Submission + - Jonathan Schwartz on Sun's Open Source Strategy (cnet.com)
enaiel writes: "At LinuxWorld, Matt Assay did an interesting interview with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems about Sun's Open Source strategy:
One of our biggest strategic challenges is that we have roughly 4,000 quota-bearing salespeople. To me, it feels like my biggest competitors have 4 trillion sales reps. I'm not going to beat them by hiring more sales reps. I'm going to beat them by leveraging the single-biggest sales channel the world has ever known: the Internet.
Think about this: nearly every Brazilian sees my logo. Every day. Not because a sales rep puts it in front of them, but because they see it on OpenOffice, which their government or they downloaded for free.
Customers now find us. When I see Sun's free software downloads in Western China or Siberia, two regions where we have no sales presence at all, and yet we're doing business there, I have to ask how my competitors are going to survive when no one knows about them.
The question to ask is, "What portion of the world knows my brand?"
With the Java platform I'd guess we reach 20 to 30 percent of the Internet every day (powering the games kids play online, the intranet application at a bank, etc.). Each of these constituents may think about Java in different ways, but in each case Java "sells" my brand. If you believe that brand is central to the next wave of Internet monetization — and I believe it is absolutely central — then the more people that know my brand, the more benefit inures to me.
We distributed nine million licenses of Solaris in the last two years. I guarantee we wouldn't have been able to make nine million sales calls. Seventy percent of these licenses are on Dell, HP, and IBM. This gives us a great platform to build a partnership with these hardware companies, and it also gives us a great pool of users, some percentage of which will want to pay us.
Why? How do we monetize these? When that technology is run in a Fortune 100 company in a mission-critical app, the CIO will hunt me down to pay me money. The cost of downtime for them is huge compared to the cost. "
One of our biggest strategic challenges is that we have roughly 4,000 quota-bearing salespeople. To me, it feels like my biggest competitors have 4 trillion sales reps. I'm not going to beat them by hiring more sales reps. I'm going to beat them by leveraging the single-biggest sales channel the world has ever known: the Internet.
Think about this: nearly every Brazilian sees my logo. Every day. Not because a sales rep puts it in front of them, but because they see it on OpenOffice, which their government or they downloaded for free.
Customers now find us. When I see Sun's free software downloads in Western China or Siberia, two regions where we have no sales presence at all, and yet we're doing business there, I have to ask how my competitors are going to survive when no one knows about them.
The question to ask is, "What portion of the world knows my brand?"
With the Java platform I'd guess we reach 20 to 30 percent of the Internet every day (powering the games kids play online, the intranet application at a bank, etc.). Each of these constituents may think about Java in different ways, but in each case Java "sells" my brand. If you believe that brand is central to the next wave of Internet monetization — and I believe it is absolutely central — then the more people that know my brand, the more benefit inures to me.
We distributed nine million licenses of Solaris in the last two years. I guarantee we wouldn't have been able to make nine million sales calls. Seventy percent of these licenses are on Dell, HP, and IBM. This gives us a great platform to build a partnership with these hardware companies, and it also gives us a great pool of users, some percentage of which will want to pay us.
Why? How do we monetize these? When that technology is run in a Fortune 100 company in a mission-critical app, the CIO will hunt me down to pay me money. The cost of downtime for them is huge compared to the cost. "
