Sun Microsystems


Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer hardware, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. At its height, Sun's headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
Sun products included computer servers and workstations built on its own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture, as well as on x86-based AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors. Sun also developed its own storage systems and a suite of software products, including the Unix-based SunOS and later Solaris operating systems, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Technologies that Sun created include the Java programming language, the Java platform and Network File System.
In general, Sun was a proponent of open systems, particularly Unix. It was also a major contributor to open-source software, as evidenced by its $1 billion purchase, in 2008, of MySQL, an open-source relational database management system. Other notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. On April 20, 2009, it was announced that Oracle would acquire Sun for 7.4 billion, or 5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The deal was completed on January 27, 2010.

History

The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.
On February 24, 1982, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution, joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders. The company was the second, after rival Apollo Computer, to specialize in workstations. The name "Sun" is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. McNealy focused on operations; Fortune described him as "notoriously cheap". Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.
By 1983, Sun was known for producing 68k-based systems with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than DEC's VAX to run 4.2BSD. It licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft. Wall Street was an important early market, as were CAD/CAM, CAE, CASE, and other technical markets. By 1989, InfoWorld described Sun as "the unqualified leader in the workstation arena", and target of DEC and Hewlett-Packard 's own products.
Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, for Sun Workstations. The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA; Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the company's current strategy.
Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple, and later blue.

Dot-com bubble and aftermath

During the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money, with its stock rising as high as $250 per share. It also began spending much more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of genuine demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. In 2000, the bubble burst. Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into freefall as customers closed shop and auctioned high-end servers.
Several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the stock fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. It continued to fall, faster than many other technology companies. A year later, it had reached below $10, but it eventually bounced back to $20. In mid-2004, Sun closed their Newark, California, factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland. In 2006, the rest of the Newark campus was put on the market.

Post-crash focus

In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high instruction-level parallelism and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for multi-threading and multiprocessing, such as the UltraSPARC T1 processor. The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on April 17, 2007, as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise series.
In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid, a grid computing deployment on which it offered utility computing services priced at US$1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering built upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, which Sun marketed as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which were later launched as its first software as a service product.
In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on GAAP basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14, 2005. In January 2007, Sun reported a net GAAP profit of $126 million on revenue of $3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts would invest $700 million in the company.
Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, Prague, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Canberra and Trondheim.
In 2007–2008, Sun posted revenue of $13.8 billion and had $2 billion in cash. First-quarter 2008 losses were $1.68 billion; revenue fell 7% to $12.99 billion. Sun's stock lost 80% of its value November 2007 to November 2008, reducing the company's market value to $3 billion. With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15–18% of its work force. It expected to save $700 million to $800 million a year as a result of the moves, while also taking up to $600 million in charges.

Acquisition by Oracle

On September 3, 2009, the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. On November 9, 2009, the Commission issued a statement of objections relating to the acquisition. Finally, on January 21, 2010, the European Commission approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun. The Commission's investigation showed that another open database, PostgreSQL, was considered by many users of this type of software as a credible alternative to MySQL and could to some extent replace the competitive strength that the latter currently represents in the database market.
Sun was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2009 for $5.6 billion.
Sun's staff were asked to share anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. A website containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun was made available on September 2, 2009.
In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.
The transaction was completed in early 2010.
In January 2011, Oracle agreed to pay $46 million to settle charges that it submitted false claims to US federal government agencies and paid "kickbacks" to systems integrators.
In February 2011, Sun's former Menlo Park, California, campus of about was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for Facebook. The sprawling facility, built around an enclosed courtyard, was nicknamed "Sun Quentin" by Facebook's employees. Notably, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg did not change the sign in the front of the campus, he simply had it turned around and the company's logo put on the other side. The remains of the old Sun logo was left as a reminder of "what happens when you take your eye off the ball."
On September 1, 2011, Sun India legally became part of Oracle. It had been delayed due to legal issues in Indian court.

Sun acquisitions

  • 1987: Trancept Systems, a high-performance graphics hardware company
  • 1987: Sitka Corp, networking systems linking the Macintosh with IBM PCs
  • 1987: Centram Systems West, maker of networking software for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
  • 1988: Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the F3 font format
  • 1991: Interactive Systems Corporation's Intel/Unix OS division, from Eastman Kodak Company
  • 1992: Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became Wabi
  • 1994: Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division
  • 1996: Lighthouse Design, Ltd.
  • 1996: Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon Graphics
  • 1996: Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
  • 1996: Thinking Machines Corporation software division
  • February 1997: LongView Technologies, LLC
  • August 1997: Diba, technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry
  • September 1997: Chorus Systèmes SA, creators of ChorusOS
  • November 1997: Encore Computer Corporation's storage business
  • 1998: RedCape Software
  • 1998: i-Planet, a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—its name for the Sun-Netscape software alliance
  • June 1998: Dakota Scientific Software, Inc.—development tools for high-performance computing
  • July 1998: NetDynamics—developers of the NetDynamics Application Server
  • October 1998: Beduin, small software company that produced the "Impact" small-footprint Java-based Web browser for mobile devices.
  • 1999: Star Division, German software company and with it StarOffice, which was later released as open source under the name OpenOffice.org
  • 1999: MAXSTRAT Corporation, a company in Milpitas, California selling Fibre Channel storage servers.
  • October 1999: Forté Software, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of the Forte 4GL
  • 1999: TeamWare
  • 1999: NetBeans, produced a modular IDE written in Java, based on a student project at Charles University in Prague
  • March 2000: Innosoft International, Inc. a software company specializing in highly scalable MTAs and Directory Services.
  • July 2000: Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of computing jobs across multiple computers
  • September 2000: Cobalt Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer for $2 billion
  • December 2000: HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions
  • 2001: LSC, Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota company that developed Storage and Archive Management File System and Quick File System QFS file systems for backup and archive
  • March 2001: InfraSearch, a peer-to-peer search company based in Burlingame.
  • March 2002: Clustra Systems
  • June 2002: Afara Websystems, developed SPARC processor–based technology
  • September 2002: Pirus Networks, intelligent storage services
  • November 2002: Terraspring, infrastructure automation software
  • June 2003: Pixo, added to the Sun Content Delivery Server
  • August 2003: CenterRun, Inc.
  • December 2003: Waveset Technologies, identity management
  • January 2004 Nauticus Networks
  • February 2004: Kealia, founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, developed AMD-based 64-bit servers
  • January 2005: SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider
  • May 2005: Tarantella, Inc., for $25 million
  • June 2005: SeeBeyond, a Service-Oriented Architecture software company for $387m
  • June 2005: Procom Technology, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets
  • August 2005: StorageTek, data storage technology company for $4.1 billion
  • February 2006: Aduva, software for Solaris and Linux patch management
  • October 2006: Neogent
  • April 2007: SavaJe, the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones
  • September 2007: Cluster File Systems, Inc.
  • November 2007: Vaau, Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions
  • February 2008: MySQL AB, the company offering the open source database MySQL for $1 billion.
  • February 2008: Innotek GmbH, developer of the VirtualBox virtualization product
  • April 2008: Montalvo Systems, x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon
  • January 2009: Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing solutions