The New Sun Microsystems

It is the start of the last quarter of 2008 and we engineers in ISV Engineering are still baffled when we hear from new Startups when they say "Oh we are startups, I don't think we can afford Sun Microsystems" or sometimes even from old partners. It's like  Flashback to 1999! Yes we were selling $4million servers based only on SPARC in 1999. However in 2008 we are selling many servers for much less than $1000. (HINT: Join Sun Startup Essentials) In fact now we sell systems based on various CPU architectures like  AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon, UltraSPARC T2, SPARC64 VII. We also have one of the biggest OpenSource offerings right from MySQL, Java, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Glassfish, Netbeans, etc. (I for one cannot even remember all our OpenSource projects). So what we figured that essentially it is hard  for non-Sun folks to distinguish  the current Sun from the Sun of 1999. Essentially our biggest competition in 2008 is the lingering image of Sun from 1999 as seller of expensive Sun SPARC systems.

It is hard to push that message out when you don't have advertising budget. But we have to get the message out.  So what am I going to do about it?

Just to show the fact that we have changed from last decade, next time when I have to introduce myself,   I am going to say:

"I am Jignesh and I work for The New Sun Microsystems"

to highlight the fact and push the message out. I am changing the introduction in my blog and my email signature to reflect the same. I am hoping people will  read or hear the "New" moniker and ask their favorite Sun contacts "What's new?" and that's the exactly the question that I want those potential customers to ask us.

Update on Nov 6, 2008: Check out the New Sun.com website