Company Profile of Sun Microsystems
Company Profile of Sun Microsystems
Introduction
I choose Sun Microsystems because I bought some of their stock three months ago and it has done very well. In fact it had, at one point, gone up close to sixty percent. After watching its rise over the time that I have owned it I began to wonder what Sun Microsystems is really all about. I knew that it built the backbone of the Internet, but I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. When I heard the focus of the project we were assigned for class, I decided this would be a great opportunity to learn more about the company and it’s global operations.
Company Background
Scott McNealy, William Joy, Vinod Khosla and Andreas Bectholsheim founded Sun Microsystems in 1982. They created the company to sell high-performance desktop computers, running on the UNIX® operating system. They were immediately successful with the more technical type of user such as engineers, scientists and software developers. The company was started entirely with investments and large purchase agreements, something that was very rare at the time. An agreement with a company called Computervision Corporation, where the aforementioned company agreed to pay millions of dollars for Sun to manufacture their computers, really started Sun on their way. From there Sun went on to make many more original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreements. Scott McNealy made most of the original deals that helped start Sun so, in 1984, he took on the titles of CEO and chairman. Some of the first OEM agreements were made with Xerox, Eastman Kodak, AT&T and an Italian copier maker, Olivetti & C. SpA. (Britannica.com, 2000)
As mentioned above Sun Microsystems was created in February of 1982. Right away in 1983, after signing the OEM agreement with Computervision they began operations in Europe. Sun Microsystems was almost immediately an international company. In 1984 NFS™ technology was introduced, this technology allowed computers to share files and soon became to main technology of its kind used in the computer industry. In 1985 Sun opened operations in Canada. The next big idea of Sun’s came out in 1986. PC-NFS™ technology allowed PC users to create a network of computers. As the company opened operations in Asia and Australia it also opened to the stock market with its...