A conversation with 'Virtual Scott' McNealy

By John Webster

February 8, 2006 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - I'm having a conversation with "Virtual Scott" as I fly east from Sun Microsystems Inc.'s annual analyst conference last week, a two-day Sun fest for financial and industry analysts.
Virtual Scott is my mind's image of Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with a Sun logo. He's smiling, witty, disarming, and an unswerving champion of all things under his Sun (sorry, I couldn't resist).
I'm going over my notes from Scott's opening address. I find his four-point strategy for 2006:

Get the story out

Drive volume

Execute

Make money

"So," I say to Virtual Scott, "this is a strategy? Let's take No. 1: Get the story out. Looks like Marketing 101 to me. Next -- drive volume. I assume you do this by getting the story out, right? So, No. 2 is really the objective of No. 1 (i.e., more Marketing 101). Now for the next two points -- execute and make money. Duh! That's Business 101. Dude ... this is a strategy?"
Virtual Scott says, "What do you guys know? You guys never get it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
During the eight years I've been going to these Sun analyst events, I've seen the real Scott McNealy go from cocky to contrite as he makes his opening remarks. This time, he was somewhere in between -- a bit cautious but clearly buoyed by the current demand for Sun servers. He was back in the saddle again but without some of the swagger of the Internet One years.
This year, I traveled west to see how Sun's acquisition of StorageTek was going. I can honestly say to Virtual Scott that I was pleasantly surprised. The Sun storage folks, who now call themselves the Data Management Group, were happy.
I noticed another difference. In previous years Sun tried to build a storage outlet by buying body parts, then stitching them together. It was a sort of Dr. Frankenstein approach to selling storage; although I think back then it was called "best of breed," right Virtual Scott? Last year, Sun bought the whole body. Now, Sun has storage (a real storage company), servers, an operating system, files systems networking, and a still-vibrant development community, all under one roof.
I'm under a nondisclosure agreement, but I can say that we will see a very different kind of storage device from Sun that wraps sheet metal around Galaxy, Solaris, QFS and storage bricks. In fact, the strongest part of this new box is its server component. We'll see it later thisyear.
John Webster is senior analyst and founder of research firm Data Mobility Group LLC. He is also the author of numerous articles and white papers on a wide range of topics and is the co-author of the book Inescapable Data: Harnessing the Power of Convergence (IBM Press, 2005). John can be reached at jwebster@datamobilitygroup.com.

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