McNealy: "The Suicide Attacks
Change Everything"
By Mark Veverka
For the better part of his tenure at the helm of Sun Microsystems, Scott
McNealy has tirelessly accused Bill Gates of nefarious ways, constantly
attempting to portray Microsoft as some sort of Evil Empire.
But the terrorist attacks of September 11 have redefined evil for McNealy.
His fight with Gates was about business. This is about death -- the
cold-blooded murder of 6,000-plus men and women, including one of his
own executives, a top software engineer who perished on American Airlines
Flight 11.
And it could have been a lot worse. The suicidal hijackers might have taken
some 340 other Sun employees with them were it not for some brave civil
servants and a bounty of good fortune. Sun's New York-based sales and
support offices were in the lower half of the World Trade Center's South
Tower. Speaking softly and contemplatively during an interview in his Palo
Alto offices a week to the day after the hijackings, McNealy said: "I'm a
founder. This is the first time we've lost an employee" in the line of duty. "The
suicide attacks change everything."
Like almost everyone on the West Coast, McNealy was at home when the
first tower was struck. He was called to the TV, where he remained glued for
what seemed like hours. As the South Tower burned like a candle, he could
only hope and pray that his people would escape the lethal inferno and its
subsequent implosion.
"It was awful," McNealy shudders.
It would be hours before McNealy started to hear scattered reports from his
employees. Each report brought a sigh of relief as more and more Sun
employees became safely accounted for.
While many fortunate refugees from the collapsed skyscrapers were able to
retreat to the safety of their homes and families, McNealy's troops were
treated to a quick hug from coworkers, a shower and perhaps a bite to eat
before heading back out to help Sun's Trade Center clients with their servers.
Whether it was retrieving data or ordering new computer workstations for
emergency trading rooms in New Jersey, the same Sun employees who could
easily have been part of the death toll were now attending to their jobs just
hours after black clouds enveloped lower Manhattan.
McNealy could not say enough about the character, fortitude and resilience of
his employees. "The amazing thing is that they don't even feel like the victims.
And yet they were the victims," McNealy recounted. "I'm blown away by
them."
In no time, with nary a purchase order, Sun's New York support team was
shipping 200 high-end workstations to Merrill Lynch's emergency facilities in
New Jersey. "We're just shipping the stuff and worrying about [payment]
later," McNealy said. And since Sun's entire New York service operations
were destroyed, the company had to forge ahead itself without the benefit of
phone lines, networks and computers.
In the days that followed, Sun took full-page advertisements out in
newspapers to publish new toll-free telephone numbers just to let its
embattled Tri-State customers know how to contact the company. Customers
who tried calling the previous numbers "were calling dust," says McNealy.
Catering to Manhattan customers during this time of crisis hasn't been as
personally harrowing for Gary Bloom, chief executive of Veritas Software, a
Mountain View, California, storage software concern. His New York sales
and support troops were largely out of harm's way. But just like hundreds of
other CEOs that morning, Bloom needed to ascertain the nature and extent of
the direct impact on his operations before he could spring his employees to
action.
"My thought was: Do I have anybody on any of these planes?" Bloom recalls.
When the corporate travel agency checked the manifests, it found that Veritas
had been spared.
While most Americans marveled at the courage and bravery of the rescue
workers following the explosions, Bloom watched with particular interest. For
about 10 years, during his 20s, the former top Oracle executive was a
volunteer emergency rescue worker in San Luis Obispo and Contra Costa
counties in California. Over the years, he had been called in often to save life
and limb from raging Western wildfires. Bloom watched in amazement as the
urban rescuers tunneled into the man-made caverns with blowtorches and
rolls of fiberoptics in search of survivors.
"I know how difficult it is to go from searching for someone who is missing to
searching for someone who likely no longer is with us," he said.
Now Bloom's job is to save data, and the weeks following the calamity will
prove a critical and defining moment for his young company. Veritas makes
software that allows computer servers, which store data, to transfer
information to other servers if there's been a failure or disruption. The
company also makes software that backs up and protects data.
Needless to say, the company's products and people are now facing their
biggest test. Veritas has hundreds of customers in lower Manhattan, and how
well they perform during these trying times could very well determine the
future prospects of the company.
Despite the inability of hardware providers to ship Veritas badly needed parts
because of the unforeseen total shutdown of airfreight shipping services,
Veritas has been getting the job done, according to its CEO. "Right now, we
are heading toward a 100% hit rate," Bloom said.
A small number of Veritas customers benefited from solutions that were online
configurations, meaning when power shut down, computer systems
automatically tripped over to servers that were up and running without missing
a beat. "I think some of the best stories will be of those who didn't have to
recover [data]. They used online configurations that simply allowed systems to
just 'fail over,' " he notes.
Bloom hopes these real-world test cases grab the attention of top executives,
showing them the benefits of a data protection system that does not need to
recover lost information. Still, about 55% of the company's software licensing
revenues come from data-protection software, which allows customers to
recover data seemingly lost in servers that were damaged or shutdown.
Naturally, the anecdotal accounts of how well Veritas and its software live up
to its claims will be the ultimate marketing message. If it works, "I'll have
CIOs all over the world talking about us."
But for now, sales calls are on the back burner. In fact, Bloom doesn't expect
to see an immediate spike in sales due to the terrorist attacks. Some pending
sales that were likely to close during the final weeks of the quarter may not get
done as sales efforts give way to the priority of tending to current customers.
Many corporations are simply hitting the pause button on information
technology purchases until the economic fallout from the attacks begins to
settle. (For more insights from McNealy and Bloom, see a related article.)
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