Sun's Jonathan Schwartz: CIOs will hunt me down to pay me money

Matt Asay has an interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on news.com. Schwartz explains how having millions of downloads of Sun's Solaris and Java translates into bounty for the company and its shareholders.

Asay: But how do you translate interest and volume into customers? Downloads are nice, but how do you get a return?

Schwartz: The question to ask is "What portion of the world knows my brand?"

With the Java platform I'd guess we reach 20-30% of the Internet every day (Powering the games kids play online, the intranet application at a bank, etc.). Each of these constituents may think about Java in different ways, but in each case Java "sells" my brand. If you believe that brand is central to the next wave of Internet monetization - and I believe it is absolutely central - then the more people that know my brand, the more benefit inures to me.

We distributed nine million licenses of Solaris in the last two years. I guarantee we wouldn't have been able to make nine million sales calls. 70% of these licenses are on Dell, HP, and IBM. This gives us a great platform to build a partnership with these hardware companies, and it also gives us a great pool of users, some percentage of which will want to pay us.

Why? How do we monetize these? When that technology is run in a Fortune 100 company in a mission-critical app, the CIO will hunt me down to pay me money. The cost of downtime for them is huge compared to the cost.

The proof of Schwartz's thesis that free and open software is a path to good fortune is embedded in Sun's financials. Last quarter, Sun had earnings of $329 million (9 cents per share) on revenue of $3.83 billion, and net income of $473 million (13 cents per share) on revenue of $13.87 billion, a 6 percent increase from a year ago. Lower component costs contributed the recent Q4 fiscal year earnings, and Sun plans more job cuts later this year to help meet its goals for Wall Street if enough CIOs with deep pockets don't hunt Schwartz down.

Larry Dignan reports on what the future holds for Sun's financial picture.