an upgrade? Maybe Sun can pick up some Google refugees….

One really nice number – margins are on the uptick again, apparently. Up to 45% and above, the best numbers since 2001.

“We are a hotbox company” – that is the most important fact to consider.

New hardware architectures. “Its been so long since I had people screaming at me and it just feels good”. Vintage Scott, that comment. The return to a fulfillment model?

So what about customer wins? GM, GE, Amex, Fedex, the UK National Health Service. These are all subscription model customers. This is certainly a growing marquee customer base, and unlike other vendors such as Oracle, Sun evidently doesn’t feel the need to make economic claims it can’t support.

Identity management is the key to Sun’s software story. IBM and Sun are probably the only two players in the industry going to win customers planning to roll out tens of millions of identities. Oracle- maybe in a couple of years from an architectural and sales model perspective. Microsoft? AD is unproven at that scale. No – the kind of deals that we’ll see more of – Orange and Amex – that is likely to be an IBM Sun shootout.

I talked to Michael Barrett from Amex this morning. He told me Sun’s identity management tools were far and away the best in the market. This after a very thorough due diligence process. 100k enterprise identities, tens of millions of consumer identities, and millions on the B2B side – and that is a Sun win. Did I remember to say Michael likes the new Niagara servers? That is another customer that has kicked the T-1’s tyres and liked the feel. On a related not this puchasing decision also has to be great news for the Liberty Alliance . WS-I – What’s that? Amex is evidently going to put its federation thinking into practice…

If Sun can now persuade Microsoft to support the T-1 and T-2 line then Sun really be cooking with gas. For now the platform is an ideal LAMP or SAMP engine. But Windows support would really shake up the application platform landscape more broadly.

On data center – Scott says its an IBM Sun shootout. He claims he doesn’t compete with HP.

“Longer time we become more aligned… HP OEMs Sun’s storage. HP is competing with IGS. HP don’t do processors, operating systems, and so on. When Itanium goes away – we become far more complimentary. Microsoft and intel – general and motors… they probably should merge.”

Maybe the Scott McNealy comedy show still has some legs… HP and Sun as partners? Now that is a classic contrarian position.

disclaimers- Sun, IBM, Microsoft and Liberty are clients. Oracle is not.