Sun's Cloud (4 of 4)

In the last three updates to this blog, I've tried to set out a clear direction of where Sun's headed. I've talked about our three basic priorities: 1. Technology Adoption 2. Commercial Innovation 3. Efficiently Connecting Adoption and Commercial Opportunity. I'm hoping you've got a clear picture surrounding the first of these two priorities - how and where we drive software adoption, and focus our commercial efforts. So now I'd like to talk about the linkages - while also addressing one of our biggest strategic challenges, our scale. Selling Scale First, why is scale a challenge for Sun? To be clear, I'm not talking about purchasing scale. As I've said before, we use innovation to drive product profitability, not simply bulk purchasing leverage. The scale to which I'm referring is selling and marketing scale. With Sun's current products, we could be selling to twice the number of customers we currently serve - our products appeal to an audience far greater than our customer base. But we're limited by our size - our sales and partner force has a tenth the resources of our biggest peers. This is a particularly tough problem to solve in the midst of an economic downturn. Growing customers while reducing employees is an obvious challenge. But it's also a huge opportunity. We have fewer than 100,000 customers worldwide. Using just one example, there are more than 10,000,000 MySQL users globally - reachin...

Date: March, 19 2009
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/unified_computing

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