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In
a short span of time, Sun Microsystems India has carved a
niche for itself on the Indian IT scene. Buoyed by the impressive
success it has had to date, the company now plans to increase
its contribution to Sun’s global revenues. Prashant Rao
and Pankaj Mishra profile the mercurial company and
try to find out the secret of its energy
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Bhaskar
Prmanik has set his eyes on making Sun India
for its parent, what Hindustan Lever is for Unilever |
Sun
Microsystems India’s managing director, Bhaskar Pramanik
is a man with a vision. “Do you know that Hindustan Lever
contributes almost 25-30 percent to its parent’s (Lever
Bros) overall revenues? That’s what I want for Sun India,”
says the man. Considering India’s low cost manpower and
the country’s never ending craze for IT, one may think
the task to be easily achievable, but Pramanik knows best.
Known across the globe for its ground-breaking technology
ranging from NFS to J2EE and beyond, getting Sun to shine
on the Indian market has been no easy task.
Milestones
 Sun
entered India in 1987, through Wipro its sole distributor.
Says Pramanik, “In the late 90s, Sun was not known. It
was Wipro that was the recognised brand and even our customers
considered themselves to be Wipro’s customers.”
The dilution of its brand image and a strong recommendation
by the DoE to FIPB that Sun Micro-systems be brought to India,
caused the company to establish a direct presence in India.
Accordingly, Sun India was established in 1995 under the stewardship
of Anil Jain. Soon after, the company established a 100 percent
subsidiary, the first such subsidiary of any MNC in the country.
In 1998, the company began setting up Sun Education Centres
(SES) in the country. Today, there are 135 centres spread
across 22 cities training over twenty-five thousand students
every year. The importance of SES lies in the fact that the
company had to initially face customers who cribbed about
the lack of people with Sun skill sets. SES solved that problem
by supplying a steady stream of Sun-skilled professionals.
In the same year, the company began to work with IITs, IISc
and RECs to create awareness about UNIX and Java. It also
worked out a special pricing package for education.
In the next year, the company established its India Engin-eering
Centre (IEC), and followed it up by introducing iPlanet in
2000. With this, all divisions of Sun were in place.
More recently, in June 2001, the company established its first
office outside Bangalore in Delhi. By July the company had
more than 400 employees, which is now close to the 500 mark,
supporting an installed base of 45,000 systems a far cry from
1996 when it was a one man show.
What gives Sun its energy?
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According
to Unnikrishnan, forging
partnerships is the way to go |
According
to Pramanik, a strong vision is what pushes the company to
achieve even greater heights than what it already has. He
says, “We’ve always looked ahead. Back when Vinod
Khosla founded Sun Microsystems, he believed that what engineers
needed were high-grade open connected workstations. In 1995,
we had put together a platform architecture to use the Web,
gaining a lead of four-five years. We came up with the Four
A’s Anytime, Anywhere, Any-one and Always on. My mission
in India has been to make people here understand the vision
and its relevance for the country. We believed that bandwidth
would be available freely even in the days when I used a 1.2
Kbps character based terminal. The onset of Ethernet transformed
computing with applications becoming network aware and that
led to Java.”
Another driving force behind its exploits, says Pramanik,
are the company’s three core competencies, namely innovation
where it places itself along the likes of Microsoft and Cisco,
marketing extending from product conception to execution and
delivery of the same and partnering. The company follows a
distributor model in India. “If someone else can do a
better job at something, we outsource it,” says Pramanik.
He cites Sun’s relationship with Citibank that is integral
to the company’s finances. “Sun is one of Citibank’s
top clients and the killer app for us is Suvidha. Unless people’s
bank accounts can be fed money, we can’t work. We give
preference to companies that we do business with for everything.
It is no surprise to find then that Citibank happens to be
Sun India’s largest customer.
Organisational structure
Sun’s
India office follows the same model as its parent. The country
head is usually the local head of the global sales organisation
in this case, Pramanik. Sun’s norm is that a manager
should have eleven others reporting to him. It’s a heavily
matrixed structure with straight and dotted line reporting.
The US GSO is the largest such entity across the globe for
Sun Microsystems. It provides support to other divisions with
iPlanet functioning as a separate entity.
In India, Bhaskar has two roles. He is head of the GSO for
India as well as the managing director of Sun Microsystems
India. “I’m not responsible for the IEC but I clear
their bills,” quips Pramanik. IEC has two components
iPlanet and the rest of Sun’s development, the day to
day running of which is handled by Avinash Agrawal. “Teamwork
is very important,” adds Pramanik. “We have to ensure
that we are all moving in the same direction in terms of goals
and objectives.”
Strategy
The company has announced investments of $100 million in its
Indian operations till date, a significant portion of which
is being utilised to enhance its reach by strengthening the
channels.
Distributors are handled directly by Sun. These are Wipro,
Tata Infotech, CMC, CDAC and Accel ICIM. In 1999, sales for
Sun’s workstations, desktops and workgroup servers really
took off leading the company to appoint Tech Pacific, Wipro,
and subsequently, Ingram as distributors for these products.
Today, Sun can supply these lower-end products anywhere in
India within eight hours. For solutions, the company works
with SIS like Tata Consulting Services, Wipro and Big 5 firms
such as PwC, KPMG, Accenture as well as Indian consulting
firms like MindTree.
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Ajit
Khare’s Professional
Services Division is another area that the company is
betting heavily on |
Initially,
Sun had to face the problem of low branding. Java was not
related to Sun by customers. There was low awareness of the
company’s products and services. In addition to this,
the company was never face-to-face with its customers. The
solution? It did two things. A direct sales team was set up
to go after large customers. How-ever, fulfilment and support
was left to partners. Some examples of Sun’s large accounts
are Reliance, ICICI, HDFC, ITC Infotech and L&T. Sun needed
to support its partners better. “We had to ensure that
our partner’s sales force was as good as IBM, HP and
Compaq’s sales force and we were better than them,”
says Pramanik.
“We
believe in a partner centric approach and have therefore launched
programs like iForce. Owing to this approach, we have tripled
our business in the country during last 3 years,” says
K P Unnikrishnan, country head-marketing, Sun Microsystems
India. According to him, the key areas in marketing for 2001-02
are going to be iForce, Sun One and Sun Tone Certification.
There are around 120 iForce partners at present and the company
is now planning to enable these partners so that they can
offer more integrated solutions. “iForce partners have
been our strength as they offer a one stop shop for an integrated
solution based on Sun’s offerings,” Unni-krishnan
admits. The company now has over 250 Sun certified sales people
(sales force of Sun’s franchisee) and 200 Sun certified
service engineers.
“Sun
believes in creating wealth in countries where it operates.
To do this, it works with promising local companies and seeks
to help them improve their chances of success,” Unni
says. “Through our iForce program, established partners
can tap the markets to increase their revenues and drive further
success. Emerging partners can benefit from our developer
network, system discounts, solution sets teaming, technology
leadership, and other tools to allow them to succeed.”
According to Unni, Sun India spent around Rs 7 crore last
year on advertising and promotions. “Apart from promoting
various partner programs we have also started a ‘VC Club’
wherein about 50 local VCs are involved. This gives our partners
and other start-ups a platform to forge strategic alliances,”
says Unni.
Sun plans on addressing new business segments in 2001-02 Bioinformatics,
CRM and Banking and Financial Services Industry.
The server market
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Anil
Valluri aims to bridge tha gap between network
and processor speed |
In
India, Sun has 67 percent of the UNIX workstation market and
61 percent of the UNIX servers market (both figures in Unit
terms). According to IDC’s Q1 2001 report, Sun Microsys-tems
has strengthened its leadership position as the number one
Unix server vendor for both revenue and unit shipments in
major markets in the ASEAN and India region. In fact, the
report says that Sun Microsys-tems increased its lead as the
number one server vendor in the Unix market in the major markets
in the ASEAN and India region. Its UNIX server revenue market
share grew to 45.1 percent in Q1 2001 from 40.1 percent in
the same quarter in 2000. Sun also dominated the UNIX server
market in terms of unit shipment with a significant 47.5 percent
market share. IDC reported that total Unix server revenues
in the region grew 8.2 percent in Q1 2001 from the corresponding
period in 2000. RISC/Unix server revenues accounted for almost
94 percent of the total Unix server market.
Based on IDC Q4 2000 Server Tracker data, Sun was the leading
UNIX server vendor in ASEAN and India with a 39 percent market
share. IBM was second with 23 percent, followed by HP with
22 percent in revenues. Sun shipped more than twice the number
of Unix servers that its nearest rival sold in ASEAN and India
in calendar year 2000. “Despite unprecedented economic
challenges during the year, we continued to take share from
our principal competitors,” says a proud Bhaskar Pramanik.
Sun recorded growth percentages of 143 percent and 100 percent
respectively in the Unix workstation and entry-level server
segments in unit terms. It also increased its market share
in unit terms in the mid-range and high-end server market
with a growth of 87 percent. The T3 range of storage products
also grew in excess of 70 percent in revenue terms. “We
do more business than HP and other put together and multiplied
by two,” quips Unni.
Sun’s Indian operations are among the top five locations
having the potential to clock over $1-billion in revenues.
The other four countries are China, Spain, Italy and Brazil.
Sun India is reportedly targeting $1 billion in revenues within
few years. To this end, it has already announced investments
worth $100 million and is also planning to roll out new products.
In the last fiscal, Sun India, reveals the survey, sold 2,457
UNIX boxes for a revenue of Rs 373 crore and 3,200 units of
workstation for Rs 95 crore.
The growth in entry level, mid range and high end server and
workstation products, and the great performance by Sun’s
Enterprise service and education services were responsible
for the accelerated revenue ramp up, according to company
sources. “We are targeting the verticals of software,
telecom, finance and manufacturing to gain a sizeable chunk
of business this year,” says Unni.
Sun India is busy developing parallel markets for its offerings
so that the effects of the downturn can be mitigated. “We
have appointed around six integrated marketing agencies who
market our products. Outsourcing the functions like marketing,
sales and some HR activities have placed us in a better position
to analyse the trends and make the most out of them,”
says Unni. In all, Sun India has around 50 professionals taking
care of sales and marketing spearheaded by Unni. With five
zonal support centres in the country, the company aims to
achieve growth rate twice more than the industry average in
India.
Technology at Sun
“Sun
started as a workstation company,” says Anil Valluri,
director-systems engineering, Sun Microsystems. “We were
a hardware plus UNIX firm. UNIX came from Stanford. We added
Ethernet to the mix and decided that every workstation will
have a network connection.” A few years later Sun’s
famous slogan ‘The network is the computer’ was
born. “We believed that everything was going to be networked.
That philosophy was ingrained into our products and R&D,”
says Valluri.
From the beginning, Sun was an innovator. Finding no adequate
technology to share files over a network, Sun invented NFS
which was a huge success. Furthermore, it gave NFS to the
Open Source movement by making the spec public. This technology
would eventually be picked up by the likes of Microsoft, HP
and IBM. It is today the de facto standard for sharing files.
From workstations, Sun moved on to servers. While it gained
market share in the server space, it came out with a vision
of a world with thick servers, thin clients and fat pipes.
“We believe in an utility model of plug and use. This
kind of model is very predictable,” says Valluri. The
aim? To deliver applications over the network.
The birth of the Web and standards such as HTML and LDAP provided
the impetus for the Network Computer. Another product of this
period was Sun’s most famous technology Java. “We
had a client-side execution in the early days and the applet
download was taking time,” adds Valluri. This was the
scene in 1995 when Sun saw three transforming forces: Bandwidth,
the Internet and, of course, Java as the language of choice.
1997 saw Java moving on to the server. By the time J2EE v2
came out in 1999, Java had found its niche and prospered.
Enterprise extensions for the ‘write-once, run anywhere’
language and Sun’s strategy of segmenting Java into three
flavours J2SE for clients, J2EE for the enterprise and J2ME
for phones and PDAs was paying off.
Sun is basically a hardware company. It innovated heavily
here, as well. “We introduced inexpensive IDE drives
in workstations. At the high-end we acquired Cray, the CS6400
and Cray’s engineering talent. This was what eventually
led to the E10000 (called E10K) a high-end server built around
Sun’s UltraSPARC II chip. Sun came out with a series
of hardware firsts. The first partitioned domains on UNIX,
six years ago. It introduced concepts such as load balancing
and brought many desirable mainframe class features to the
server space.
A unit of Sun’s hardware is SPARC (Scalable Processor
ARChitecture). “Fujitsu and Texas Instruments took the
SPARC and made their own systems around it. We published the
SPARC API. Hitachi even made a clone called the Hyper-SPARC,”
adds Valluri. The SPARC was a 32-bit chip. Sun went 64-bit
with the Ultra SPARC I in 1996-97. Not only did it lead in
the switch to a 64-bit architecture, but also was first with
64-way servers. “Our best competitors had only 16 CPU
servers till six months ago,” says Valluri.
A key to Sun’s success has been an emphasis on backward
compatibility in the Solaris operating system and its line
of processors. “ISVs were clear about our direction.
It has always been SPARC+Solaris. They had the confidence
that ported applications would be supported. That’s why
we are Number one in UNIX globally and the leading server
vendor in some parts of the world in overall server sales.
Our single binary architecture lets Sun’s ISVs fine tune
their applications and make them better in the time that other
vendor’s ISVs are busy porting their applications onto
a new platform. Most of our ISVs are Tier I partners they
develop and release first on Sun’s platform.”
Today Sun’s new goals are Massive Scalability, a software
stack that can be integrated and continuous always-on infrastructure.
“Copper is giving way to fibre. Bandwidth is overtaking
Moore’s law by halving the time nine months versus eighteen.
Our goal is to bridge the gap between network speed and processor
speed. The answer is multi-processor support (SMP,.”
says Valluri. The company is also part of initiatives such
as the Liberty Alliance (an alternative to Microsoft’s
Passport).
In India, Sun’s technology focus has been on building
connectors to applications such as ERP, COBOL, inventory systems,
Lotus Notes and MS Exchange.
Saying the network is the computer is one thing. Living that
credo is another. Walking through Sun’s Divyashree office,
the Sun Ray thin client sitting on every desk is a testimony
to Sun’s belief in it’s mantras. There are over
a hundred of these machines and they are smartcard based proof
of Sun’s dream.
R&D at IEC
The Sun India Engineering Centre has been around for three
and a half years. It commenced operations towards the end
of 1998 and was formally launched in May 1999 on Infantry
Road, Bangalore. “We expected to stay in that place for
a year but in two months, the place was full. We came to our
present location, Divyashree Chambers, in June 2000,”
says Avinash Agrawal, managing director, India Engin-eering
Centre, Sun Microsystems.
From humble beginnings of two teams of 15 people in 1998,
Sun’s IEC has grown to house 400 people. The heady growth
of the centre can be seen from the fact that in May 2000 there
were 100 employees. Today, there are four times that number.
One trend driving this is the increase in cost pressures in
the US, which is expected to make the IEC more valuable to
its parent.
The IEC follows a business model of ‘virtual teams’
where all teams at India IEC are part of worldwide teams that
operate across geographies. “The team in each geography
decides which part of the project will be tackled in that
region,” explains Avinash. “The team in the US approaches
me. If the project makes sense for us, we facilitate it.”
The biggest portion of work handled by Sun IEC today is e-commerce
work and that related to e-commerce products. A large team
works on the iPlanet Web server much of which is created in
India. Other products in the e-commerce space include Buyer-Expert,
SellerExpert and the iPlanet Messaging Server. In fact, patches
for the Solaris OS are only created in three of Sun’s
development centres across the globe Bangalore, London and
Menlo Park, California.
Sun’s IEC is actively invo-lved in Java documentation
and support for all three of Sun’s Java platforms J2EE
(Enter-prise Edition), J2ME (Micro Edition) and J2SE (Standard
Edition).
Solstice
Enterprise Manager was done completely in India. The IEC is
working on the next generation of Sun’s top-of-the-line
servers the E15K, successor to the block-busting E10K and
the next generation of servers beyond that. Other futuristic
projects include creating the software that will add diagnostic
capabilities for future server products.
IEC ports Java based e-commerce projects to other platforms
Windows and Linux. Some products have been ported to IBM AIX
and HP UX and even the Apple Macintosh.
So where does Sun IEC fit into Sun One? “We are working
on the iPlanet area of Sun One,” says Agrawal. “The
application server is a huge part of Sun One. It is not that
you have to use iPlanet since you can plug in other application
servers. All components of Sun One are replaceable be it the
Directory Server, Application Server, Messaging Server.
IEC also works with Sun’s partners to create APIs for
other applications from other vendors that can be used in
Sun One.
Engineers from IEC attend events such as Java One and make
presentations at these events. “We have participated
in Indian events such as India Internet World,” adds
Avinash.
Regarding Sun’s high profile StarOffice suite, the IEC
has a small team working on the Office suite. In addition,
all queries posted on Sun’s Support forums regarding
Staroffice come to India. StarOffice 6 will be out in January
or February 2002 with a Web-top or portal version released
at a later date.
The IEC has an internal website and each project team has
its own site. DT Mail, an open messaging system, is used for
internal e-mail. DT Mail server lets you use any client of
your choice that supports IMAP.
Professional Services
This is a five-year old division in the US. Globally it is
the #1 system integrator on UNIX. Professional Services debuted
in India in September 2000. The Indian arm reports to Asia
South which has been around for over four years now. Professional
Services Asia South is a hundred man strong unit. The Indian
team has eight professionals with well over a decade of experience
in the industry. This division plans to grow steadily. “We
involve people in professional services from across the globe
when we find a suitable opportunity,” says Ajit Khare,
country director, Profes-sional Services, Sun Microsys-tems
India. Globally, the division has 4,000 consultants. Sun Professional
Services operates on a geographic model. It has specialty
groups focused on technologies such as Java, storage, iPlanet
services and security.
Sun Professional Services India designed an Internet Data
Centre last year. It architected the network and folks from
Sun’s US office came down for two to three weeks and
went back to do offsite work for the same. This year, Professional
Services is undertaking architectural assessments, Java consulting,
security and Sun-ready assessments as well as generic and
technology focus.
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