CRN: Is Sun gaining market share from IBM or HP or is the overall market growing?
Severa: Sun's classic installed base, which sat on its hands from a procurement point of view the last 2+ years, is buying again. I don't know if Sun lost market share to their competitors as much as end users just weren't buying any capital equipment. Now Sun is better positioned at the volume end with Opteron and Linux running on low-end servers. All those things are better positioned than the last couple of years for Sun.
CRN: What areas of Sun are not growing as fast as servers?
Severa: Areas that still need more attention are storage, particularly network attached storage where they don't really have a product offering. They do on the low end and also at the high end, with Hitachi, but the 9900 is getting long in the tooth, and will get revved from Hitachi later this year. The mid-segment, NAS in particular is a large opportunity, Sun has not been competitive there.
On the software side, there's still a lot of controversy. The [Java Enterprise Software] stack and the related economic model at $100 per user, per year, is somewhat threatening to many end users. It really challenges the way they have bought and supported enterprise wide software applications. Schwartz says people would rather have interoperability than best of breed. That may ultimately be true, but it's not the consensus that we see today. People expect best of breed. The idea of trading that for interoperability has not been validated yet. End users expect the various applications to all work together. It's the same with subscription vs. licenses. Ultimately that's maybe what the model evolves to. That argument goes best with the CFO, not the CIO. CFOs aren't making the IT calls about which applications are selected.
