Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Sun Microsystems, a bitter enemy of Intel in the days of Scott McNealy, is about to announce deal with the world's largest chip maker that will see its Solaris server operating system resident on Intel Xeon based hardware. The deal will mean that commodity range of Sun Solaris servers will be available, powered by both AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, as well as Sun's own high-end Sparc chips.
Since 2000, the once powerful Sun has been a
company struggling to stay afloat in a market increasingly moving to
commodity hardware and software. Sales of Sun's Solaris operating
system on the high performance but expensive Sparc platform have
declined in the wake of both x86 processors and open source software
platforms.
Even before Sun co-founder Scott McNealy handed over the reins of the
company to Jonathan Schwartz in April 2006, the company has desperately
tried to reinvent itself.
Sun still makes the lion's share of its revenue from high-end servers
running its Solaris flavor of the Unix operating system but has moved
to revive its fortunes in the past year by moving toward open source
software and commoditization of hardware.
In addition to releasing a range of low-end x86 servers using AMD
Opteron chips, Sun open sourced the Solaris operating system Common
Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in 2005 and opened its
Sparc platform to run Ubuntu Linux in 2006. In November 2006, Sun
finally announced that its Java development platform would be open
sourced under the GNU GPLv2 license, the license favored by the Linux
community.
With its software open sourced, Sun has moved to position its Sparc
hardware platform as an alternative to x86 in the open source software
space. In addition, Sun wants to increase its share in the commodity
hardware server space running both Solaris and Linux. To that end, the
impending deal with Intel is important.
In order to compete with the major commodity server players, such as
HP, Dell and IBM, Sun has to be able to offer the best processors
available in its hardware at any given time. With Intel and AMD
continually leap-frogging each other with new server chips, all of the
server players have moved to offer the products of both companies in
their hardware. If it wants to be a player, Sun can no longer afford
not to follow suit.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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