'Sun's subscription based service in India will take sometime'

Besides Sun Microsystems' operations in South Asia, its Asia South VP and
MD Lionel Lim is also instrumental in growing the company's business expo-nentially
throughout the years with an average annual growth rate of more than 100
per-cent. Lim recently bagged the SMI Leadership Award. Speaking to Rahul Gupta
of CyberMedia News, Lim outlined Sun's vision in open source segment and also
how the company is going to position the rece-ntly launched Solaris 10.

Your subscription based service model has not picked-up in India up till
now. What's the reason for that?

We started subscription-based services in other parts of the world, but in
India it would take some time, as there are various taxation and custom issues
that need to be clarified. We offer grid computing for $ one per processor, per
hour in other countries but in India we are still working on the pricing. What
would it be and when, it's too early to say.

What would happen to resellers who base their business model around
selling Solaris and SPARC?

Resellers are moving out of proprietary systems and mak-ing a jump towards
selling services apart from just simply pushing boxes. We've been telling them
to sell services as well as boxes. Most of the value-added resellers under-stand
that they have to add more services than just shifting boxes, and the local
partners are figuring it out. The ways we are working in terms of actually
implementing it is going to take some time.

Sun is going through the pro-cess of adapting itself to Linux. How would
you go about this?

We are seeing big risk in network computing because of the famous Linux
based app-lications. What we are seeing is too many Red-Hat based app-lications.
Open Source Solaris is much cheaper than Redhat and people have started
under-standing it. We know how to unite into a logical process and make it
commercially viable.

IBM appears to be doing a good job positioning AIX and Linux. How are you
going to tackle this?

Basically, we look at those companies who are providing technology and
infrastructure and not just the people. Sun in India is more technologically
alive, advanced, aligned and the cost is comparatively low. IBM is the other one
but with too many architectures and a higher cost. I think IBM is still raw and
we would be much ahead of it in times to come.

Are you finding that large numbers of users are considering a move to your
Java desktop system?

On the desktop front, we are dominating the segment with Solaris. We have
emerging technologies to make an impact in the Linux desktop segment. The reason
being that our applications run on both Windows as well as open source
platforms.

What has been the response of Solaris 10?

We announced Solaris 10 last year. It is compatible all proprietary systems
and we already have customers in India running various forms of beta. In terms
of the ISV adoption, on December 15 we kicked off the program in India.