“Innovation, Global Communities and Emerging Markets” with Sun Microsystems’ Peter Ryan
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here’s Pepsi. There’s Coke. Who needs a third cola? The same could be said for Sun Microsystems: IBM. HP. Who needs a third network software firm?
“I admit there’s no need for another cola on the market,” answered Peter Ryan, Sun’s Executive VP for Global Sales and Services. “But many people on the planet quite like Jack Daniels.” Ryan’s wry British humor underscored his message on the importance of innovation and game-changing paradigm shifts in a presentation sponsored by The Fletcher School’s International Business Center’s Global Speaker Series and in a podcast interview with Peter Ryan and two Fletcher students.Sun Microsystems, the Silicon Valley-based company whose software products include Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice, has embraced the power of open source. With open source, users can freely access, change and improve the software, distributing it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Rather than using copyrights and license fees to drive revenue, Sun actually distributes its open IP openly to individuals and institutions. In emerging markets, where the license fees for brand name software may discourage investments in computing, open source programs have proved to be a godsend. Firms are able to reduce start-up costs and make efficient use of scale for immediate growth. Governments can equip whole universities with functioning computer networks at a fraction of the cost of name brand program suites. The barrier to entry becomes just hardware infrastructure—which Sun sells. In fact, about two thirds of Sun’s revenue comes from hardware. Thus, emerging market governments like China are contracting Sun to build out network infrastructure, based on open platforms, to extend internet connectivity to more rural areas, where remote towns will be able to get started on high speed connections and open source software platforms.
So, expanding the global community of internet users is profitable for Sun, but it is also extremely valuable from a development perspective. In Ryan’s view, internet technology and open source software presents emerging market enterprises with a “leap frog” opportunity. The internet is spreading by about 6.6% annually, with about 1.4 billion users online today. By 2012, Ryan said, mobile handheld devices will surpass landlines in number, and only 18% of technology developers will reside in the United States. Furthermore, the populations of most emerging markets are generally young, going through the universities and at ease with technology. As a result, creative, energetic developers and investors from India to China to Latin America will be able to drive rapid technological and economic growth, bringing fresh ideas to areas where the mature economies of the US and Europe are too bogged down with outdated systems. “If you want to create your future today,” said Ryan, “you wouldn’t want to start from the US.”
Growing up in multicultural Liverpool, Ryan learned early on the importance of a global perspective. Long before the internet, the world was just as connected, he suggested; only, it was marked by inequity in access to knowledge and support. Today, networks are increasing and accelerating the rate of exchange, chipping away at the root cause of economic inequality by liberating the flow of ideas and knowledge services. Thus, open source work may present us with the opportunity to, as the saying goes, “do good by doing well.”
Kirby Reiling F’09