While many in the industry have written off Sun at one time or another as a has-been of the dot com era, it's interesting to see that some of their bets in the last few years are starting to pay off. Although I'm not quite ready to say that Sun is winning back customers because of its open source strategy around Java, Solaris etc, I think it is fair to say Sun is far more open a company under Jonathan Schwartz t While many in the industry have written off Sun at one time or another as a has-been of the dot com era, it’s interesting to see that some of their bets in the last few years are starting to pay off. Although I’m not quite ready to say that Sun is winning back customers because of its open source strategy around Java, Solaris etc, I think it is fair to say Sun is far more open a company under Jonathan Schwartz than they were in the past. And by open, I mean they are listening to their customers, being more transparent about their goals, and working with other leading companies in the industry to deliver better combined solutions. A blogging CEO? Sun working with Intel? Open source version of Solaris? Who’da thunk it? There are two good articles in the press recently worth reading. The first is an article titled “Billionaire Thinks in Trillions” in the New York Times and describes Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim‘s efforts to achieve even higher performance supercomputers with a scale-out architecture based on 13,000 AMD processors. Bechtolsheim returned to Sun a couple of years ago after Sun acquired his company Opteron-based server company Kealia.The second article, the unfortunately titled “Dawn of the Dead” is in FastCompany magazine and descibes Sun’s “Blackbox” initiative to deliver an entire data center with 250 rack mounted servers in a shipping container requiring less power and cooling than competitors. While the idea is not necessarily unique to Sun, it’s still impressive. Both of these articles highlight that Sun is once again doing the kind of innovation that made them such a hot company in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Combined with an open source stack running Solaris or Linux, Sun has put together a very attractive platform for some of the biggest and most compute-intensive companies in the world.What do you think of Sun’s moves? Can they recapture the old Sun spirit? Let me know what you think. Or better yet, tell Jonathan. He genuinely wants to hear from the open source community. Open Source