Despite reassurances from Lalita Tademy, vice-president and general manager of Sun Microsystems Inc’s SunPics unit, our sister paper Unigram.X has picked up rumbles of discontent over the direction of Sun’s printing group. The group is responsible for products like NeWSprint software, SparcPrinter and NeWSprinters, targeted at the Sun market. SunPics, formerly a Sun Technology Enterprises’ satellite, was shuffled back into Sun Microsystems Computer Corp when the firm de-planetarised. At the time, SunPics products were positioned as key to Sun’s client-server plans (CI No 2,422). Direct sales and marketing positions were eliminated as those responsibilities were taken over by Sun Microsystems and some staff left of their own accord, but the unit also lost leading engineers. The SunPics team is down to 40 employees from 70 before re-absorption. Insiders are worried at the lack of apparent focus on the Japanese market place, which provides the largest chunk of SunPics’ $50m-odd revenues. Tademy admits that the unit is still adapting to the Sun Microsystems internal organisation, but denies SunPics is lessening its Japanese efforts and promises it will continue to perform at its current level.
