I am at Java One and just had a discussion with Sun president and CEO Jonathan Schwartz and a few other analysts. It was a knockabout session, as we had a chance to chat to Jonathan in his new role as CEO. <\/p>\n
I asked Jonathan what I thought was a softball question with a somewhat obvious response<\/p>\n
“How much are you enjoying Dell’s current misfortune, and why aren’t you doing more to kick the firm while its down?”<\/p>\n
Jonathan looked me in the eye and expressed exactly how Sun will be different under his stewardship.<\/p>\n
“We don\u2019t need to be anti-anyone<\/em>. Why does the story always have to be Sun slaps somebody?” <\/p>\n That is a big change. Scott McNealy was always trying to “kill” somebody, and seemingly came from the Everybody Else Miust Fail school of management.<\/p>\n Jonathan on the other hand, pointed out that Dell is a potential partner, and generates a lot of Solaris installs\u2026<\/p>\n One customer running Solaris on Dell hardware is Wells Fargo…. that has to be a nice opportunity. <\/p>\n Jonathan said that when he became CEO the first thing he did was call the likes of Matthew Szulik (RedHat), Marc Fleury (JBoss), and Kevin Rollins (Dell).<\/p>\n Take note – Jonathan didn’t call customers straightaway, as per the new tech CEO playbook – he called the people that Sun couldn’t have a sensible conversation with while Scott was still in charge\u2026 <\/p>\n Most other industry players have long responded to coopetition, both competing and cooperating with other major firms, and changed their business models accordingly.<\/p>\n Sun on the other hand often looked somewhat isolated. Vertically integrated yes, but isolated also. <\/p>\n It seems like Sun is now finally making that transition. Take note\u2026. Sun working closely with AMD was a big wake up call for the firm. We may well see more deals like that… <\/p>\n Jonathan is evidently about value creation, rather than negativity, and it\u2019s a good look.<\/p>\n Sun – participation requires partners, some of which are not best of friends. It will be interesting to see whether the non confrontational approach to Dell bears fruit. Solaris pre-installed on Dell? Stranger things have happened, especially when customers ask for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am at Java One and just had a discussion with Sun president and CEO Jonathan Schwartz and a few other analysts. It was a knockabout session, as we had a chance to chat to Jonathan in his new role as CEO. I asked Jonathan what I thought was a softball question with a somewhat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-9H","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}