The hidden gems inside Sun Microsystems

BANGALORE, INDIA: This used to be the subject of many debates in newsrooms, blogs, annual specials, cocktail parties, techie barbecues and you name it. IBM taking over Sun wasn’t ruled out but it was considered too premature to think about.

What comes as a surprise is the timing – though M&A strategists may point out that this is the most natural time for a takeover. And so what about the timing? There’s so much going on in the tech landscape that things are in a state of flux.

There’s the platform war, the race for cloud computing hot seat, the server war now complicated with Cisco’s entry and the advent of open source, which is sticking out as a sour spot for companies wanting to make it pay. Sun itself faced it first-hand with first Java and later MySQL (after it acquired the opensource DB player and decided to keep it open).

If you are looking for some backgrounder on this story, read: IBM in talks to buy Sun Microsystems

Let us take a long-term view. Let’s stand back and see what Sun stood for and how it fits into IBM. I do not know the India CEO let alone Scott McNeally or Jonathan Schwartz to tell you what’s going on in their minds right now. However, what I can do is sit with you and pull out those signboards along the street, which can lead us to some conclusion. If you are game, read on, or else read Kundra back in White House with a 'black' mark.

When I heard that 'The Wall Street Journal' has put out a scoop on this deal, the first thing that ran across my mind were these: Hey, isn’t IBM doing more for Java than Sun and will they now find a profitable business model for MySQL?

IBM jumped on to Java bandwagon and became its biggest supporter. It gave the best development environment in Eclipse. It shifted bulk of its product roadmap to adopt Java. Sun never brought Java in front of a standards committee, yet it found a great marketing machine in IBM.

In fact, IBM used Java as its cutting-edge tool for enterprise applications, something that Sun itself didn’t do as effectively. Sun alone couldn’t have pushed Java to these levels. And if Java is staying the course against Microsoft’s “.Net” then bulk of the support has come from IBM.

Sun’s CEO Schwartz was under severe pressure to show tangible benefits from the acquisition of MySQL. By deciding to keep the present MySQL in the open source but build a new database platform for commercial use, Sun seems to have hit a strategy roadblock.

IBM may not help MySQL. It may turn out that MySQL is a major pinprick in its own DB2 strategy. Yet IBM being conservative, and having the stomach to encourage competing research going on, might help keep MySQL in its course.

What I am most worried about is some of the key researches that are going on inside Sun. There are many of them but let me talk about two most visible and interesting ones.

One is a language development effort by Guy Steele, the man who wrote Scheme (a dialect of Lisp). Steele is leading an effort to develop Fortress, a functional programming for mathematically oriented. The vision of this language is to reinvent Java in a way mathematicians can use. This has created a lot of flutter in the languages domain.

The second is a browser-based dynamic programming language called Lively Kernel being developed by the legendary Dan Ingalls, who wrote Smalltalk.

Lively Kernel is written completely in Javascript and uses the browser to deliver a rich multimedia web experience. You can create dynamic and highly interactive web content. All these are developed using your good old browser. This is dubbed as Smalltalk in a browser. It can be a coincidence that Ingalls will now be on IBM rolls where Smalltalk thrived before Java replaced it as the language of choice.

Then there is StarOffice. Though the desktop war is over and the action has moved over to cloud computing, technologies mastered and lessons learnt in the desktop arena can bring the winning edge when companies are migrating to the web paradigm. Google’s last two outages have shown that an offline strategy is a must as a backup. Microsoft wisely hasn’t shifted focus from its desktop products as it is prepping for Azure and other wares for cloud computing. (Sun today announced its cloud computing strategy which will definitely help IBM).

Coming back to StarOffice, Sun finally found a jolly good product that could stand up to MS Office suite. OpenOffice borrows a lot from StarOffice and something, which IBM has failed to replicate in its Symphony.

These are but small fries and people might be wondering why would M&A deals be based on such flimsy stuff. The point is there are a number of Sun Fellow engineers who are pursuing such niche products and technologies, which can become the next big thing. When James Gosling and company were working on Oak, none imagined it would rule the world as Java.

In a way IBM will be gaining all these wonderful things that are happening inside Sun. IBM is a company which is known for nurturing research talent. Yet philosophies may change and cultures may differ and this is something not our concern.

There are, of course, large uptakes Sun will bring. Some conflicts too. Sun Solaris will conflict with IBM AIX. But IBM will gain all the server hardware portfolio of Sun. It will also gain the storage portfolio and the cloud computing portfolio, where IBM is a weakling.

We are not looking at the larger and immediate benefits. We are only worried here about some of the hidden gems in Sun labs. Small projects tend to be axed first since it is difficult to find its value to the company in the medium term. I am not sure how much of long-term views M&A deals will eventually bring to the table.

As we go to press, IBM is only talking with Sun. If I were doing this deal, I would have bought Sun for its hidden gems and its contrarian outset to business. Only Sun could live with Java without making much money out of it for so long. Only Sun could go ahead and pay one billion dollar for MySQL, which wouldn’t bring in any revenues. Only Sun could have the temerity to ask people to call it the “cloud company.” Remember its bold “dot” in the “dotcom” slogan. (Well IBM had the “e” in the “e-business” slogan).

Here’s raising a toast to all the little hidden gems inside Sun and hoping they live on and make it big.