Open Solaris at Linux's expense?
There's an article in Information Week today suggesting that Sun's Solaris 10 may be a Linux killer, or, rather, that it will help Linux stop killing it. I'm not sure I buy that.
Why? Well, I spent the day on Wall Street, and talked with several financial institutions, which have historically been big Solaris shops. While I did hear from one that Sun's open sourcing of Solaris had given pause to the "dump Solaris" campaign there, the rest all said the move to Linux is aggressive and unstoppable. At this point, one said, Solaris is "legacy" and no amount of source code is going to change that perception.
Perception is reality. Perception: Solaris is old, in Wall Street's minds. Ergo, bye buy, Solaris.
This jibes well with an eWeek article suggesting that Red Hat's expansion on Wall Street is only accelerating. (It also explains why my friend at Large Financial Institution X was meeting with the Red Hat executive team right after his meeting with me, despite his suggestion that Solaris was slowing his company's move to Linux. :-)
Am I suggesting that IT buyers can be as trendy as consumers? Of course. After all, they're the same people, just at different times of the day. I saw this at Novell, where NetWare continues to be a great product, but one that lost (long ago) its sex appeal. Ergo, continued declines in NetWare market share.
At this point, I think Sun needs to expand its business to new products, and not hope to resuscitate Solaris revenues, just as Novell needs new products, not new names for old products. Once a brand is tarnished ("legacy," "non-standard") as somehow unpopular, its shelf-life will be short. So move on.
2 comments:
Perhaps there's a Wall Street in Salt Lake City that has you confused? At any rate, you and I have been on different Wall Streets: in New York (and London and Chicago and Tokyo and Hong Kong) the perception of Solaris has changed radically with Solaris 10 and Sun's embrace of Opteron. Financial firms are (infamously) quiet about their technology decisions, but the change has been so significant that some have gone public about it. For example, this CBR story about JPMC or this ComputerWorld story about the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. And these stories are old: a year old and eighteen months old, respectively. Since that time, the momentum has very much continued to build -- to the point that the "Solaris is old" perception is only coming from the folks who either still haven't explored Solaris 10 or have staked their careers out on Linux. So I'm not saying that you didn't have the conversations you claim to have had, just that the people you are talking to may be more lagging indicators than leading indicators...
Very possible. I certainly have no axe to grind against Sun. But the people I was talking to were SVP/CIO-level. I think they were reasonably well informed, and these were big financials.
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