Sun Microsystems Inc.’s long struggle to return to profitability hasn’t shaken the loyalty of Solaris system integrators to the company’s computer architectureor to its future.
“I have great faith in the Sun software architecture,” said Victor Schrader, president of Schrader & Associates LLC, a systems integrator and developer of secure messaging systems and client/server applications in San Diego, Calif.
This will encourage customers to keep working with Sun equipment even as the company faces increasing pressure from shareholders to start turning profits again, he said.
Schrader said he thinks the Sun Solaris architecture running on either SPARC or Intel processors is superior to comparable Intel architectures running Unix, Linux or Windows.
“I don’t dislike Intel hardware-wise. I just believe Sun has got far better reliability,” he said. The best thing that Sun might do, Schrader suggested, is make a renewed push to support the Solaris architecture on Intel. Being able to develop systems that run equally well with Solaris both on Intel and on SPARC “would be a killer architecture,” Schrader said.