Gartner Vendor Rating for Sun Microsystems: Positive
Friday, July 4th, 2008Gartner has issued a new vendor rating for Sun Microsystems: “The overall vendor rating is positive”.
The Gartner definition for “positive” is
Demonstrates strength in specific areas, but execution in one or more areas may still be developing or inconsistent with other areas of performance:
- Customers: Continue planned investments.
- Potential customers: Consider this vendor a viable choice for strategic or tactical investments, while planning for known limitations
Table 1. Detailed Rating
| Initiative | Rating | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Viability | ||
| Strategy | Positive | No Change |
| Financial | Promising | No Change |
| Marketing | Positive | No Change |
| Organization | Positive | No Change |
| Market Offerings | ||
| Product/Service | Positive | No Change |
| SPARC64 Servers | Positive | No Change |
| x64 Servers | Promising | No Change |
| SPARC CMT Servers | Strong Positive | New |
| SPARC III/IV Servers | Caution | New |
| Disk Storage | Promising | No Change |
| Tape Drives, Tape Libraries and Virtual Tape | Positive | No Change |
| Storage Management Software | Caution | No Change |
| Infrastructure Management Software | Promising | No Change |
| Solaris | Strong Positive | No Change |
| Professional and Managed Services | Positive | No Change |
| Database Management Systems | Promising | New |
| Identity and Access Management | Strong Positive | New |
| Technology/Methodology | Strong Positive | No Change |
| Java | Positive | No Change |
| Open Source | Strong Positive | Up |
| SOA Infrastructure | Promising | No Change |
| Pricing Structure | Positive | No Change |
| Customer Service/Support | ||
| Sales/Distribution | Positive | No Change |
| Indirect Channels | Positive | No Change |
| Direct Sales | Positive | No Change |
| Developers | Strong Positive | Up |
| Support/Account Management | Positive | No Change |
| Product Support | Positive | No Change |
| Account Management | Positive | No Change |
Source: Gartner
The Gartner Report breaks down each of the categories in the table. The report has forma definitiions for all the ratings:
- Strong Positive
- Positive
- Promising
- Caution
- Strong Negative
Quotes:
“Sun Microsystems customers should feel more comfortable with their infrastructures than they have since 2001, because of the company’s improved market and financial position. The past year represents an important turning point in Sun’s ambition to be known as an open-source company.”
“Sun continues to reinvigorate its image and move to sustained revenue and profitability. Since 2006, gross margins have risen from 42% to as high as 48.5%, with more consistent profitability (47.3% for nine months ending March 2008).
“There are indications that Sun is using its alliance partners more to spearhead a professional service-led entry into key vertical markets.”
“Sun continues to strengthen its organization. Its executive management team is stable, strong and comfortable working together.”
SPARC64 Servers: “a technically strong family of RISC Unix servers, well-positioned to compete for conventional Unix workloads in terms of performance and functionality with comparable designs from IBM and HP”
“Sun’s commitment to x64 technology innovation is unquestioned, and sales of these servers have increased at a brisk rate. “
”Sun has pioneered the market for dense, multicore processor designs … Sun receives a strong positive rating in this category due to the product’s forward-looking design and philosophy, strong throughput, and reduced space and power consumption”
“Sun is conscious of the threat that Linux poses to Unix, and the Sun approach is to enable ever-better Linux coexistence, so that Solaris effectively will become a better Linux than Linux is itself.”
”Sun Java System Identity Manager and Access Manager products are considered leaders in the IAM [ identity and access management ] market.”
”Sun’s identification of and investment in key technology trends, such as multithreading, multicore and power conservation (well before they became mainstream), is impressive.”
“Sun is a premier contributor of key technologies to the open-source movement. From OpenSolaris to middleware (GlassFish), DBMS (MySQL acquisition) and Java, Sun has delivered innovative code into various communities. “
”Sun’s presales system engineers continue to be a major asset, especially in conjunction with the company’s solutions centers.”
“Hardware support: Sun has quietly built an impressive direct-service capability for its equipment”
and Mark Moir. It provides interesting insights into what Sun is doing: