Schwartz, in his previous job as head of Sun's software group, introduced pricing plans by which a customer could use as much of Sun's server or desktop software as it wanted, paying according to how many employees it had. On Tuesday in Shanghai, China, the company announced similarly unconventional schemes for storage and services in the midst of many other quarterly announcements.
In the case of storage, the company will sell customers access to a top-end StorEdge 9980 system, operated and owned by Sun, for US$1.95 per gigabyte per month for a three-year subscription commitment. The price includes storage management software and support services and increases by $1.50 for better management or $2 for a mirror-image storage system.
In the case of services, Sun will sell a collection of more than 100 services designed to improve operations of a company's data centre. In a twist, though, Sun will audit the data centre continuously, and the healthier it is, the less Sun will charge for the subscription.
"We're beginning to put some meat on the bones of the strategy around using both technology and economics to drive disruptive innovation in the enterprise," Schwartz said in an interview.
The moves come as the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company tries to recover some of the strength it had in the late 1990s, when customers were willing to pay premium prices for its high-end networked computers, called servers. Since those glory days, Sun has had three massive rounds of layoffs and continues to lose server market share, even though the market has resumed growing.
Sun now is remaking itself. It has buried the hatchet with Microsoft -- partly, at least. It continues to push its own UltraSparc-based servers, but the company now sells models with "x86" processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. Sun appointed new executives to manage its top server products. And it's hoping to establish a more steady revenue stream through product-service combinations that customers subscribe to rather than buy outright with one-time payments.
The changes are designed to let Sun, which for years has profited from high-end gear, adapt to a computing world dominated by good-enough technology such as Intel processors and the Linux operating system.
"There will be perpetual demand for computing infrastructure...The largest companies in the world are those that supply universal and perpetual demand for commodities," Schwartz said.
Also at Tuesday's Sun show in Shanghai, Sun launched the second version of its Java Desktop System, incorporating the Linux operating system and higher-level software for personal computers, as expected.
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