BRIC Schwartzhouse
I’m at Sun today for a Jonathan Schwartz keynote and panels on the emerging opportunity of the BRIC — Brazil, Russia, India, China — markets. Schwartz seems to have hit a stride of sorts where his rhetoric of the last few years has been caught up to by the results in the marketplace. Certainly vigorous layoffs and belt-tightening have had their effect, but also aggressive R&D as in research and delivery of the new chipset and a big downpayment on virtualization have resulted in a good quarter.
Today Jonathan’s thesis is that technology eliminates barriers. The delveloping markets represent the largest growing but smaller sized segment of Sun’s opportunity. That’s trillions in the US versus billions in the emerging nations. Schwartz sees the US as in danger of limiting the spread of our technologies. Talent, he says, is flowing away from Silicon Valley as a result of restrictions. At the same time, the panel talks of “the next Google” as coming from a Brazil or elsewhere. And as always, Schwartz is on the defensive about how to detect actual progress in revenue.
Market share revenue will be a derivative of market share adoption, he says. “But it happens over time.” He suggests comparing Red Hat and JBoss growth over time. Free software, open sourced Java, focus on mobile handsets. Afterwards, I asked Jonathan how he accounts for revenue for the virtualization layer; he suggested the wrapper — Thumper — encapsulating the value of Solaris and attendant technologies. I invited him to come on the next Bad Sinatra Live and he said, “send me a note.” Here it is.
