Hi Qwik,
I attended the launch of Solaris 8 in NYC today which has only raised my enthusiasm for SUNW.
Ed Zander considers Solaris the "family jewels" of SUNW and cites its scalability, reliability and security as the reason SUNW has "captured market share". In fact he considers Solaris the "defacto standard" for what was called unix with IBM and HP no longer even being relevant players in that field having abdicated to NT and Linux. In fact he considers the term 'unix' as a group be dropped with the better categorization of server OS's being: MDS, Linux, NT, and Solaris.
I left seeing SUNW as entering into a league of its own. A solutions provider for 24/7.com. When asking customers why they want SUNW the answer is because its reliable and scalable. The chief fear of business today is being 'successful' and thereby not being able to scale with that growth. In my estimation it is transforming into a networking service/solution provider on the scale without comparison, and that includes IBM. Very impressive demonstrations. The system stays up even as processors are added.
By making the OS freely available, SUNW is allowing for corporate development of their own software needs. The OS is now an OE (operating environment) coming packaged with Oracle 8i, and iPlanet directory services (I.DAP,Webtop, webserver, application server software), Solaris Firewall, Apache webserver etc, for a total of 16 disks. They see IBM and HP by embrassing Linux just doing what they did with NT -- following and not leading.
SUNWs still rising and yet to hit the zenith,
Michael
P.S. He said, buy Dell with Solaris on it. |
