Financial services companies, along with telecommunications corporations, are Sun's core customers; Sun rose with their lavish spending in the late 1990s and fell with their troubles this decade. Even though financial services are rebounding some, Sun's future depends on how well it does with its push to new segments such as health care, manufacturing, retail and governments, Ryder said.
"I think if Sun is looking to the past to declare its future, they're doomed," Ryder said. "The jury's still out whether they'll overcome the hill. But at least they're moving in the right direction."
Sun faces competition
It also faces heavy competition from IBM. In an attempt to rain on Sun's parade, IBM plans to announce on Tuesday that Wall Street consultancy Random Walk Computing has created a version of its electronic brokerage and trading software for IBM's Power processor-based Unix and Linux systems. HP, meanwhile, has used Linux as a tool to attack Sun, for example with a partnership with market data distributor Reuters.
IBM and Dell have been steadily gaining share in the server market at Sun's expense, though Sun in the second quarter made some progress with its goal in increasing its unit shipments.
Sun has been touting its Opteron servers, such as the four-processor V40z it announced in July, but its bread and butter remains UltraSparc products.
Sun will launch the V490 and V890 servers Tuesday, models that use up to four and eight UltraSparc IV processors, respectively. The systems use the same hardware as the UltraSparc III-vased V480 and V880 models, but they offer better performance and cost less, said Chris Kruell, marketing director for Sun's scalable systems group.
A V490 with two 1.05GHz processors, 8GB of memory and two 73GB disks costs $30,995. A V890 with eight 1.2GHz processors, 32GB of memory and six 73GB disks costs $123,995, Sun said.
It's not a coincidence that the faster models are less expensive, he said. "We're transitioning over to the UltraSparc IV systems. Pricing is set up to incent that," Kruell said. However, he declined to say when Sun would complete the transition with low-end products such as thin rack-mountable dual-processor systems.
Sun also plans to begin showing off networking gear based on its acquisition of Nauticus. The products accelerate encrypted communications with Web servers, a vital task for processes such as making secure credit card purchases over the Internet.
And Sun plans to take yet another crack at the storage market with the StorEdge 6920. The product is based on the acquisition of Pirus Networks that Sun announced almost exactly two years earlier.
The product didn't arrive when Sun originally had hoped. "We thought it was going to take six months less than it did," Wood said, but Sun had to make sure it was reliable. "It absolutely cannot have a data problem going through it. You don't ship this until it is rock-solid bulletproof."
Sun is happy with the technology, though. It has technology called virtualization that will let it subsume and control other storage systems from Sun and competitors such as HP and EMC, Wood said. The 6920 has a capacity of as much as 45 terabytes and, through most customers will probably buy 10 to 30 terabytes.
Sun's overall plan has merit, Forrester Analyst George Colony said in a Friday report.
"Given the strategy and management, I believe that there is a good chance that Sun will be around for a strong third act," he said. "I've hung around with many tech zombies in the past, from Wang Laboratories to Prime Computer to Digital Equipment. When I stare into the eyes of the Sun management team, I still see life."
