On April 4 I posted a piece in which I discussed my reactions to the Sun-Microsoft deal. This week I was in California for meetings at the Sun Menlo Park campus when the news broke about the big reorg. As the dust begins to settle, I thought I’d blog my initial reactions to this. After all, I’ve been at Sun nearly 19 years, and it’s a big part of my life.
First, let me summarize the announcement (since some journalists still couldn’t get it right even after the press flash, the analysts’ call, and widespread discussions). Before this change, Sun was organized into a number of business units. ESP built mid- to high-range SPARC servers; VSP built low- to mid-range servers based on SPARC, Xeon, and Athlon processors, as well as SPARC workstations; PNP designed SPARC chips (fabbed outside); NWS did storage systems; SW did software: Solaris, Java, middleware, desktop, N1, identity, embedded.
After the change, NWS and SW are essentially unchanged (so far). Throughput Systems absorbs ESP, PNP, and the SPARC-based products from VSP. Network Systems gets the Xeon and Athlon lines from VSP, plus the Kealia acquisition. My guess is that Nauticus will also go into NS, though I haven’t seen anything definitive.
My thoughts on all this. First, I think it’s a step in the right direction. In the past, there have been charter issues about exactly where ESP and VSP should draw the line: now we’ll have a single division responsible for a (hopefully simplified) range of SPARC based products. The big debate about the roles of MPs versus blades in systems remains – after all, it’s not just a Sun thing – but it should be easier to get the balance right when it’s not seen as a turf issue any more.
Second, I want to understand exactly what the NS value proposition is. The announcement talked about low-cost horizontally scaled systems with off-the-shelf components that leverage industry economics. Does that mean a low-margin model, or a high-value one? If the latter, there needs to be a substantial investment in software to complement the off-the-shelf components. Does all that get done in SW, or should we split SW and move certain pieces into NS?
We’ve tried various ways of organizing SMI over the years. I regard the new structure as SMI 4.0. Here’s the taxonomy:
SMI 0.x: The original Sun with Scott, Vinod, Andy, Bill and the small gang of obsessive crazies who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and got Sun off the ground. Led to…
SMI 1.0: when Bernie Lacroute came on board in 1984. Strong, relatively centralized engineeering and operations, with Bernie as effective COO. In this period we laid the foundation for real growth: SPARC, the AT&T deal to unify Unix, strong engineering processes under Rob Gingell. This was also the era of the 386i workstation (with which I was involved), and the infamous “Larry Garlick Memorial Decision” not to get into the router business. I think the last of these may have been one of the things that precipitated…
SMI 2.0: The era of “The Planets”: a core computer business (SMCC) surrounded by a number of independent business units: SunSoft, SunConnect, SunPics, SunSelect, and so forth. I remember Fortune magazine hailing this as the breakthrough model for the 1990s. It allowed us to enter and exit certain markets fairly painlessly – who remembers SunPics, the Sun printer business? – but it confused customers, because each BU had its own sales force and we couldn’t coordinate the customer-facing activities. Plus each BU was really very independent, and there were armies of people doing nothing but negotiating intra-Sun transfer pricing. (There’s a lesson here for bureaucracies that try to achieve efficiency though “internal markets”: they don’t work.) So during the 1990s there was a gradual shift to…
SMI 3.0: The defining characteristic of this version of SMI was the move to a single sales force. Because this changed the nature of the BUs, and led to a degree of functional rationalisation, it was tempting to see functionalism as the driving force, but it wasn’t. Behind the single sales force, the various BUs remained (?fiercely) independent. And the functional organization was never as total as it might appear. Scott might tell me that he’d “put all of software under Jonathan”, but these days engineering is software, except for a bit of physics, and there was (and is) software development going on all over Sun – appropriately so. The fact that Zander was COO for a while, and a few high-profile people came and went, and we went through the bubble, didn’t really change this model. But the decision to put Jonathan Schwartz in as COO, and his “activist” managerial style, definitely signals a shift, to…
SMI 4.0: Maybe this should be SMI 3.1 instead, but never mind. This model has a strong Back To The Future feel: Jonathan Schwartz gets to play the part of Bernie Lacroute. One sales force, internal units organized for operational efficiency and execution rather than along business lines.
It’s never boring.