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Strategies & Market Trends : Market Gems-Trading Strong Earnings Growth and Momentum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Gore who wrote (5934)	3/6/2001 8:17:03 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6445

FFIV overlooked in infrastructure Net play................ Sun Chief Says 'Net Holds The Future (03/06/01, 6:43 p.m. ET) By Elizabeth Montalbano, CRN Despite the downturn in the economy, the future of the Internet still lies in supplying infrastructure that can support the demands of B-to-B and Internet transactions, Ed Zander, Sun Micrososystems president and COO, said Tuesday. In a speech at the Portal Conference 2001 in San Francisco, Zander said Sun (stock: SUNW) is focusing on three things for the future of the Internet: massive network scalability, an integratable stack, and continuous real-time Internet access. To help accomplish its goals, Sun, Palo Alto, Calif., is calling on solution providers and partners to work with the company and to adhere to industry-adopted standards. The Portal Conference is an annual user conference sponsored by Portal Software, a Cupertino, Calif., vendor that provides Internet-based customer management and billing software to service providers. Sun and Portal are strategic partners, and Zander serves on Portal's directing board. After his keynote, Zander told CRN that Sun's recent re-commitment to its traditional channel partners wasn't all that new. "We've always been committed," he said. "It wasn't a dot-com push [that we did last year], it was getting our whole company [to be] more effective." The channel's disillusionment with Sun came about because of a breakdown in communication on Sun's part, which has since been rectified, he said. "[Solution providers] thought we were taking our whole business direct," he said. "Actually, we communicated lousy ... But we've done a lot of work in getting back to [the channel] and reinforcing that stuff." Zander kicked off his talk by musing how quickly the tide has turned for the Internet economy in the past year, and poked fun at Sun's marketing campaign. In late 1999 and the early part of last year, Zander said Sun made a big pitch by calling itself "the dot in dot-com." "But you really can't use that anymore, because there ain't any dot-coms around," Zander joked. "So we switched in the second half of 2000 to 'We're the 'o' in the old economy.'" With the recent downturn in the economy, Zander said Sun's new pitch is, "Anyone wanna buy some servers?" Zander also said that analyst reports doubting the Internet's future effect on the economy are "stunning," and compared network computing's effect on the future to the impact of the telephone and automobile in the early 20th century. "In 1930, '31, based on the great economical downturn of that century, [they were] doubting whether voice telephone and the automobile would have an impact on society going forward," said Zander. "I think we're in year one or two of the greatest infrastructure buildout we've ever seen in our industry." While supplying infrastructure that can handle B-to-B's growing capacity and bandwidth is key, there is a lot of opportunity for value-add with solution providers and strategic ISV partners in that space as well, Sander said. "I think the burden is on us and our partners to take the Internet to the next level," said Zander.