While struggling to reinvigorate its hardware business, Sun continues to focus on software and services as it aims to change the way companies buy and deploy IT.
The Sun Grid initiative, unveiled earlier this year and aimed at delivering technologies and services to users on a pay-as-you-go basis, is key to the effort. A pair of acquisitions the company announced last week should build out those offerings, and Sun executives say more purchases are on the horizon.
“We’re just warming up,” says John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun’s software group.
In the first deal, Sun announced that it would buy all of the intellectual property rights to Procom’s network-attached storage (NAS) technology. Sun has had a licensing agreement with Procom for more than a year and ships Procom’s technology in its Sun StorEdge 5000 family of NAS appliances. The $50 million deal will let Sun more quickly roll out NAS products, and company executives indicated the technology could find its way into the Sun Grid storage offerings.
The second deal, with thin client firm Tarantella, will beef up Sun’s Sun Ray thin clients, which offer anytime, anywhere access to its desktop applications . With Tarantella, Sun will be able to hook into legacy applications, whether they’re running on Windows, Unix or a mainframe.
The idea is to be able to display any application on any device, from a thin client to a mobile device, Loiacono says. Today, Sun partners with other companies to provide that kind of access, but customers must pay additional licensing fees. The plan is to integrate Tarantella’s Secure Global Desktop technology into Solaris.
“The bigger picture [with these acquisitions] is that we’re building a utility computing model . . . and they provide more possible services that we’re going to integrate into the big Sun Grid,” Loiacono says. “The next service you could see from us is display services, meaning you can display your application from anything to anything.”
Loiacono wouldn’t say when such services would be available.
Sun needs to do more to turn itself around, analysts say.
“Adding incrementally to a service-delivery function doesn’t create a strategic advantage,” says Joshua Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting. “They are incremental little pieces that Sun is adding to its portfolio. . . . Their stock is abysmally low and nothing they’ve done recently has helped improve that.”
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