Sun Microsystems has fired off a barrage of product
promotions, upgrades and service announcements in an attempt to
retake its traditional stronghold in the financial
community.
The Solaris operating system offers better computing performance
and system management for less money than comparable Linux systems,
company president Jonathan Schwartz told investment banking
analysts and financial services executives in New York.
Sun has delivered what its customers said they wanted, he
added.
Schwartz acknowledged that Sun initially was not prepared to
deliver products that customers were asking for during the economic
downturn of the early part of the decade.
Customers were asking for versions of Solaris that ran on
multiple platforms and higher levels of performance for lower
prices, he said.
The big questions for Sun, according to users and analysts, is
whether they can differentiate their technology from Linux.
In the past several years, Schwartz pointed out, Sun delivered
Solaris on x86 technology, but also has certified a wide variety of
software to run on its Sparc processor systems.
"One of the main items on the shopping list was, you wanted
choice," Schwartz said.
In an effort to take back customers it lost to Linux, Schwartz
announced a 50% discount on Solaris right-to-use licenses for
customers upgrading from Linux.
"There's no question that Sun was tremendously successful in the
financial community when it was less price sensitive, but they then
lost ground to Linux," said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata,
who attended the New York event.
However, for financial industry users, pricing is not the whole
story.
"We have to look at the whole value proposition, though of
course price itself is important," said Steve Rubinow, the chief
technology officer for Archipelago Holdings, an electronic trading
system.
"We're not as big as some of the companies here, so we may have
tens of servers, not hundreds, so the dollars don't add up as
fast," Rubinow said. "If I can manage an environment of [just] Sun
servers and avoid support headaches, running Sun offers an
advantage."
Sun is competing with Linux, at least for the time being, on
features as well as price, other users agreed, and Sun pricing has
put it at least in the same range as Linux systems.
"We're spending money on Linux because we have to buy Linux
systems too, and that's because we have to buy service, we're not
just getting the operating system for free," said an IT executive
at a major investment bank that runs both Sun and Linux
systems.
"Right now we like the features that Solaris offers, for example
the resource management capabilities are better than Linux's," said
the executive.
Sun promotions geared to financial companies in New York
included a Xeon trade-in program offering cash credit for customers
switching from Intel Xeon servers to Sun Fire systems based on
Opteron processors.
The credits range from $560 (£313) for low-end Sun Fire V20z
servers, to $1,250 for midrange Sun Fire V40z servers and $860 on
Sun Java Workstations.
Sun also is offering a free trial of a Sun Fire V20z server and
Solaris 10 to selected customers.
In addition, Sun released pricing information for the Sun Fire
V490 and Sun Fire V890 servers, at starting prices of $30,995 and
$39,995, respectively.
Building up to the launch of Solaris 10 next month, Sun also
announced that new products, migration tools and support will
become available over the next 90 days through its Software Express
for Solaris system adoption program. These include Predictive Self
Healing, the Dynamic Tracing resource management feature, the new
file system ZFS and Project Janus, which offers Linux/Solaris
interoperability.
Marc Ferranti writes for IDG News Service