SDA: Please tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Sun Microsystems?
Unnikrishnan: I have been with Sun for seven years under various roles. I was into marketing for sometime, worked in the Sun’s call center business, ran a little bit of software business for some time, last year I moved into the role of running the alliances sale organisation along with the whole Developer Outreach Programme and this year I run a couple of groups that is the traditional marketing, the alliance sales and the Teleweb sales team.
Couple of things here. First is the traditional marketing in terms of the focus we bring in the Sun brand, how do we make sure that Sun technologies are known by every stakeholder or every prospective stakeholder for Sun, how do we run strategic initiatives to increase sales for Sun, how do we make sure that we are constantly growing double than the industry standard, how are we constantly out performing the competition, that’s for traditional marketing.
I also look after the Alliances that work with the large independent Software Vendors (ISVs) as well as the Indian ISVs as well as the budding ISVs. How do we make sure there is lot more interaction between the Sun and SAPs, Sun and Oracles of the world? How do we increase our platform shell on them in terms of the sales when you go to the market?
Similar approach on the Indian ISVs, getting additional input over here is to make sure that Indian ISVs have the technologies ported on Sun. We make sure that if there is a new application coming in, we sync up with them, make sure that they have products support from Sun, we get the best benchmarks going, the best performance duly happening. The third part is identifying which could be the next potential ISV of the country. This could be a small 10 to 40 person organisation who would have just 1 product today, but do they have the potential, could it be forming overall solution of what Sun is looking at today, it could be a small thing like a value-added services, could it be overall a multi-billion dollar telecom bid. But if that key component also forms something by which I can go to the customer and provide end-to-end solution story, that’s a partner I would like to go with.
So we identify, sniff these kind of partners, we work with them in terms of first getting them, and then handing over the technology, get their technology ported on to Sun. It could be Solaris or Java. Once that is done, we do the benchmarking to make sure that the applications run best on Sun.
Third part will be to go to the market, get the sales engagement model.
Second last piece of what my sales team does is if one takes the typical sales scenario of a Pyramid- we have the top accounts of the Sun sales people, the mid way that will be handled by Sun and partners and then you have the bottom bar of the pyramid which may be the Small and Medium Businesses, or a guy in Tiruvanathapuram, or in Jammu who actually is a Sun user or a partner with whom we usually get in touch. So we have a pretty strong call centre team that focuses, calls out based on these partners and customers and we generate business through them. That is what we call the Teleweb initiative.
The last part is the Developer Outreach Programme. It is a given that every man, woman, child knows Java. We make sure that there is a lot more of net beans adoption; lot more of Solaris adoption, Sun-Java Studio adoption. So, it’s called the Developer Outreach Programme. How do we make sure we go out, we evantualise the broader technologies to that person on the field by-it could be through events, it could be through web in hours it could be by 1to1 touch programmes, it could be through phones. The idea is how do we make sure this is a technically qualified person, he has an incline towards Sun, the moment he has an incline towards Sun, how do we work with him and handle him in terms of technological options. So he is highly trained as far as Sun goes, he would love Sun in terms of newer technologies coming in. So when he as a developer builds his application sitting in a large company or sitting in his home in night doing his hobby, we would want Sun to be in front of him. That is what Sun all about.
SDA: Web 2.0 has forever altered the relationship between a company and its customers, with companies understanding that you have to give your customer what they want. As the Marketing Director for Sun in India, can you tell us how Sun is going about understanding and forging a new relationship with the customer?
Unnikrishnan: If we look at the Web 2.0, it could be split into 2 segments. First are the companies that are beginning to build their applications towards Web 2.0 and then there is the second segment of companies that started doing business on Web 2.0. Both the segments are opportunity the way Sun looks at it. But we handle both of them separately. If I take the start up part of it, we actually have a programme running where we help the start ups in technology adoption, whether it is go to the market or getting into where they have business initiatives. This could be through giving them discount in hardware, handholding them, technology consulting, training them, linking up with them with the VCs. So, the moment me as a kid or me as a young 30 year old guy who suddenly has great crave that I want to launch a technology, a product, an application or a business for a Web 2.0 initiative, I would know whom I would talk to. I will go talk to the VCs to talk about the money; I would get my friends and couple of key guys from the industry together to form this company but whom would I go to from a technology-consulting centre and Sun moves in that. So that is one area where we talked about Web 2.0.
The other initiative is if you really look at Web 2.0, there is something what we call as the Red Shift Organisation. Here is a company that is growing faster than the GDP, who is growing faster than the traditional brick and mortar organisation and who is growing faster than the norms. So their challenges are totally different, their challenge is one that is security. How do I make sure that when I am growing so fast, I don’t have some loose technology or product, which would enable a hacker to get in and hack into my system. Secondly if I am an outward facing and have 10000 customers today, I am a great company and I am doing so well that tomorrow if I have 10,00,000 customers, then is my technology and infrastructure geared up to ramp up to this? So that is the second challenge he would have.
The third challenge is it’s finally a bi-polar world. It is not just Sun, or an IBM, or a .NET or a Java today. You have multi technologies. How do I make sure that I have the infrastructure that can integrate and multi-operate with multiple technologies. That is a big challenge again which an organisation would have. So the way we address them is again through our infrastructure and technology. So we have technologies to help them in their scalability, which help them in their security areas, which help them in their introptivity areas and hence we go to these guys with a solution and say, “This is a new growing from a ‘X man organisation’, ‘X revenue organisation’ to our X multiples tomorrow. We have the technology to help you actually grow. We call up the boundary compatibility. For e.g. he could be running an application on a Sun server today & tomorrow when he grows and takes a different Sun server with a higher configuration or a higher, more superior server, the application which is running on this server today can run on other server also. He doesn’t need to recompile the codes all over again. So, that is a huge advantage. Recompiling the whole code means you are shutting down the system, telling all your customers,” Please wait! I am rebooting my system. Once that is there, you can come back to me.” This gives the same binary code and takes the whole way up from an entry level sparks largest machine to a high instruction reception.
SDA: Greening is among the most critical factors impacting the current growth of data centres in tandem with power and cooling and presenting significant challenges as user transaction demand is accelerating in Asia. How are you getting CIOs and CFOs to work together to direct their efforts to successfully squeezing "green" into--and out of--the data center?
Unnikrishnan: If I were to take a step back about five years this would have been a pretty uninteresting and a new concept. CIOs and the CTOs would have said, “Yes! It is important but I don’t think it is a challenge today.” Fast-forward 3-5 years, today almost every single CIO sees that as a challenge. Space, cooling and power is a challenge. Performance obviously matters here. So organisations have actually come back to us and said, “What can we do as an innovative company, as a technology company to make things happen.” We have helped them.
One is the interaction we have with the CIOs and the CTOs in terms of their requirements, working backward with our department, R&D labs and bringing out products into the market today that cater to their needs. The other thing is all about the saving component. We share examples with customers. For e.g. the SunRay. It is a thin client. When about 38000 Sun employees started using SunRay, our internal costs were reduced. So, Sun’s logic is 3:2 or 3:1 scenario. So for every 3 employees you have 2 Sunrays. Take the example of a sales guy who logs into the Sunray. Then the next sales guy would come and sit on the same place and work the same way. We call this flexi work office. So 2 things are saved. One is we did a couple of million dollar saving on real estate We save on the electricity because this thing again consumes lot lesser wattage than with traditional PCs. So one of the favorite things that Scott McNealy (Sun chairman) keeps saying about is global warming. There are five billion people on earth and if all of the switch their computer on at the same time, it wouldn’t be global warming, it would be universal warming.
SDA: Sun is now walking the green walk, and not just talking the green talk. Sun has used virtualization - enabling one server to do the work of multiple machines - to slash the number of computers in the data center and the heat they generate. What are the hurdles, or rather the prohibitive factors, that Indian companies are facing in adopting green data center solutions?
Unnikrishnan: I think one is the awareness and competencies. Indian companies need to know that it is not just blindly buying boxes. Today most CIOs and CTOs form part of the business committee, gone are the days when they were cost centres, just running something which was required for the organisation. Today a CIO of a bank would be sitting with the CEO to decide what is next solution I need to make to the customer, for my consumer and how can I make the technology help you do that. He could also be sitting with CEO and saying we are at par with competition, what can I do with technology to make us lead for couple of yards ahead. So I think we have reached a stage where CIOs and CTOs are aware. I think it’s more in terms of qualified trained manpower and consumers. How do you make sure that your business will grow? If you think your technology and network will be clean and snazzy as it is today what will it be 20 years from now, then you are grossly mistaken. So you need to be enhancing your technology o accommodate future developments. Awareness about future technology is important. Today’s CIOs are aware, skilled, qualified trained people and I think the guys who differentiate men from boys are the guys who are visionary, future thinking and educated. A decade ago when you talked to a CIO about a technology, the first he would say, ”Ok. Who else is doing it? Today that’s no more a question mark. They said, ”Listen, this is the need of today. This is what my consumers in the country want and if this technology is going to address that problem, why not?”
SDA: Sun faces intense competition from IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, all of which are increasingly marketing the energy-efficiency of their servers. How does Sun differentiate its solutions from the others?
Unnikrishnan: There are two that I want to make here. I don’t think this is factually correct that all these vendors are pushing their energy efficient servers. I have statistics to back me. But let me take a step back. If one were to look at the risks of the Unix market, we fight products from HP and IBM. If I were to look at storage we fight products from EMC, if you were to look at software, there is again a whole set of companies we compete with. But this in Unix today, we have been the dominant market leader for more than five years. Take the latest IDC numbers with Unit shares; we have 57 per cent market share. The rest 43 per cent is with the competition, which includes IBM and HP.
The challenge for me in that segment is how do I grow the market. It is close to about 60 per cent grabbing 5 –10 per cent from an IBM or Sun is really not I am gunning after, for me to identify and tap the next market and next opportunity for me to grow that market share. The second point is about energy efficiency. Compare the Niagara chip with a nearest competitor and it will be easily twice or thrice more efficient depending on the configuration and set up at a temperature of 95 watts which is less than a light bulb. I think the Niagara today is definitely one of the world leaders in the energy, eco-computing infrastructure scenario. Also what we do is we call the eco computing. We are pioneers in the market today in terms of the telling the customers a couple of things. One is the whole thing about space.
We’ve reached a stage in life where building a data centre is couple of few thousands of square kilometers away. That’s space issue. Imagine you have a data centre in Nariman Point (Mumbai) or you have a data center in MG Road (Bangalore) and when your business grows you have to expand your data centre which means you have to go to search a building to set a data centre and unless you are a multi million dollar cash rich organisation that is kind of pretty tough to do. So, we have brought in machines that are by the way the Niagaras. So if I were to make a comparison in terms of performance of this machine vis-à-vis an equally comparable machine. It used to be called the E10s and it used to be couple of square feet in size. Today it’s just thin, it’s like a slightly elongated version of a pizza box doing the same performance what that machine used to do. So suddenly we are cutting down on space. Second challenge any CIO would have, it’s more at the CFO level is running cost of a data centre. You have a huge gen-set running behind your data centre pumping cooling air into a data center. Think about the cost, which has been going there. So, when a Niagara runs at 95 watts you can imagine the kind of power saving that comes in. The third part is all about performance. Reduce on size you slash down on wattage and you ramp up on performance. So again when you take a Niagara or Galaxy and compare that to the nearest competitor, we are easily in the range of about 1/3rd -1/4th in terms of size or wattage but we are almost double or triple depending on the environment on performance. So this is where we call eco computing because here is a product which helps you as far as the eco computing part goes but really doesn’t sacrifice as far as your technology grows.
SDA: There has been talk in the community that the Start Up Essentials program is impressive enough for start ups doing business with Sun as emerging customers, but not enough for start ups that start up with products and services that do not revolve around the products and services that Sun offers. Your comments.
Unnikrishnan: Any organisation needs a network-computing infrastructure. So whatever they do, they need a network-computing infrastructure. There are different ways of looking what a network-computing infrastructure would mean. The thought two decades ago was ”I have a PC, I have six PCs connected on a network. That is my IT. That is not the case anymore today as people realise the importance of having technologies, which will help them grow and scale up. We start off small helping small companies. We tell these guys, “Listen you are a 10 man company or a 50 man company today. If you want this system, yes we can provide it to you. When you start growing up we can hold your hands roll along with you because the basic computing infrastructure will be there. That is something, which will come to need when required even tomorrow when you are a multi-million dollar organisation.
SDA: Java is only one part of Sun, albeit a very successful one. So, what does the stock ticker JAVA has to do with Sun's other software brands, like OpenOffice/StarOffice, Solaris, NetBeans or SPARC? From a branding perspective, are you not saying, "I want my investors to forget other SUN products, and just focus on the Java brand?
Unnikrishnan: We were a workstation company when we went public. What is Java? A individual would be touching Java at least 3-5 times a day knowingly or unknowingly. Every time you login with your PC there would be a Java update coming up. Every time you do some kind of banking transaction either on your phone or an ATM or at the bank there will be Java playing somewhere, every time you are making a phone call there will be some connection of Java coming in, every time you do some internet booking, movie booking or any purchase which you may want to do through the Internet, the Java comes into play. May be if not 20 per cent at least 1 out of 10 things that you would have done in a day, there would be a Java connection to it. So Java is lot larger beyond just a workstation. And that is what Sun is. Knowingly or unknowingly Sun is touching a consumer every day. That is the whole philosophy and logic behind the ticker change.
Second part is talking about the Open Office. I think today Open Office and Star Office are definitely the second largest office automation tools to rule the market today and the growth is phenomenal. The downloads are in millions and think about it. Would you want to spend Rs. 15-20,000 on an office or a machine tool, which you will need to upgrade 2 years from today? Which you will have to pay an upgrade cost 2 years from today? And that is not the only point. You are running a PC you will have to upgrade the PC. How many people can afford doing it? And again what is the future? In the end you will use an office automation tool to make a spreadsheet, to write a letter, to put a memo, to send an email. Having a clipart coming in the middle and those glitz and glam coming in the middle is that something which you really need. So that is what Open Office is all about and that is what people have seen value today. That is a reason, it’s a successful model which is one of the reasons now Google has signed up with us to have downloads of Star Office with all consumers. So that is what our Star Office and Open Office story is.
In terms of NetBeans, Solaris, I think the Java war is something, which is being won. It is how Solaris is now moving so aggressively into the market. Last year we had 7.9 million Solaris downloads. 70 per cent of that was onsite. IBM, HP, Dell, Lenovo, were all downloading Solaris and running their application. So, there is a huge market that is now coming from outside. So what we said,” Hey this is a great opportunity why don’t we get more aggressive. So customers used to download, they didn’t know where to go for training because Sun training used to be on Java back in the days but now it’s Sun or technologies. So we had a huge ecosystem of partners ready to train people and obviously that helped in creating the momentum of Solaris. Also we open sourced Solaris, which then built a huge open source movement. Today Sun by defacto is the largest open source donator in the community. People think open source is Linux. Fair enough open source is Open Solaris also and today the kind of momentum Open Solaris is bringing in the market is phenomenal.
SDA: India houses the largest number of Java developers worldwide. What is Sun doing in India to facilitate the awareness that 'Sun is The Java Company', and how is it looking at bringing more developers into its fold in order to work on furthering the development of your technology--Solaris, Java and the like?
Unnikrishnan: We are not facilitating Sun in India as a Java company; we are facilitating Sun as a technology company. Just a technical correction, India is the world’s largest Sun technology developer base. So we’ve got about 530,000 developers today in the country who are building developing applications based on Sun technology. We have got very strong developmental momentum programme. We call it the Developer Outreach Programme here. We are constantly in touch with them through various initiatives, giving them software training, giving them hardware at highly discounted prices and holding them, getting them into communities, linking up with our customers and engineering centre. In fact Sun Tech day is one of the best examples of the development mind in the country. Last Sun Tech day in India had 10947 paid attendees. I think we are a huge committed and loyal developer community and it is our endeavour to constantly to back to them and give them value in terms of technologies, CDs, training programmes, link them up with global communities, put them on various associations, get them talking to us constantly.
SDA: A recent report from Nucleus research suggests that while SOA is pretty far along the hype curve, it is now suffering some backlash as only a minority of companies is getting a return on investment on SOA. What do you see as important to ensure that the adoption curve matches up to the hype curve?
Unnikrishnan: SOA is a great door opener and every one is interested. We are now looking at something that is getting to be the need of the day. There are technologies that are available. There are leaders of that segment; it is I as a customer who has to decide when do I take the lurch. It is something that is there, it is something that will help me, is there topmost in the priority. Maybe not number one; but definitely top 4 or 5. This is what I want.
SDA: While Sun has improved its standing among applications servers for SOA and BPM, its products are not yet at the level of the products from IBM and BEA, which have gone through "extreme battle testing." notes Forrester. How do you react to this observation?
Unnikrishnan: Am not aware of this report and it won’t be fair on my part to comment. The only input I would like to give on this is that today we have a product that is tried and tested and leaders of the market whichever segment of business you go to. Lets take 2 of my newest products-whether its Galaxy, whether it’s x64 boxes or whether it’s the Niagara chips, each one of them has become a multi-million dollar business for us. Not even 2 years, it has gone into triple digits in terms of revenues. I would like to leave at it saying that its numbers which talk, I don’t know this report so, its not right on my part to comment on it.
SDA: Scott McNealy has often pointed to education as an arena where network computing can make a major difference. What were the biggest challenges in building Curriki? Also, how do you see the educationists in India warming up to this idea?
Unnikrishnan: The biggest challenge most education centres would have in terms of the infrastructure build-up and trained manpower is the improved focus on access. If you move to the tier 2 and the tier 3 cities it is really not available or it’s definitely lower compared to that. So what Sun has done from our side is we made all our software free and this is something that we did it even before we made it free to the organisations. So any educational institution can actually take down our software for free. So that was one big step we took.
The second thing that we did is we have clear-cut educational grants because in the end Sun stands for Stanford University Network. This university has funded us so obviously we have a soft corner for any kind of institution. We have our solution, our infrastructure, and our products all at a highly discounted rate for educational institution. So we constantly run programmes for institutions and academia in terms of making sure that they have access to the latest and best technologies. Not only that once you have access to the best technology we help them network to the various educational grids across the globe so that you can pass information, access information and you could be world class in terms of the kind of the curriculum and the information we would be providing.
Fourth initiative was training them. We conducted various courses, through or directly from Sun, through partners and various educational institutions to make sure that there are constantly inputs given to these various curriculums on teachers and academia to make sure that they impart world-class training. Last but no the least, we run a programme called the Campus Ambassadors. So these are university students who are like Sun ambassadors and they work in the university with various students and the academia to talk about Sun technologies.
SDA: Coming to India-specific plans, Sun has decided to go to 15 new cities in India targeting a potential spend of million. How has that shaped up, and what are your plans for the next fiscal?
Unnikrishnan: We can’t talk on those numbers. I think we would have done a big business ever since we have gone into India. I think we would have done something around USD 100-150 million. We want to grow the market. I think we are still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of market opportunity. Every guy is running behind the telecom and the BFSI segment. The idea is to build an ecosystem. Ecosystem means the Independent Software Vendors, the partners, resellers, niche application providers, so how do we build applications for that, how do we move more aggressively into the market. We’ve put footprint in 15 cities in the last 1-year. How do we make sure that every single man, woman, child who hasn’t been on the networking computing infrastructure will have access to Sun. He already knows Sun. So I think today we have a decent brand record as far as Sun the brand is concerned. So today if somebody in Guwahati wants to buy Sun so I should be able to contact him within 24 hours, somebody in Jammu wants to buy Sun within 24 hours. So we’ve built that infrastructure today. So, the idea is how do we constantly go back and build their small kids because in the end the SMEs also are big segments of the market opportunity.
The third area what we look at is of newer partners. They are all set of new segment, which is equally required for one telecom segment. So think about it. You may also be going to a BSNL, Bharti, Hutch or whoever and you would have sold them one set of application. Now you could go back to the same segment and say, “Listen, we can work as partners and enhance your offering to the market. No one would have thought that mobile ring tones would be such a big market today, who would have thought that a 30 year old would be sitting and playing mobile games. It’s the market. So, I am trying to claim here is that markets have remained untapped, how do we go back and handle these kinds of markets. So those are plans for India.
So as I said the plan is how do we go grow, explore the market, how do we figure out newer applications, newer products here, newer solutions and grow the market even further and how do we ensure that its just not about ten per cent of the size, its even bigger market or there is a market that could be growing and how do we identify that. So it used to be like the IT market in 2000. Everybody used to run behind the IT market. So we were fortunate, we saw the telecom boom happening, we saw the BFSI boom happening and we started working with them. And today we are sure we are dominating in the telecom segment, we are dominating the BFSI segment. We have very good presence in education, we have got very good presence in retail.
SDA: Is there something else that you would like to add for the benefit of our readership?
Unnikrishnan: Solaris is the way to go. Download it, try it out, call up our call centre, we will ship a DVD across to you. Try it, use it and you will see the difference.
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