The Disruption Diaries

I’ve been “punching up” for decades, having started at Sun Microsystems in the 1980’s. Sun was a scrappy Unix workstation and server startup competing with heavyweights like Apollo, IBM with their IBM RT workstation, and Digital Equipment Corporation with their microVAX and DECstation. Even then, we would regularly beat those Goliaths with better solutions at better prices, and a more nimble approach. What set us apart was a belief in peer-to-peer computing with desktops and servers using the exact same chips and operating system. Sun didn’t have to protect a proprietary product line like IBM and DEC did, with their mainframes and minicomputers. We were all-in on UNIX, Open Systems, and RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing). We invented many technologies in use today, including Java and the Network File System. While we experimented with Intel workstations (Sun-386i), we had invested heavily in our own CPU (SPARC) and operating system (Solaris, our branch of UNIX). “All the wood behind one arrowhead” was the saying, and a team of pranksters even erected a huge arrow the size of a telephone pole sticking out of CEO Scott McNealy’s 5th floor office window in Palo Alto.

In addition to Sun Workstations dubbed SPARCstations, we sold data center servers larger than a refrigerator. I know, as I was the Product Marketing Manager for the SPARCserver 630MP, 670MP, and 690MP… that last one was the fridge-sized server with a whopping four processors! I was proud that it became the world’s most popular multiprocessing server during my tenure, circa 1993. We had some storage offerings but we often partnered with specialists like Legato, Hitachi and a little startup called Network Appliance.

The strategy worked. Apollo was acquired by HP in 1989 and stopped making workstations in 1997. DECstations were discontinued in 1994 and in 1998 DEC was acquired by Compaq which would later be acquired by HP. IBM didn’t make Unix boxes after 1996 and stopped making PCs altogether in 2004. By 2000, Sun had become the king of Unix workstations and servers. Those were the days. Our tagline became “We put the dot in dot com”... and then the dot com bust came.

Eventually, a more nimble offering, Linux on commodity x86 hardware, did the same thing to us. It’s a well-known story. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. As you may know, Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2009 and it powers their cloud servers. Sun servers have even had cameos in several Marvel films!

The very building I worked in at Sun became Facebook’s headquarters. Instead of removing the old Sun signage, Mark Zuckerberg reversed it and put the Facebook (now Meta) logo on the other side. This serves as a constant reminder to employees that the only constant is change.

Now I am at NetApp, thanks to their acquisition of CloudCheckr. I’m pleased to see how NetApp has adapted and grown since it was formed as a storage hardware vendor dubbed Network Appliance. NetApp is now a major player in the Public Cloud industry. I joined CloudCheckr in 2017 because I was in sync with their laser-focus on Public Cloud and I’m excited to see NetApp investing heavily in CloudOps and disrupting the status quo!