While Sun Microsystems is known for its
accomplishments in the financial services and telecom industries, the
company is now touting wins with retail establishments.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based network computer maker said it has
convinced five new customers including Kelly-Moore Paints, Guitar Center, and Air Terminal Gifts to move to its Linux-powered systems. The retailers
are all hosted under Sun’s partnership with iForce partner Tomax’s
Retail.net software.
Even better, Sun Industry Director Bob DeLaney said, more retailers are converting to Sun’s Solaris OS. He said they include Benjamin Moore Paints, Ultimate Electronics, Ratner Companies (Hair Cuttery Salons and Bubbles Spas), Sportsman’s Warehouse and Grace Kennedy Company (a Jamaican retail conglomerate).
“Retail is somewhat the last bastion of proprietary systems,” DeLaney told internetnews.com. “These are the customers that rarely, if ever, change their infrastructure. But we’re seeing a dramatic change in the industry where retail companies want the same cost savings as the financial services customers.”
DeLaney said beyond IBM legacy systems, Sun’s progress in retail venues also gives it a chance to take business away from Dell and HP, which both offer point of sale systems.
“And as RFID starts to take off, there are challenges for edge servers, on the retail sales floor as well as in the back warehouses and distribution centers,” DeLaney said, while pointing out Sun’s work with radio frequency identification tags
Complementing the strategy is the addition to Sun’s OEM partners of 12 new members, including makers of servers, workstations, supercomputers,
telecom equipment platforms, VPNs,
Sun said the new membership will help extend Sun’s Solaris OS beyond its own product lines. The list includes ASA Computers,
Continuous Computing Corporation, Electronic Business Solutions, Flight
System Consulting, NatureTech, Pinnacle Data Systems, Portable One, Rave
Computer Association, S-Terra Group, System Works Corporation, Think
Computer Products and Tokyo Forex Financial.
The company said its Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for the Solaris OS on x86 has doubled in size in the last six months and currently includes
more than 200 supported x86 systems from both Sun and third party vendors.
Key ISVs like BEA, Sybase, Oracle, and VERITAS have already signed on to
support their solutions on Solaris x86.
“Following on the heels of last month’s agreement with Rackable Systems,
this groundswell of support from 12 OEMs is further proof of the strong
momentum behind the Solaris OS on x86,” Ann Wettersten, vice president of
systems software marketing at Sun, said in a statement. “As we continue to
push hard on growing the Independent Hardware Vendor ecosystem for the
Solaris OS on x86, we believe this will have a snowball effect in driving
even more Independent Software Vendor adoptions.”
Newly appointed Executive Vice President for Network Systems, John Fowler
told internetnews.com that Solaris OS on x86 will certainly start
taking off as soon as the company fills in some of the holes of Sun’s server
lineup.
“With just a 2-way Opteron server, I don’t have a product line,” Fowler
said. “We’ll be making some announcements next month in Singapore [at Sun’s
NC04 event]. At that point I will feel stronger in what I’m doing.”
Fowler, who previously served as Sun’s Chief Technology Officer for
Software, said his focus now is a more comprehensive product line based on
Sun’s relationship with AMD . The strategy is to offer
2-way and 4- way, workstations, and larger systems base on Opteron, which can
run not only Sun’s Solaris but Microsoft Windows and Linux as well.
On the hardware side, Sun spent some time this
week opening
up its storage cluster hardware specifications. The company is now
offering support for non-Sun storage arrays including third-party storage
devices from storage heavies like EMC, IBM and Network Appliance. The
collaboration is jointly supported by the Technical Support Alliance Network
(TSANet) and includes a self-certification test.
