|
|
 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
| |
NOVEMBER 9, 2004
Trading CPU Time Like Corn? Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz is convinced users will purchase time on his company's machines by buying it on eBay Give Jonathan Schwartz credit for chutzpah. The president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems (SUNW ) wants to do nothing less than commoditize the high-end computing business. He says his secret weapon in the cost-cutting wars will be eBay (EBAY ), a company that knows a thing or two about moving commodities. Schwartz says Sun will offer by yearend a new computing service, called the N1 Grid Service, that will allow customers to buy all the processing power they need on an hourly basis. The price is just $1 for every hour a customer uses a computer processor, or CPU. Customers will be able to buy computing power with little more than a credit card and a Web browser. "You won't have to sign a long-term deal or anything. It's really the only service out there like this," boasts Ashif Dhanani, director of utility computing at the Santa Clara (Calif.) company. WACKY OR WORTHY? No doubt, renting computer services like a utility through eBay sounds a bit odd. But it's a typically unconventional move for Schwartz, a pony-tailed executive who took over the vacant president's job at Sun in April. This is an exec, after all, who promised his board of directors that he would get Sun, stuck at the time in a three-year revenue slide, growing within a year. True to his word, it has eked out sales growth two quarters in a row. So don't brush Schwartz -- or his wacky schemes -- off too fast. The new utility computing service could appeal to a wide variety of tech-savvy customers, from big investment banks that may want a little extra power to run risk-analysis simulations to biotech startups that can't afford their own supercomputer but need to do rapid-fire drug design. Though the service will initially run on Sun's own Web site, the ultimate plan is to include eBay as a marketplace to auction excess capacity at prices that could dip below the announced rate of $1 per CPU per hour. "We might put the whole thing on eBay for a down time such as Thanksgiving Weekend and say 'Come bid for it,'" says Dhanani. "CULTURAL" ISSUE. Is this a meaningless marketing ploy by the talkative Schwartz or a real shift in the computing landscape? Sun insists it's a serious business, though many analysts aren't sure. Sun has historically made its profits from sales of giant computer systems. Utility computing, which allows lots of cheap servers to operate like one big one, would seemingly undercut Sun's business. But Schwartz is unflinching. He says the technology is all there for this to be a reality, and Sun itself is now aggressively selling the kinds of low-cost servers analysts say is wrecking the Silicon Valley giant's business. Most important, Schwartz believes customers are ready. "The issue is not a technical one," he says. "The issue is a cultural one." Tech managers will have to be willing to give up some control of their data in order to get to the low-cost advantages of the utility service. If Sun delivers on this promise, it will take the fledgling utility computing concept into a low-cost realm where CPU cycles on someone else's computers are traded like corn or oil. It seems like a natural evolution for a maturing industry. Even if Sun's gambit doesn't work, analysts figure someone will eventually make a concept like this work.
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now! | | |
 Copyright 2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version