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Sun Microsystems Case Essay

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Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Sun Microsystems is a diversified IT company that makes everything from hardware such as semiconductor chips to software. The company has a presence in several different markets which means that they have to compete with a large number of competitors amongst these different markets. Many of these competitors are specialized in their respective fields. In order to determine the best strategy for the company, we first need to understand and analyze its internal and external environments. This will be achieved through a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis.

Strengths:

- Presence in both hardware & software markets: Few companies have a well developed hardware and software portfolio like …show more content…

Sun can provide an alternative to the Microsoft operating system and provide the hardware to work with it.

Threats:

- Economic Downturn/Poor Economic Conditions: An economic downturn or poor economic conditions will raise the pressure on medium sized IT companies such as Sun because they will have to compete in a slower market with the larger competitors. This could also mean a cut in budgets within Sun that would include the R&D which is a crucial portion of the company for a technology driven company.

- Aggressive competition: Due to its diverse portfolio, Sun competes with many different companies that include Intel, HP, Microsoft, IBM and Apple. These competitors are larger and more focused on their core competencies and can be a threat to the organization as well as they enjoy a larger market share and brand recognition.

Jonathan Schwartz decided to use open source as the future strategy of the company. The belief behind this is that free software such as Java is likely to reach more people than its current software of Solaris does. This may be one of the few ways for them to challenge the market domination of Microsoft in this arena. The goal of the company is to develop hardware and provide open source software that will run on its hardware. This may seem like a money

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