KEY POINTS:
There's a little corporate self-deprecation on display at Sun Microsystems' sprawling Silicon Valley campus.
Some company wags have plonked a glass-fronted shipping container on one of the complex's manicured lawns, filled it with office furniture and IT equipment, and placed a sign on the front which reads: "Please
do not feed the executives."
The display takes the proverbial out of one of Sun's latest - and most perplexing - products. Called Blackbox, it is a data centre housed within a standard-sized shipping container.
Data centres are typically sports stadium-sized, air-conditioned edifices staffed by an army of nerds that guzzle as much electricity as a small town in the pursuit of maintaining a company's relentlessly growing banks of digital information.
When Sun, one of the world's largest IT server companies with a US$13.9 billion ($20 billion) turnover, decided to cram an entire data centre into a metal container which could be loaded on the back of a truck, reactions ranged from "brilliant" to "why would you bother"?
Sun's response to the cynics is that Blackbox is an answer to the growing problem companies have finding space and power to run traditional data centres. It says the mobile unit can be placed anywhere there is power, from a rooftop to a desert.
"We're seeing demand in very interesting places," said the company's chief executive and president, Jonathan Schwartz.
"Companies that today want to put data centre infrastructure in Beijing in time for the Olympics are all of a sudden looking to Blackbox as an easy way to contain an existing data centre and move it."
Schwartz, a bespectacled, pony-tailed 41-year-old, confesses Sun's business strategies can be a hard sell.
While a Blackbox will set you back several hundred thousand dollars, Sun is perhaps best known for the stuff it develops and gives away free, including the Java and Solaris operating systems.
Just as Google is an internet search company that makes money not by selling search, but the advertising around it, so Sun works on a build-it-and-they-will-come business model, Schwartz explained.
"The technologies we build we give away for free and we make the code available," he said.
"Now for most financial investors, they look at that and they think, 'Why would you do that? You're giving away something of enormous value and you get nothing in return.' And our response is, no, we get quite a bit in return, we get a huge opportunity.
"If we can get millions of people to download Solaris we will create a broader data centre opportunity [to sell IT infrastructure] because we do such a good job putting Solaris into deployment to run large-scale businesses."
The same is true of the Java system embedded in the majority of the world's mobile phones, he argues.
"If we can get billions of people to travel around with a mobile Java device then not only does that generate a small amount of revenue for Sun, it generates billions of dollars of infrastructure opportunity in the world's telecommunications carriers."
Last month Google began giving away Sun's StarOffice software suite through its Google Pack software download service - the latest move by Microsoft rivals to challenge the market dominance of Microsoft's Office software.
While Schwartz is correct when he says "free has become, in some sense, the defining attribute of technologies that will be broadly adopted", companies like Sun still have a way to got before they put a significant dent in Microsoft's multibillion-dollar empire.
That said, Sun's free, open and green marketing mantra is an increasingly powerful lure for both consumers and corporate customers. After falling on hard times after the tech-wreck of 2000, a slimmed down Sun is now back making profits and talking up its prospects in the consumer-driven "Web 2.0" environment.
Schwartz rejects suggestions Web 2.0 is another bubble waiting to burst.
"Bubbles are social phenomena where value is supposed to be, but there's no real value there," he said.
"I think when you look at the business models of some of the Web 2.0 companies - whether it's Sun Microsystems or eBay - we collectively generate billions of dollars of profit every year. That's not a bubble. A bubble was what we saw in the 90s where you could sell pet food online and take your company public with no revenue, but I don't think we see that any more."
Indeed. Pet food is out and the future is in high-tech shipping containers.
* Simon Hendery travelled to Silicon Valley as a guest of Sun Microsystems.
