MOCA's Severa: High On Sun, New Pact With BEA

Speaking Monday at his organization's annual partner summit in Carlsbad, Calif., Severa said that, for all the bad-mouthing Sun gets, it is one of the few companies to weather some of the toughest times in IT history and still be able to generate cash. "The others spend their time trying to out-Dell Dell," he said.

Severa said, for instance, that Sun's server business last quarter grew 38 percent year over year, the fastest of any server vendor. And that growth was across all platforms, he said.

Anyone who thinks Linux is eating Sun alive are wrong, he maintained. Linux is what he called the "good-looking brother" of Unix, where Sun has a leading position. Sun not only has a wide range of servers to run Linux, including the Advanced Micro Devices Opteron platform, but Sun's Solaris 10, expected to be released late this year, will run Linux faster than any other platform.

Severa said despite a widespread belief that Linux is free, Red Hat charges $800 and up per year, per server for what he called "mediocre" service. Sun, on the other hand, offers worldwide Linux support from a premier partner. "Seems to me Sun is raising the bar on Linux," he said.

Arrow's MOCA division has been able to take advantage of both Sun's recent successes and shifts in the industry, said Severa.

Most importantly for El Segundo, Calif.-based MOCA, its software business has been growing faster than its overall business, he said.

MOCA is looking to grab a bigger part of the software business via its new partnership with BEA.

Severa anticipated one of the questions solution providers would ask about the competition between Sun and BEA, and said, "BEA and Sun? Gosh, how does that go down, because they compete so much?"

MOCA is bringing in BEA in part because 55 percent of BEA's deployments are in Sun environments, leading to what Severa called a natural affinity and alignment between the two. "If there's a BEA deployment, the chances are high that there [are] Sun products," he said.

BEA and Sun are a potent combination to go against WebSphere and IBM, said Severa. "Once WebSphere goes in, there is little opportunity for anyone outside IBM," he said. "This will have a multiplicative effect on Sun."

At least one partner, Don McDowell, executive vice president of marketing and partner solutions at Logicalis, Schiller Park, Ill., agreed. "The important piece is the recognition that the software solution set is what pulls the business. It shows the importance of software to Arrow's business and takes them outside their normal scope of business," McDowell said.