Cost stress: faster migration of Unix users to open platforms

Article title: facing the cost pressure Unix users are accelerating migration to open platforms. Linux is a technology channel of the IT lab in China. Includes basic categories such as desktop applications, Linux system management, kernel research, embedded systems, and open source.

As the economy gets harder and harder, companies are looking for ways to reduce costs.

For UNix-based companies like Sun, this is bad news because their prices are not cheap: recently, the chief technology officers of some companies I talked to have abandoned Sun's Solaris system because of its high cost. One of the CTO's conversations is as follows: "We have two Sun systems, each of which has four processors running the Solaris system. it costs us about $70000 a year for maintenance. We finally gave up on it and bought two Dell dual-channel servers, where we can run Linux. As a result, we achieved a 30% performance improvement, and the maintenance cost will be less than $1700 per year ."

The following conversation comes from another CTO who gave up Sun Solaris and switched to Linux: "We did some tests. after considering the software copyright fee and hardware cost, the Linux/Intel solution is 90% cheaper than the original solution, but the speed is increased by three times."

For a product that users see as value-added, they generally offer a higher price, but they also want to see that the future of this product will be good. So when the New York Times decided to re-print an article from infoWorld last week, Sun was even worse. The title of this article is: will Sun Solaris be phased out soon? Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, was quoted in The New York Times article:

The customer is very concerned about whether Unix is a more expensive traditional architecture. They have always supported Unix, because they don't want to change some traditional applications and migrate them to the new platform, because it will cost more. However, they need to do this now, because Unix cannot bring together the wisdom of different companies and individuals like Linux.

He also seems to direct his finger at Sun, "The future is the world of Linux and Microsoft Windows, not Unix or Solaris." he said, "Solaris has almost no new deployment, sun is currently in financial distress."

All investors will be nervous at the moment, and it is not often the case that the share price fell by nearly 7% in a day, but it did happen at the beginning of this week. However, Sun's shareholders must want to know when the bad news will start, because Sun's stock has fallen for several months in a row.

Back in June of this year, many commentators questioned whether Sun was able to stand alone because its share price fell too fast and its market value was only USD 7 billion. Sun's share price fell by 40% over the past three months-much higher than the NASDAQ drop value, which fell by 13% in the same period. Many people hope who can stand up to solve the current company's predicament-maybe it will be Fujitsu?

The decline in economic conditions is not the best environment for sales promotion, and Sun is not even good news, because it has been forgotten over the past few months. Among the four major server vendors-IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun, last quarter, only Sun was the only company with a decline in server revenue, up to 7.2%, according to the IDC World quarterly server tracking report. In comparison, IBM's server sales increased by 14% over the same period.

These arguments do not prove that Solaris is struggling, as mentioned in the New York Times article. At present, the operating system has many followers, and there is a huge community under the OpenSolaris project. However, there are too many bad news around the company at the moment, and many people are wondering where Sun's future is. Maybe Sun is waiting for opportunities, and it will keep growing. At present, Sun seems to focus on Solaris, at least in form.