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The Sun Sets For Larry, Rises For Others?

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It’s been a while I know, but this blogging business just keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list. My thanks then to “Uncle” Tom Groenfeldt for alerting me on his blog to the recent departure from Sun Microsystems of Larry Scott, where he was vice president for financial services. Larry is going somewhere, though he’s not telling, at least not yet. But his departure jogged my memory to some offline conversations I’ve been having of late, not least during the Linux on Wall Street conference that I chaired the other week.

Those of us in the low latency world will know that Larry (who joined Sun when it acquired middleware vendor Seebeyond) played a key role in recent times in the company’s efforts to establish itself as a player in this space … such as working with the likes of Stac to publish some impressive benchmarks for Solaris, running on AMD x86 hardware it should be noted.

Now, notwithstanding the move of major Sun customers like the CME from Sun to Linux, industry anecdotes suggest that Solaris – now a free and open platform just like Linux – is making something of a comeback on the street, with firms revisiting whether to ditch what is viewed as a rock solid operating system, which now benefits from real-time Java and built in virtualization.

At low-latency.com, we relish all this competition in the marketplace. But even more, we love to get your feedback. So don’t be shy … what say you on whether the Sun is setting or rising. In fact, I wonder what Larry would say …

Until next time … here’s some great music. [tags]sun,sun microsystems,linux,solaris,larry scott,amd,java,virtualization[/tags]

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