Sun Microsystems chief explains his success

Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems' CEO and president, has outlined reasons behind first quarter earnings, released Friday, that beat analyst predictions.

McNealy was speaking in London after attending the Telecom 99 conference in Geneva.

He claims Sun is forging ahead because its flagship technology, Java, is at the centre of the wireless revolution set to be central to future computing infrastructures.

"Name one Web site you can't access through Java. The answer is none. Name one Web site you can access from Windows CE and Windows. The answer again is none," he said.

McNealy was careful to underline the importance of the wireless market and explained Sun's strategy to be involved at its core. "We're trying to embed the Java browser technology into every device so that they can talk to IP, so they can handle XML, so they can handle Java applets. So they can talk back to IP based servers, like NT and Solaris."

McNealy also said Sun's performance in the high-end server market has been at the expense of his company's chief rivals, Compaq, IBM and Hewlett-Packard (HP), which he said are all experiencing slowing growth rates.

Compaq refused to comment on McNealy's claims because their own results are due to be released shortly.

IBM's hardware strategist, Nick Davis, recognised that Sun has experienced growth. "This is why we launched a major campaign called Sunscreen to try to eclipse them in 1999 and IBM has also invested $1.1bn to become the market leader next year," added Davis.

Hewlett-Packard was equally defiant when its enterprise product marketing manager, Hugh Jenkins, said: "As far as the high-end servers are concerned, we are currently outshipping Sun by 50 percent, according to market share figures that we have. We actually think Sun are genuniely worried about some of our products."