Comments
Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud. We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
Cloud Expo on Google News

SYS-CON.TV
Cloud Expo & Virtualization 2009 East
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
IBM
Smarter Business Solutions Through Dynamic Infrastructure
IBM
Smarter Insights: How the CIO Becomes a Hero Again
Microsoft
Windows Azure
GOLD SPONSORS:
Appsense
Why VDI?
CA
Maximizing the Business Value of Virtualization in Enterprise and Cloud Computing Environments
ExactTarget
Messaging in the Cloud - Email, SMS and Voice
Freedom OSS
Stairway to the Cloud
Sun
Sun's Incubation Platform: Helping Startups Serve the Enterprise
POWER PANELS:
Cloud Computing & Enterprise IT: Cost & Operational Benefits
How and Why is a Flexible IT Infrastructure the Key To the Future?
Click For 2008 West
Event Webcasts
Sun Loses Staggering $1.67 Billion in Quarter
Sun wouldn’t give any guidance and wouldn’t say whether more layoffs were in the works

Sun wouldn’t give any guidance and wouldn’t say whether more layoffs were in the works when it reported late Thursday that it wrote off $1.44 billion worth of its business in the September quarter – its forced answer to the “new economic reality.”

All together it lost $1.67 billion ($2.24 a share) in what is for Sun its first fiscal quarter and a bad beginning for the year.

The company did not explain which units suffered the goodwill impairment. It said last week that it would write down the value of one or more of its reporting units but didn’t indicate how much that would amount to. It put losses at 25 cents-35 cents a share.

Revenues in the quarter came to $2.99 billion, down 7.1% year-over-year, with system sales off 15%, which it attributed to the downturn. Its gross margin was 40.2%, down 8.3 percentage points.

The results included a restructuring charge of approximately $63 million, roughly $40 million less than expected. It said it hadn’t gotten around to handing out all the pink slips it anticipated.

Net it lost nine cents a share. It was expected to lose eight cents.

Sun still has $3.12 billion in the bank and according to CEO Jonathan Schwartz is going to pursue targeted acquisitions rather than sell assets.

Yet Sun has been criticized for its $4.1 billion acquisition of StorageTek – storage sales were up 0.4% – and its billion-dollar acquisition of MySQL. Jonathan continues to cling to the idea that Sun can sell hardware into MySQL’s users, most of which don’t even pay for the software.

About Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.

Register | Sign-in

Reader Feedback: Page 1 of 1

Latest Cloud Developer Stories
Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to publ...
OCZ Technology Group, a provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, on Tuesday announced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCI Express (PCIe) flash storage solution, designed to accelerate cloud computing applications and reduce operating expe...
Many organizations have embraced, or are considering, the benefits of cloud computing – speed, flexibility, increased expertise, shared workload, reduced costs, etc. The benefits are many – but so are the risks. What are the threats to cloud security? Which parties assume respons...
In August 2011, SHI Enterprise Solutions (ESS) division launched the SHI Cloud, offering reliable and cost-effective industrial-grade cloud computing platforms. That same division achieved an 82 percent increase in revenue over 2010.
SoftLayer Technologies on Tuesday announced the immediate worldwide availability of SoftLayer Object Storage, a redundant and highly scalable cloud storage service that allows users to easily store, search and retrieve data across the Internet, with optional CDN connectivity, or ...
Subscribe to the World's Most Powerful Newsletters
Subscribe to Our Rss Feeds & Get Your SYS-CON News Live!
Click to Add our RSS Feeds to the Service of Your Choice:
Google Reader or Homepage Add to My Yahoo! Subscribe with Bloglines Subscribe in NewsGator Online
myFeedster Add to My AOL Subscribe in Rojo Add 'Hugg' to Newsburst from CNET News.com Kinja Digest View Additional SYS-CON Feeds
Publish Your Article! Please send it to editorial(at)sys-con.com!

Advertise on this site! Contact advertising(at)sys-con.com! 201 802-3021

SYS-CON Featured Whitepapers
ADS BY GOOGLE

Breaking Cloud Computing News
Salary increases will remain negligible in Japan this year, with employers instead turning to benefi...