Sun is distributing Solaris 10 binaries for X86 and Sparc iron for free on servers with four or fewer processors. In the middle of February, about two weeks after Sun launched Solaris 10, it had about 500,000 Solaris 10 downloads and had an initial run rate in those first two weeks of 1 million downloads a month.
By the end of March, Solaris 10 downloads had passed though 1 million in total, and the run rate as Sun exited the month was about 500,000 units per month. It is now a month later, and Sun has added another 300,000 downloads and is settling in a pattern that could see Solaris 10 downloads reach 2 million or 2.5 million by January 2006.
These numbers are apparently well ahead of Sun’s expectations. The Solaris 10 beta program, which launched in October 2003 and ran through the end of December 2004, accounted for 500,000 downloads in about 15 months, or about 34,000 per month. Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 shipments averaged about 73,000 a month. To say that Solaris 10 is doing a lot better is an understatement. The trick now is to monetize that growing installed base.
Sun said yesterday that it has already seen a spike upward in Solaris training, and that as the Solaris 10 base grows and customers put it into production, it expects to start seeing revenue for support services, which range from $120 to $360 per CPU per year and which is a lot less expensive than Linux, Windows, or other Unixes.
How much money might this be? Well, do the math. If Sun manages to get 2.5 million Solaris 10 downloads, and 20 percent of these get put into production with support services on machines that, on average, have two processors and have normal 9×5 business hour support, that works out to about $240 million dollars a year; if customers prefer 24×7 support, which at these rates they can certainly afford, it could be a $350 million a year business.
As the base grows and software vendor support expands, Sun might get an even higher conversion rate of free downloads to support contracts. To be a $1 billion business, Solaris 10 support would have to be tied to anywhere from about 1.4 million to 2.1 million servers, the lower number being sufficient if customers opt for the higher-end support services.
This seems like a tall order, but there are around 16 million X86 servers out there in the installed base, and another 6 million or so are sold every year. Solaris could eventually get such penetration. And the penetration for X86 servers will probably be a lot higher than the current two-thirds of downloads that Solaris 10 currently has (the other third is for Sparc-based platforms).
In bragging about the Solaris 10 download rate, Sun’s chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy, said: I would not want to be Red Hat right now. Red Hat sold 175,000 support contracts for its Linux implementation in its most recent quarter, and Novell sells considerably fewer than this; it is unknown how many companies download their Linux software and do not pay for support, which you can do thanks to the open source nature of Linux.
Mr Loiacono said that Sun has certified over 1,700 applications from independent software vendors, and that 170 new ISVs who did not have products on the Solaris platform have ported their applications to Solaris 10. One of the most important sets of code that Solaris 10 needs to support is the databases and middleware from Oracle.
About 70,000 customers in the world have opted for running Oracle databases on Solaris platforms, and this is probably the biggest portion of the Sun installed base in the data center. (Telcos and service providers run infrastructure workloads on Solaris platforms, or their own databases and applications, and financial services firms use Sparc boxes for number crunching, application serving, and infrastructure workloads, too.)
Sun said yesterday that the Oracle 10g database is certified on Solaris 10 for both Sparc and X86 platforms and the Oracle 10g application server is certified on Sparc boxes and will be certified later this year for X86 and X64 processors from Intel and AMD. The Oracle 10g database was certified on Solaris 9 on both Sparc and X86 platforms back in November 2004.
