With back-to-back solid quarterly financial results in the bank, Sun Microsystems President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz stepped on stage Sept. 13 and tried to convince Wall Street that the company has landed solidly on the comeback trail.
Schwartz, who has been the company’s top executive for just over 100 days, came to New York City and told an audience at the company’s annual customer event how Sun has re-evaluated itself and returned to a core business model of offering innova-tions for a growing marketplace.
As the Internet moves from a passive stage to what Schwartz called a “Participation Age,” the demands of customers for better infrastructure will begin to drive more and more of the market-place and ultimately drive Sun’s growth and profitability.
“It’s about services,” Schwartz said. “It’s about serving cus-tomers; it’s about serving individuals as well as serving the busi-nesses that are trying to reach these individuals.”
What Schwartz said he hoped to do was take that potential and create a 4 percent operating margin for Sun by the end of the year.
To help grow and achieve this operating margin, Schwartz said Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif., would have to rely on innovation as well as the adoption of its technology in the market place. He pointed to the use of Java in handheld devices and desktops and that the company had now sold some 6 millions licenses for its Solaris 10 operating system.
The next step is now to combine what Schwartz called the four Ss – security, storage, servers and service – and spread those innovations across all platforms, including open source environ-ments. Sun wants to move farther away from point products and more towards solutions offerings, according to officials.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Sun CEO: We’re Ready to Grow in the ‘Participation Age’
