As the MD of Sun Microsystems India, Bhaskar Pramanik believes in working…

As the MD of Sun Microsystems India, Bhaskar Pramanik believes in working
with the channel. He feels that this alliance is not based on convenience.
Instead, it offers Sun and its partners an opportunity to work together on
building a service portfolio. He tells Channels India that this relationship is
based on risk-sharing and Sun is willing to go out and share this risk with its
partners.

Which product segments are showing good growth within Sun's business?

Our UltraSPARC IV has been very successful as customers who have used it
have seen their performance double because of it. Star Office too seems to be
doing well in India.

Bhaskar Pramanik

Globally, the number of people using Java Enterprise System (JES) has
increased phenomenally. The JES business in India grew by about 30% to 40% last
year, and we expect this growth to continue. We have also reduced cost and are
looking at reducing it further to invest in R&D.

Sun recently adopted AMD processors for its systems. Why do you need AMD,
in addition to Intel and SPARC processors?

We have made three strategic alliances in the last quarter, the first being
AMD. This tie-up allows us to come out with a series of low-cost servers
targeting the commercial market. This gives us a footprint into a market, which
we were not addressing earlier. It is designed to support Linux, Solaris
and Microsoft.

The good news is that we are not looking at building a commodity product, but
we are going to take a commodity processor and differentiate our products in the
market place, both in terms of price and performance.

Which are the other two strategic alliances?

One alliance was with Microsoft, while the other was with Fujitsu. They use
the SPARC processor, and the Solaris Operating System (OS) to build a huge
mainframe. We will collaborate with them to make their SPARC-processor better
using new technology. Instead of both companies reinventing, we collaborated
with them to reduce the cost of R&D.

What's next after Ultra-SPARC IV?

SPARC IV was well received in terms of performance. We do realize that the chip
design is against the laws of physics. As the chips get denser, it becomes
difficult to get more performance. This is because of latency between the memory
and the CPU. So with our new chip multi-threading technology, we are going to
leapfrog the performance of chips based on the same level of density which you
currently have or slightly higher.

What new developments are happening on the OS front?

Our Solaris 10 OS is already on beta. There is one function called the
D-Trace, which enables you to understand the performance of the old system on
the Sun server, therefore identifying where the bottlenecks are. Without
rewriting the code, it gives 25% to 30% better performance. It has taken us two
to five years ahead of competitors in terms of OS.

What has driven Sun's growth in India?

In India our business has doubled, primarily driven by the telecom and the
financial services industry. We expect these two sectors to continue to drive
growth in the near future as well. We have also been very successful in the
Small and Medium Business (SMB) space and have grown by 250% in this space.

What is your USP in the channel space?

What differentiates us from our peers is that they do everything themselves,
while we focus on working with our partners. This is our delivery model
globally. It is not based on convenience, but because there is an opportunity to
work together in building a service portfolio. Very few organizations have been
able to do services with partners. It's about risk sharing, which we are
willing to go out and share with our partners.

What is the status of Sun's R&D on Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) applications?

We are exploring it though it's not easy. We have set up a huge
demonstration center in Houston where people walk-in to see how RFID can be
applied to their business. RFID is not just for tracking.

What is the status of Project Mad Hatter?

There are two components to the desktop initiative called Project Mad
Hatter. One is the StarOffice, which sold 20,000 licenses last year. The other
initiative is the Java Desktop Systems - the Linux desktop which is not that
successful. This is because people are more comfortable with Microsoft and
challenges of cost and securities.

Most of our desktop success has been with the government and
education, where cost is a major factor. In the private sector security is a
priority. The good news is that Novell, Red Hat and HP are copying our strategy.
The sign of success is when others start to ape you.

NELSON JOHNY
in Mumbai

CHARTING SUN'S PATH