Chauncey Gartner

From: spencer_katt@ziffdavis.com
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 12:42 AM
To: eWEEK readers
Subject: Being there; clicking on keynotes; going straight to the outsource

“Mmm, dolphins!” In Florida for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, the Mouser was mesmerized by the iconic critters who decorated the Walt Disney World Dolphin resort as he envisioned the cute seafaring mammals on a nice kaiser roll with diced celery and mayo.

The keynote-surfing Kitty knew where to click for comedy—Sun CEO Scott McNealys moment on stage. “I dont do tequila, and I dont do 40 to 60 percent growth anymore. The hangover is just too much,” said McNealy, recalling the dot-com boom years.

As he touted Suns ability to allow as many as 8,000 server blades in a single Opteron box, McNealy said Solaris 10 will begin shipping 60 days after an official announcement sometime next month. Pushing Suns services deal, he said, “A dollar per CPU hour is like stealing.” But he quickly noted that Sun will round up to the latest hour. “I want to be clear on that,” he deadpanned.

Joking with the audience about the end-of-quarter hoops that Sun salespeople have to jump through, McNealy told attendees, “What you do to my sales reps at the end of the quarter is not right.”

As McNealy spoke about the desktop and how attendees will be able to “beam it down from the Sun N1 grid,” Spence imagined that the recent defection to Red Hat by Karen Tegan-Padir, Suns vice president of engineering for J2EE platforms and application server products, would greatly increase Red Hats designs on the desktop market.

Seeking an open buffet in a Dolphin meeting room, Spence stumbled upon a high-level outsourcing tête-à-tête. The Kitty overheard the claim that top Indian outsourcers such as Tata and Wipro will use their vast cash supplies to go after Indian operations of U.S. companies. Once they take over the operations and sell the IT services they were performing back to the parent company, look for them to leverage those operations to sell similar services to more U.S. companies. “Thats what outsourcing is all about, no?” thought Spence.

His curiosity now outweighing his hunger, Spence overheard that one of the Indian companies might even be eyeballing a U.S. integrator, currently down in stock price, like EDS.

Although the Tabbys tummy kept rumbling, he also heard that since HP let PWCC slip through its fingers and into the clutches of IBM, it may be looking to court another consulting firm, such as BearingPoint. “One way or another, they cant keep lowballing deals to get customers like Procter & Gamble to sign on with them,” said another voice. “Mmm,” thought the Katt, “P&G makes Iams cat food, dont they?”