Sun Asks ISVs Why They Love Solaris

Published: January 24, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's a new year, and it always takes a while for the year to warm up. Aside from some big acquisitions, a few server announcements, and the tanking of the world's stock markets, the news in the IT sector has been thin. So this is a good time for vendors to get in touch with their customers and to reach out to their communities through the press and blogosphere to get a story out there that might not rise above the crackle and roar of a busy week.

So it is with the results of a study that Sun Microsystems recently did, polling the independent software vendors (ISVs) who create and support application software on Sun's Solaris variant of the Unix platform. Back in November, to get a sense of why ISVs create applications on Solaris and what impact Solaris has on their own businesses, Sun did a survey of a subset of its ISV community in the United States, Germany, China, Australia, and Italy.

In the past, the Solaris base peaked at over 12,000 applications (including a bunch of musty ones certified on older Solaris releases) and has had many thousands of software development organizations creating those applications. So you have to reckon for yourself if you think that 76 responses from ISVs, which is what Sun got in its survey, is a representative sampling. It all depends on how large or small the actual, active Solaris application base is. And the difference between peak application and ISV support and current support can be quite dramatic.

For instance, IBM used to boast about the AS/400--that was short for the Application System/400--having over 20,000 applications and 8,000 ISVs back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but today it says there are probably only 2,500 or so key ISVs still supporting OS/400 and i5/OS applications; the old applications still run on the new boxes and operating systems, of course, since that is one of the AS/400's brilliant software and hardware engineering tricks. But there is little doubt that the total application catalog has probably shrunk by a factor of three in the AS/400 market. Maybe more as RPG has gone out of favor, no matter how many new Linux and Java applications have made the jump over to the modern System i platform and its i5/OS operating system.

And in the decade since the beginning of the ascendancy of Linux and Windows, the maturation of the Unix market, the reduction of Unix to three key release (Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX from dozens of viable Unixes two decades ago) and other factors have undoubtedly shrunk the size of the actual, saleable Solaris application base, much as it has that of the AS/400. In an effort to be transparent, Sun has been very good about talking about the application ramp on Solaris 10, the most current iteration of Sun's Unix that has seen over 12 million cumulative downloads in the past three years since it was launched. But Sun's presentation, which it has given every quarter for a while now, on the Solaris application ramp counts commitments to port applications to Solaris 10--from either earlier Solaris releases or other Unix or Linux platforms--not actual applications ported. Moreover, I can't tell if Sun is double counting an application that runs on the Sparc implementation of Solaris 10 when it is also available on the X64 variant of Solaris 10. So you have to take even the following numbers with a grain of salt. (Ditto for Hewlett-Packard's counts of applications available on the Itanium processor. When a version of the Oracle database is ported to Linux, Windows, and HP-UX running on Itanium, for instance, that counts three times. So who knows how many unique Itanium-based applications are really out there.) Anyway, according to Sun's data, in September 2005, Sun had roughly 1,700 applications committed to the Solaris 10 platform, and it broke through 3,000 by June 2006; 4,000 by September 2006; 5,000 by March 2007, and 6,000 by August 2007.

In any event, back to the results of the Solaris ISV survey that Sun did. Why do they love Solaris? The same reasons they always did. Over 80 percent of the ISVs polled said that performance, availability, and security were the most important aspects behind their decision to support their code on Solaris 10. More than 70 percent said that networking, data management, interoperability, cross platform capabilities, and service and support were important. (How Sun lumped these all into single topics is a bit weird.) Of those surveyed, 87 percent said that Solaris 10 was a critical part of their own business, and 91 percent said they had "a positive experience" with Solaris 10. (Exactly what that means is unclear, but it is probably not as filthy as the joke I could have made about that statement by Sun but didn't.) Most interestingly, 83 percent of the ISVs said their applications mix Solaris with another platform, and 72 percent said that interoperability between Solaris and other platforms was an important aspect of their ongoing support of Solaris for their applications. (Hence, Microsoft and Sun buried the hatchet two years ago, ending the war of words and some lawsuits.)

What the survey did not ask, of course, is why ISVs really support Solaris with their applications. The answer is simple: because it is what they know how to support, and very likely know how to support well. And it is how they make their living. And for those ISVs who watched as Sun let other platform vendors eat its lunch from 2001 through 2004, eroding server market share and bringing Solaris to the brink of market irrelevance, the run from 2005 through 2007 must have given Solaris ISVs the sense that Sun was back in the game and they could rely on Solaris as a business once again as much as customers have always relied on Solaris as a rock-solid operating system.

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