Here you see Stephen Chang, manager of Buyer Engagement at eBay, showing me a new eBay widget called eBay To Go. But unlike the other products we see here this one actually is shipping today! You’re getting the first look at it. I’ll also be auctioning off some items on my blog over at scobleizer.com. This widget will let bloggers and other people on the Internet add things they’ve discovered on eBay to their Web sites. That way, your readers will be able to see what items are interesting to you right on your blog or Website. It’s really cool and Stephen shows me how it’s done.

Tags: eBay, Demo Expo, Disruptive Innovations, Stephen Chang, eBay To Go

Since all network traffic is recorded, it’s easy for the IT staff to review exactly what passed through specific ports, or to reconstruct a specific user’s browser session. With the Solera solution, the answer to why the network was slow between 2:00 and 4:00 PM yesterday can be scientific instead of guesswork. Compliance managers, universities, and governments can ensure that policies are followed and that intellectual assets and intelligence are preserved. Built on a 100-percent open architecture, any available commercial, open source, or customized software can be used to review data. Solera also offers tools and an API for any third party or individual to create custom tools for monitoring and review.

Newly backed by Canopy Ventures, Solera Networks takes a new infusion of cash to get the news out about their customer-proven offering.

This podcast is brought to you by Rocky Mountain Voices.

Tags: Tivo, Solera Networks, Steve Shillingford, Brad Baldwin

More images on Flickr.

Transcript:

Host: Michael Johnson - PodTech
Guest: Martin McKeay - Network Security Podcast
Guest: Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
Guest: Richard Stiennon - Fortinet
Guest: Richard Mogull - Gartner
Guest: Bruce Schneier - Schneir.com
Guest: Lori MacVittie - F5 Networks
Guest: Eric Green - Larstanpodcasting.com
Guest: Ron Gula – blog.tenablesecurity.com
Guest: Ryan Singel - 27bstroke6
Guest: Brian Krebs - Washington Post
Guest: Michelle McLean - ConSentry Networks

Michael Johnson - PodTech
This is Michael Johnson and we’re here at the Foreign Cinema restaurant in San Francisco, a very unique restaurant in which many of the nights they show movies outside, projected on a wall. We’re here at the site and on the occasion of the RSA 2007 Conference, and we’re here with a lot of people from across the country that are security bloggers, we’re going to talk to a few of them to see what’s on their minds or what they’ve been blogging about lately.

Martin McKeay - Network Security Podcast
I mean this is only happening once a year, there is a lot of us with a lot of voices out there, and well, we like to talk. So, it’s a really good thing to have this group together and (Voice Overlap). So, I wanted to give our sponsors, Microsoft and Fortinet, a couple of minutes to talk and they will tell you why they decided that it was worth sponsoring this event.

Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
Hello everyone, I’m a Mac

Speaker
Don’t do that to me, I want to be the Mac.

Speaker
(Inaudible)

Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
He said, I believe the exact phrase was, if I were shopping for a computer today, I would want to buy a Mac, that’s what he said, in that email, he’s being purposely dramatic, but that was Jim, as those who have ever talked to him know.

Speaker
That was Jim in the past tense.

Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
Yeah, well, he retired, he retired, he’s gone. So, I want to talk a little bit about why we really wanted to help put this together. Most of you actually probably don’t know me as Stephen Toulouse, you probably know me as Stepto, which is what everybody calls me, it’s my email name at Microsoft, stepto@microsoft.com and my blog is stepto.com. I actually began — I’ve been with Microsoft since April of 1994 and I started off supporting Windows 3.1 and DOS 5.0, which I am proud to say had no remotely exploitable hole in the default install.

Speaker
Have you gone through that?

Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
Had no network stack, but yeah, that it will, so we’ve come a long way since then. One of the things that Microsoft has done over the past couple of years, thanks to people like Scoble and thanks to a lot of the people that work at Microsoft and do blogging is we’ve embraced the blogging culture. So, last year we held a little lunch in, got some people together, it was just a dozen people, it was a lot fun, so when we heard the idea to do it again and do something a little bit bigger, a little bit fancier and invite more people, we jumped at the chance. I’m so glad, I mean seriously I’m so happy there are so many people here, there’s going to be so many great conversations. We’re just happy to be here, and happy to sponsor. I wish more of us were here, but planning for the next version of Windows is currently going on in Webinn (ph), so there is a lot of…

Speaker
Next after Vista?

Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
Next after Vista, so there’s a lot of split. So, as I said diverse a few minutes ago, I know it sounds a little bit crazy to say for a company that has $34 billion in the bank, but it’s a resource issue, so we don’t have everybody down here, but I’m here, happy to be here, and happy to be with Fortinet in sponsoring this. So, thank you very much for coming, we don’t want to spend a lot of time in (Voice Overlap), so you guys have great conversations and Richard, what did you want to say?

Richard Stiennon - Fortinet
Cool, so I don’t have a lot of time to talk.

Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
You’ve got as much as you want, you’re sponsoring.

Richard Stiennon - Fortinet
(Inaudible) Technorati ranking, somewhere way north of 12,000. I think that it is being a little site a Technorati blog ranking is kind of interesting when we all get together and meet, but what’s really, really, really interesting is that we are changing how people access information, because we all are in our own right experts or we all are in our own right good communicators and we know that because people are coming to our blogs, we’re all reading each others blogs, and doing the back and forth thing. This is new, we all know that, this is, in the security world for certain, this is the way that the end users are going to learn new stuff, we highlight things that just don’t get into the press, the press just doesn’t focus the same way that we do.

I’m super, super excited about what the blogging community does, so of course, when the opportunity came up, the timing was just right, I could say, Hey Rich, we’ll sponsor that, we’ll get there, that’s very cool.” As everybody talks to me this evening, I need a little help, I’ve got a bloggers dilemma, I’ve lost my bloggers voice, as you may have noticed, I can’t post anymore. Last week, for example, so TJX gets totally whacked by hackers, steals 40 million credit cards, I can’t find anything to say about it, because I have to check with our VP of North American sales to see if we’re doing a deal with TJX. That just stops you dead in your tracks, I could no longer be the (Inaudible) bloggers.

Speaker
Talk about that.

Richard Stiennon - Fortinet
Yeah, there was (Inaudible), so what do I do. I personally want to settle on a travel log because I travel a lot. So, I’m going to blog about shady hotels, and how they don’t have enough power plugs and stuff like that. Anyway, any other ideas, please let me know, and just thanks for everybody contributing to the community that we are, here it goes.

Martin McKeay - Network Security Podcast
Rich Mogull said he had a couple of (Voice Overlap) to say.

Stephen Toulouse - Microsoft
Yeah, Rich you want to say something?

Martin McKeay - Network Security Podcast
He’s the originator of this whole problem.

Richard Mogull - Gartner
You guys are joking, but — never mind, I’ll save that for when the camera’s not on. I want to thank everybody for coming, I got to be honest this went far beyond my expectations, I thought there would be a dozen guys, sitting in a room, paying for our own drinks…

Martin McKeay - Network Security Podcast
You’re paying for ours actually.

Richard Mogull - Gartner
Yeah, I though I was going to buy a round or two and that was going to be the end of it. When I started blogging as an experiment, it was, let’s just see what this is about, let’s see what’s going on out there in the community and it was mind boggling how valuable it was. The ability to have a — so let’s look who’s in the room? We have Brian from the Washington Post, reporter from a major newspaper here. We have representatives from all parts of the vendor community. We have representatives from the analyst side and we have end users everywhere. There is no place else in the world where we can all have a dialogue on a common issue, and at the same time, people read this stuff. If you were at the opening session for — I don’t normally go to the keynotes because come on, who needs to see Bill speak again. Hey now, that’s the truth really.

One of the things that Ze Frank said was, he called us the defenders of the renaissance. When you want to see the thought leadership, there’s two sides, there’s the back room, development being done, the really smart guys. When you want to see the people who are influencing, — I think that is us, but people who are influencing the community. If you look at where security came from and where security is going, I don’t care what Art (ph) says, security is not going away in two to three years, not going to be all embedded into the infrastructure.

There is a new wave of security thought readers that are building in this industry. There’s the old wave, first and then — so I love the dialogue, it’s incredible that we can all talk in an open environment, especially guys like Allan and Richard now, talking about analyst side versus vendors versus end users, all of this, (Voice Overlap). So, I’ve talked too long, thank you all for coming, I know there is more people coming on the way, let’s go drink more, and make fun of each other.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
We’re here with Bruce Schneier. Bruce, tell me a little bit about what you do?

Bruce Schneier - Schneir.com
Oh God, I am a Security Technologist, I write, I speak, I work for BT Counterpane, and I piss of the government, I do a lot of things.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What have you been excited about over the last year or so, and what’s been some of the more interesting things that you have documented in some of your studies and some of your blogs?

Bruce Schneier - Schneir.com
Well, what I wrote about — writing about now, what I posted this week, and what I talked about here at the RSA Conference is the psychology of security, how we perceive security. Security is both a feeling and a reality, and they’re different. You can feel secure and not be secure and you can be secure and not feel secure, and there’s a lot to learn in that difference, why it happens, what about the human brain makes us get security wrong? I’ve been reading a lot of psychology, a lot of human brain physiology, a lot of — there are studies about risk, there’s a whole lot of research being done in the psychology community, that we’ve never seen here in the security community, but I think is directly relevant to what we’re doing.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
That sounds fascinating, I think it is a concept of security that people are thinking about more these days, because certainly in the United States and in other places as well, this idea of what our security is, is certainly being called into question.

Bruce Schneier - Schneir.com
Right, and there’s a lot of crap security, I call it security theater (ph), security that doesn’t do anything good, but just makes you feel better, and that’s security that doesn’t target to the reality, but targets to the feeling. There are times, they’re not common, but there are times when that kind of thing is useful. There are times when it’s really bad, and how do you know the difference. I think there’s a lot of stuff there.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What times would you say we’re in now; say the perspective of obviously the United States and Homeland Security, that’s a big name right now, but it seems to sort of be talking more to that feeling part that you’re addressing?

Bruce Schneier - Schneir.com
We’re definitely in the stupid security season, what happened in Boston last week is an example, that happens every time you get on an airplane, security is really stupid right now.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
If folks wanted to check out your blog and see some of the stuff that you’re writing about, where can they go?

Bruce Schneier - Schneir.com
Schneir.com, actually I think if you just type security blog into Google, I pop up as the first name, but its www.schneir.com, easy to find.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Bruce Schneier, thanks a lot.

Bruce Schneier - Schneir.com
Hey, thanks for having me.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
We’re here with Lori MacVittie who is the blogger for F5 Networks, and welcome to the party Lori.

Lori MacVittie - F5 Networks
Thanks, it’s very exciting thus far.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Well, it’s a really interesting group of security bloggers, we’re on the occasion of the RSA 2007 Conference in San Francisco, tell me a little bit about what you blog about for F5?

Lori MacVittie - F5 Networks
I blog about a number of things, security and otherwise, but generally just trying to apply all sorts of new technology to use in our products and how they can be used and extended and just trying to be innovative and then also commenting on what other people have to say about anything related to SOA, AJAX Security, those kind of topics.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What excites you about this, what are the things that you find really interesting in this security portion of the blogosphere?

Lori MacVittie - F5 Networks
Well, I think that emerging technology, security is very exciting because it’s new and it’s different and we have to come up with innovative ways to solve that, something that we at F5 take very seriously, but also just some of the social issues. We were just having a conversation about teenagers and security and social networking, and it’s a very interesting problem that we have to solve because it’s not necessarily a technological problem but a people problem. So, it’s something different that we have to solve, so it’s a challenge, I like that.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
We were speaking with Brice Schneier a little bit early about the sort of the concept of security and how we have a lot of solutions around, and now it’s a question of getting those things implemented, are you seeing that implementation happening now slowly but surely, or is it something that’s going to take a while do you think for the concept to sort of follow the implementation of these things?

Lori MacVittie - F5 Networks
I think as usual, unfortunately security comes last. People wait until there is a problem to actually solve it. You don’t change locks on your doors until someone breaks in. I wish that we could change that view so that people thought of it upfront, but I still think it’s a after the issue problem.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
If folks want to check out your blog, where could they go?

Lori MacVittie - F5 Networks
You can go to devcentral.f5.com/macvittie

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Alright, Lori MacVittie of F5 Networks, thanks for being with us here, enjoy the party.

Lori MacVittie - F5 Networks
Thank you.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Tell me your name?

Eric Green - Larstanpodcasting.com
I am Eric Green.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Eric, what do you blog about or Podcast about?

Eric Green - Larstandpodcasting.com
We’re across a lot of different spaces, I mean personally I’m our security guy, so we do a lot of stuff on Information Warfare, Information Operations and a couple of other security Podcasts. Company wise, we do — we cut across personal finance supply chain technology and cross technology, we do a lot of federal government stuff as well.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What kind of interesting stuff have you come across in the last number of months?

Eric Green - Larstandpodcasting.com
The last number of months have been interesting on the IO space for me. So, if you look at Info Operations and Info Warfare, the critical infrastructure side of being sort of finance and telecommunications on the security side has seen a lot of people — like a resurgence of people wanting to talk about IT security, everything all the way up to SIOPs, it’s the psychological warfare and the like. So, it’s fun being back at RSA to see what people are saying on the floor about things like that.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, tell me your names.

Ron Gula - blog.tenablesecurity.com
I’m Ron Gula.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What’s your blog?

Ron Gula - blog.tenablesecurity.com
I’m blog.tenablesecurity.com.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
And you?

Ryan Singel - 27bstroke6
I’m Ryan Single, my blog is 27bstroke6, which is blog.wired.com/27bstroke6.

Brian Krebs - Washington Post
I’m Brian Krebs of the Washingtonpost.com and I blog on Security Fix.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, what have you — I saw you three talking in a circle, what have you been really excited about, or what have you been putting in your blogs lately, is there been any dialogue between all of you other than here in person or is it been happening on the blogosphere?

Ron Gula - blog.tenablesecurity.com
Well, right now, one of the good things about getting together is, you have a lot of different disciplines. These two are from the media side of the house, I’m a vendor, so we were just kind of talking about different things that we can blog about, we all blog about dramatically different things.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What’s your favorite topic?

Ron Gula - blog.tenablesecurity.com
I like to talk about computer security, vulnerabilities, intrusion detection, that kind of thing.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What do you like to blog about?

Ryan Singel - 27bstroke6
You should jump to Brian on that one, because you guys do kind of similar things.

Brian Krebs - Washington Post
I mean basically for me this is great because I’m getting to meet a lot of the people whose blogs I read everyday and put a name with the face.

Ryan Singel - 27bstroke6
So, I do a little bit of the higher level kind of things. We cover government databases, privacy, kind of higher level security, so a lot of these folks know a lot more than I do at the — sort of nitty-gritty, kernel level kind of stuff, whereas we’re kind of higher level, a little bit more snarky.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Now, one of the things I’ve been hearing here at the conference as well as in this group is that the thinking about security, has to really be the thing that has to change for a lot of people, not so much we have the technologies, we have a lot of solutions at the show. At RSA, we certainly see hundreds of solutions that are offered up, but the thinking about security has to change, what do you think about that?

Ron Gula - blog.tenablesecurity.com
Well, everything is related. Long time ago, if you were the firewall guy, you just had to worry about the firewall, or the virus guy just had to worry about making sure the viruses were update. Nowadays, everybody realize everything is linked, the operating system, the router, the policy, everything is together, and you’re probably seeing vendors start to offer solutions along those lines and consultants talk along those lines and people blog about that kind of stuff, so I’m happy to se that kind of change.

Ryan Singel - 27bstroke6
Oh, it’s kind of interesting to hear a lot of people getting sort of some of the old time religion, which is about securing the data not about securing the firewall or securing the perimeter. I’m still waiting for the sort of the big change, where security becomes easy and the Internet becomes safe and it’s not here yet.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
How long do you think it’s going to take?

Ryan Singel - 27bstroke6
Forever.

Brian Krebs - Washington Post
I write generally for a much wider audience, so I don’t tend to write much about technology solutions and things like that. Basically, I’m writing for people, the everyday Joe, average Internet user, and so I think that’s a constant education effort because it’s real easy to I think over estimate people’s grasp of technology and security issues, and that’s a dangerous thing.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Do you think information is getting out from the blogosphere to the general public, where people read it, or does the pubic need to know more about what goes into security or do you think it actually has to stay at the enterprise level and got to go down from there?

Brian Krebs - Washington Post
I’d like to see more mainstream publications covering this important issue. I happen to think that most of the people who really need to know most about what it is they need to do, to stay secure online, don’t read blogs, I mean they’re still reading mainstream publications.

Ryan Singel - 27bstroke6
I think the mainstream folks that really need to know what they do should go to his blog, because I pick things up from you, he’s one of the best at sort of translating — like he understands the high level stuff, but translates it into what does this means for you, how do I get Flash 8 off my system, when you didn’t even know you had it on there.

Brian Krebs - Washington Post
It is always Flash 8, why do I need it?

Ron Gula - blog.tenablesecurity.com
Yeah, I mean the biggest failure of the vendor so far is all the solutions we offer are extremely technical, the average person doesn’t know, should I click this, should I not click that, am I going to be safe, am I going to lose my credit card data, it’s very difficult, so, things are getting better, we just have a long way to go.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Alright, well, thanks for speaking with us and enjoy the party.

Michelle McLean - ConSentry Networks
Hi, I’m Michelle McLean with ConSentry Networks

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What do you do at ConSentry, Michelle?

Michelle McLean - ConSentry Networks
I’m actually in charge of Product Marketing.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
And you blog?

Michelle McLean - ConSentry Networks
I do, we’ve just recently launched the En Garde blog and there are several of us posting to it by commenting on security, how security is being perceived, what we’re seeing in the customer business that we have, and just how the market is evolving around how to secure what happens on the LAN, inside the enterprise.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What’s the importance of the blog to ConSentry Networks?

Michelle McLean - ConSentry Networks
It’s multidimensional, there is the notion that for your customers, you’re trying to give them a little bit of an inside view into what’s going on, helping them understand their peers. There is definitely this notion of an industry level dialogue, where you know that press and analysts and other bloggers are reading some of your thoughts and it fosters the dialogue, it’s definitely a level of discussion that’s more fast moving and a little bit more straightforward than what you can see in the press necessarily, that’s just the nature of the flexibility of the medium. You can be very quick to get a whole dialogue going and in two days worth of comments you’ve moved the whole goal line forward around what the industry’s thinking about the topic, it’s really dynamic.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Do you think it really helps the industry?

Michelle McLean - ConSentry Networks
I think it does, because I think you end up shaping how people talk about the problems, the solutions, how they’re trying to cope with certain issues in the enterprise. I used to be a journalist and an analyst actually for nine years, and it’s really nice to be back in that thought leadership domain that a blog can give you, it’s a lot of fun, and I do think it benefits both the consumers of technology as well as those who are charged with thinking about and writing about the industry.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Michelle McLean of ConSentry Networks, thanks for talking with us.

Michelle McLean - ConSentry Networks
Thank you so much, it’s good to see you.

Richard Mogull - Gartner
Richard Mogull, and I’m an analyst with Gartner and mostly contribute to the Gartner blogs.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Obviously you’re doing something about security, right?

Richard Mogull - Gartner
Yeah, exactly, I’m on the information, security and risk team over there, so that’s — well, it’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since I was 16.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Since you were 16?

Richard Mogull - Gartner
Believe it or not, I started in physical security back when I was in high school and eventually got into — it was at PC tech job, and eventually that led to my information security career.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What has been the most interesting thing for you or what area do you focus on a particular, and what over the last few years has been some of the top one or two security issues?

Richard Mogull - Gartner
Well, it has been really fascinating actually, I’ve been covering data security for about five, maybe six years now, and back then it was something nobody would pay attention to, the research wasn’t read very frequently, not a lot of conversations about it. Last year, data security has exploded, protecting people’s private information, protecting corporation’s intellectual property, incredible amount — vendors all over the place addressing it, we couldn’t go to a keynote without a mention of data security. So, I think it has been just fascinating to watch it over this five year period, as this has finally developed and has finally started to hit the mainstream.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
What do you think changed, what was it that sort of pushed it over the edge?

Richard Mogull - Gartner
Oh, to be honest, it’s because of couple of factors. One is we actually start putting things back up on the Internet and making them potentially available that people had monetary value. There were no safe crackers except for 14 year teenage boys until people put money in the safes, then the bad guys figured it out. We put those things up there, the bad guys had a little bit of time to realize not only what was there, but learn the techniques to get at it. So, now all of a sudden, information security, we’ve always called it information security, it was network security, now we’re getting back to the information, we’re getting back to the data, we’re protecting private information, we’re protecting our intellectual property.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, has the mindset caught up, because it’s the scene that I’m hearing at RSA, I’m hearing it tonight, has the mindset of the enterprise community that deals with that data, whether it’s data in flight or data at rest, and even some of the marginal network, firms that are out there, large storage firms that are out there, have they really caught up with the idea about what security is?

Richard Mogull - Gartner
I think we have a lot of work to do there. We know there is a problem. Now, a lot of it right now is mostly compliance driven, so people are implementing data security as much for compliance as anything else, and a lot of part of it is we don’t really know how big or how bad the problem is. Over the next few years, we’re really going to start raising that awareness, we’re going to start understanding how to build security as opposed to just layering it on, and we will get back to the concept that it’s about protecting the data, and it’s about protecting our sensitive information. So, we got a little ways to go, it’s not quite there yet.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Thanks for talking with us, enjoy the party.

Richard Mogull - Gartner
Thank you very much, this is great.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, that wraps it up for our blogger evening, security bloggers from all over the country, all over the Web, all of the blogosphere, coming together here in San Francisco at the Foreign Cinema restaurant as part of the RSA 2007 Security Conference in San Francisco, I’m Michael Johnson, well see you next time.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: RSA 2007, security bloggers, Foreign Cinema, network security, Martin McKeay, Shift, Kristalle Ward, Fortinet

Transcript:
Guest: Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Guest: Paul Otellini - Intel

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Well, good morning everybody. I think we’ve got a pretty interesting day ahead of us. What I’d like to do is, first of all, welcome Paul and the Intel team. As somebody earlier remarked, it was interesting to see those two logos side by side up there, with no spontaneous creation of energy around them. We think today really changes the marketplace for Sun, it certainly opens up a new era in our future. We are really looking forward to talking through what it is that we’re all about.

So, what I’d like to do, and maybe give Paul an opportunity to take a little rest here, is actually talk back to a meeting, and I don’t know if you remember this Paul, but when I was announced as the CEO of Sun, that was back in April of last year, I made a series of phone calls, and probably first on the list was a call to Paul to say, surely, there’s more that we could do together. I mean we are really fundamentally engineering companies, we’re both really focused on innovation and opportunity. We then had dinner in a San Francisco restaurant, which Paul enjoyed a great deal, he came to my neighborhood, which I was happy about. We really got to talking about the marketplace, and it really struck me at that point, the more we talked, the more similarly we viewed the market, the more similarly we viewed the market opportunity.

A slide that can give you a little picture of that is really quite simple. The more folks come online, the more services they want to get access to. You want to get access to your Gmail account, you want to get access to your work, you want to get access to the new entertainment services. The more folks we could bring online, the more opportunity on the network, the more opportunity that would drive in the world’s data centers and network operation centers to fuel that demand. This is a very simple idea, but really the volume on the front end of this is what defines our markets. The accessibility, the affordability, and the innovation that really captivates consumers brings people online and creates economic opportunity, and certainly for Sun and Intel back in the world’s data centers.

So, what I thought I could do is just give you a little bit of a perspective on, not only our business model and the way we see the marketplace, but put our relationship today in the context of the business that we’re ultimately building, and then I will turn it over to Paul to talk about some of the things that we’re going to be doing together.

So, if you spend anytime around Sun, you’ll hear us talk about the four S’s. We’re basically in four businesses, and those businesses are Software, Server, Services and Storage. Now, for us those businesses are a Venn diagram, because there is a considerable amount of overlap between them. Customers really don’t want to have to make four entirely distinct and separate and disparate decisions, and similarly as an R&D company, we don’t want to have to do completely independent R&D to go pursue these marketplaces.

So, we want to leverage to the extent that we can the core innovations we have at Sun, the core systems engineering expertise, software expertise, and market expertise. To the extent that we can, that creates a very efficient model for R&D as well as a very efficient mechanism to go pursue the marketplace, but importantly for Sun, we cannot be just about our own intellectual property. We cannot simply attempt to lock piece A to piece B and piece C, that’s not how customers buy as we see in the marketplace, that’s not what ultimately we believe the market actually wants.

So, if you look at how we go pursue the marketplace, we tend to meet customers where they are today. Our servers at this point run both the SPARC as well as AMD, and going forward, the Intel servers we build are not just about running Solaris, they’re about running Windows, they’re about running Linux, they’re about running Red Hat.

The software we ship, and I’ll give you a graphic to really make this point in a moment, dominantly runs off of Sun hardware. The majority of the software that Sun builds is running on Nokia hardware or on Intel hardware or on — certainly non-Sun hardware, HP, Dell laptops and notebooks along with those systems and servers up in the network.

Our storage business tends to be very, very cross platform. A very significant portion of the storage we build in the marketplace, whether it’s archive systems or enterprise storage, attaches to an IBM mainframe or to an HP server, or to a Windows server.

Then finally our services business, customers don’t want to just go to a company they can support only its own products, they need those products in deployment attached to a world of other innovations and opportunities. So, really this is our view of the marketplace. We meet customers at the edges of this Venn diagram and then we do our best to bring them toward the centre, knowing full well, there’s only one customer in the world who only buys from Sun and that’s our Chief Information Officer and we don’t expect to clone him anytime soon.

So, fundamentally behind this is a very simple concept that I know — also, Paul and I spoke about, which is a belief that volume drives value. So, what you see up in front of you here is a chart showing since we announced the open sourcing of Solaris, announcing that Solaris would be cross platform, would run on anybody’s hardware, what happened when we left those downloads free onto the networks? So, you’ll see back in March of 2005, when we began this program, we have come close to, if not, I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me right now, around 7 million licenses total distributed out into the marketplaces, 7 million licenses. What’s truly interesting about those download figures is how significant a proportion of those downloads are actually running on Intel and x86 hardware out in the marketplace, nearly 70%.

So, 7/10 downloads, 7/10 of those licenses of Solaris into the marketplace were not running on Sun hardware, they were running on Intel innovation. They were running on systems built by HP and DELL and IBM, and clearly if there is going to be an indication of opportunity for us to work together, it looked an awful lot like, here is a great motivation. It’s evident that customers wanted us to work together, and so clearly we wanted to do exactly that.

So, I think you’ve seen some of the news come out this morning, but as we were discussing with the media this morning, you’ve seen one out of three elements of this relationship. To just walk you through what in fact is going on. We are announcing today a relationship in which Intel will endorse Solaris, will support it across a broad range of Xeon platforms, will agree to OEM Solaris out into the marketplace, and to ensure that the market gets the support it needs in running and optimizing Solaris on Xeon platforms. This is a market changing event. This totally changes the perspective that a customer has on how they can do business with Sun, and similarly how they can do business with Intel.

So, Intel has agreed to really promote Solaris, to help us collectively go off and build the marketplace and the ecosystem around that, and reciprocally Sun is announcing today that we are going to be building a complete line of Xeon servers as well as workstations, complementing and augmenting a very rapidly growing server business that we have at Sun. You’ve probably seen the double digit growth we’ve posted now for consecutive quarters. This just opens yet more opportunity creates more choice for consumers, and again, not just running Solaris, but running Windows as well as Linux that’s out there.

Lastly, and I think what’s most interesting to me is — in fact our teams had a dinner back in December to help prep them for working together on getting this agreement struck, and it was evident, we had all of the heads of our product businesses there, and similarly Paul had some of his leading products folks there as well. We’re both engineering companies, we’re both companies focused on technology, focused on the advancement of our own technologies, using process, using wisdom about the marketplace to create new innovations that really capture and captivate consumers.

So, we’re also announcing today that we’re going to be collaborating on the next generation of our software leveraging Intel software expertise, the next generation of systems leveraging Intel microprocessors as well as Sun Systems engineering capabilities. What does that hold for the future? Time will tell, we’re pretty certain you all will be paying attention to that, and certainly we think there is just a world of opportunity out in front of us. So, this is really a comprehensive relationship. This is not simply a buy-sell arrangement. This is a mechanism that brings the two of us together and creates new market opportunities and new options as well as new value for both of us.

So, the substance of our collaboration, why don’t I just quickly walk you through this, I think you can read this on your own. Again, from the Intel side, Solaris will now be a Tier 1 operating system in the Intel definition, which again confers upon Sun and the ecosystem built up around Solaris in the OpenSolaris Community, a great opportunity to go drive after the volume leading microprocessors in the marketplace. This really brings Intel’s involvement in not just the product evolution, but also the community evolution around the Open Source Java platform, NetBeans, as well as Solaris. Then importantly, Intel is going to help make sure that we know how to optimize Solaris well for Intel microprocessors, so we end up with a better total solution for customers.

On the Sun side, we’re certainly looking forward to building out uniprocessor Dual and Quad Core processor systems. I think we’ve also suggested that we’re not just going to end there, this is — again, we see the marketplace is growing, both in requirements as well as the need for scale. We’re going to be building out things that are greater than four way, and I don’t think it takes a lot of creativity to figure out what’s greater than four way, but it sounds an awful lot like an eight way. As we go — yeah, six way, probably not. Again, this is a mechanism for both of us to get together to do the engineering, to do the hard work, to invent things that really capture and captivate consumers.

So, with that I’d like to pass the pickle to — actually you have your own pickle. Paul Otellini, Chief Executive Officer in Intel. Thank you very much.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Thank you, gentleman. As Jonathan said at one level the very highest level, this is about Intel endorsing and embracing Solaris and this about Sun endorsing and embracing Xeon, but I think there is a lot more behind that story and to give you some of our perspective on that. I thought it has been just a couple of seconds talking about how we at Intel view the enterprise environment today. At the highest level, the biggest single thing that’s happening is it all data centers regardless of their size are now focusing on evolving to a service oriented architecture and what that means we’ve think about the data center providing the critical services for a company, large or small. It means you start worrying about the cost of that echoes of that environment. They overall ecosystem built out in a particular how you use your equipment.

Thinks like utilization rights of servers are becoming very, very critical particularly in the era of rising energy cause. So, you want to able to use them more, but also have them costless in terms of the overall construct at the data center. As this happens, we look at things that are important to CIO’s and data center managers today. One of the things that’s popped up to us is that Solaris is evolving as a mainstream operating system, as you saw some other rate on the downloads, but it also it’s mainstream and enough itself and just to the equipment the Sun ships.

Now we’ve the opportunity to have Intel Inside many of those boxes, but it is becoming as the slide as the Mission-critical UNIX for Xeon. What is that mean? It means that we can collaborate together to make sure that the feature sets that people are — who buyers are focused on that is availability, reliability, Demand Base Switching, virtualization those kinds of features can be unleashed from the microprocessor through the operating system into the hardware the people buy, this lowers are in customers cost and increases the utilization rights. It’s all very, very good.

All the customers are demanding more, more flexibility, interoperability that also a strong argument for us to work together Sun is in a unique position, rather unique position or being the operating system vendor and the supplier of the hardware. That means, we can collaborate to be able to take advantage of a lot of these deep features been in a microprocessors and surrounding architectures. Then the third point is the Intel architecture is expanding.

It’s expanding upwards into the high end of the data centers and downwards into mobile devices, but if you’re independent software developer, thinking about Solaris now, being able to think about Solaris and conjunction with Xeon, which is the volume leader in the marketplace. It’s really important to you as a software developer. You can now take advance of the install base of the Intel hardware that’s out there from Sun and other vendors, but also focus your efforts on Solaris. In terms on Solaris on Xeon in terms of being able to find new markets for your software. In terms of Intel in the enterprise, the driving feature in the enterprise is Moore’s law. It’s been sold for almost 13 years now and Moore’s law gives us more, more transistors.

Up until very recently, the more transistors met simply higher clock speeds. That’s changed it changed in the last year and it’s going to change. I think systemically going forward to where we’ll deliver more performance, but we do it through delivering multiple cores more and more cores of microprocessors on a single chip. That leads to overall lower power requirements, lower cost but gives people more performance. That transistor budget though the Moore’s law gives us, also gives us the ability think but it is the template to put new features on to the chips. You’re seeing Intel developed things like I/O virtualization.

Virtualization of the kernel capabilities to build or run multiple operating system environments on a single microprocessor, which is been true in mainframes for long time and now is coming down to volume-based servers. Intel — from our perspective has done a good job in the last year, meeting all of our commitments in terms of new products coming into the marketplace. We’ve been at or ahead of schedule on every new server chip we’ve developed and we now have industry leading performance on 28th of the top 29 industry benchmarks for servers in terms of performance or energy efficiency of those kinds of metrics. We were the first to market with quad Core. We started shipping quad Core in the third quarter and ramp that volume up in the fourth quarter.

Now you see our quad Core products setting performance metric records out in the industry. We’re stopping Jonathan talked about a deep collaboration. That collaboration goes beyond today’s products and we’re excited about working with Sun or what we can do tomorrow, not just 2007 but beyond. We have a lot of new and exciting products coming out on the next generation Silicon Technology, which is 45 nanometers. This technology is extremely healthy at our conference call last week. We talked about Intel now, microprocessors built on this technology, booting four operating systems and for those members of the press that are interested we’re going to have a deep breathing on 45 nanometers up in Oregon next Monday.

You can talk to our PR people. If you’re interested in attending that that would be one we can actually see what a construct of this technology is like, look the fab look at the products that have been built on it. I think it will be very exciting for you. We have three fabs coming up on this technology in 2008, but I think I talked enough about the technology maybe I think it would be best now to turn a back over to Jonathan and he can tell you about why he was interested in Intel.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
I offered earlier in the day to allow Paul to walk you through this slide. I am, so, thinking about this. This is actually as a very natural collaboration and I want to try to convey to you how we think about our business and how you should look about the some of the strategic moves you’re going to continue to see from Sun as we go drive forward. Every business we built at Sun is independent of the others. They are related to one another, but they cannot be exclusively dependent upon one another. If all we do is built software for our own microprocessors or our own systems. We’ll by definition not be able to go after – majority of the marketplace. The same applies for our storage business.

We cannot simply attach to Sun servers or to the Sun software that obviously misses the majority of the marketplace. By definition, we’re a minority of the marketplace and we’re looking forward to go participate in as broad a market as possible. So, you can dismiss the fact that one looking at our software business, there is a very natural relationship with the volume microprocessor leader in the marketplace. Again if you look at the numbers that are out there, if you look at where people built applications. They’re building them on Intel microprocessors they’re building them on laptops and notebooks, PCs as well as servers.

So, for us, this is an enormous expansion of the market potential, because we can leverage Intel’s brand, Intel’s reach, Intel’s momentum in the marketplace that gives to our consumers to developers as well as the enterprises, more choice and more options that creates more value for Sun. In the fact that we can reach a much, much broader marketplace.

So, frankly along with the technical expertise the fact that when we hurdle together, we end up having engineering interchanges, which create value for both companies. One of the most exciting things here and I think one of the things that is, is really the story underlying all of this. Is the fact that Intel and Sun getting together around the promotion and the endorsement of Solaris changes the game in the marketplace; what was, potentially in question two or three years ago, which is what happens to Solaris. Does it suffer the same fate as some of the other UNIX is in the marketplace that issue is now off the table.

We clearly have volume, we clearly can work together with Intel to amplify that volume and not just – go look at the market as it currently is and sharing a vision of where the market is headed next to what Paul just said? The fact that we can excitedly sit down with Intel and say tell us the features you’d like us to expose through the operating system. We’re already talking about I/O virtualization as well as the next generation of network optimization of application performance. These are the kinds of things we can do working together and again that creates market opportunity for Sun, creates adoption, and momentum behind Solaris, and if there is a better leading indicator for the future of Sun’s fortune, I can’t think of it than the adoption and the proliferation of Solaris.

So, tell us this is a very natural relationship, we’re very appreciative of the work that the Sun and Intel teams have been doing over the past 6 months as we tried to figure out or how is it we worked together. I think we have had a bit of an ebb and flow in our relationship and I think we’ve only been detecting flow in the past 6 months and I think we want to continue seeing that go forwards, so again this is to us, this is a historic moment. This definitively changes the game in the operating system landscape, changes the market opportunity for Sun gives developers that want to use technologies from Sun as well as from Intel new choices, new opportunities, new performance, new economics. The fact that we can give more choice to customers that ISV’s have a higher volume platform now to plan. There is just a tremendous opportunity both for the Intel side as well as for the Sun side.

So, we can do what we do best and in concert with Intel’s obvious strength and volume, and brand out in the marketplace. We can combine forces to really go after a next ways of opportunity. So, again, I don’t think we could be happy with the relationship, more expectant of the benefits. This is going to bring to us and to bring to customers ultimately at the end of the day. It’s all about them any ways. So, with that why not I turn it over to Russ and maybe we’ll field some questions.

Russ
So, we’ve got some folks moving around the room here with some microphones. So, in just a moment, we’ll start, but I’ll do have to ask you or we’re going to be online on the web, so I need to identify yourself and the company you’re with, so that people listening in and can also get that information and with that it also if you like to direct your questions to either of these two, just let us — let me know. So, with that I think we’ll start.

Tom
Hi, Tom Sanders (Inaudible) where will the Intel processor sit next to the AMD line?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Right next to it; different boards.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Yeah, probably different boards; haven’t got on that level of collaboration yet.

Tom
I mean is it going to be — can I choose between a Intel skew and an AMD skew for the identical system or what is it going to look like?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
So, I guess two things, one, I’d refer you to John Fallow (ph) and he can talk about specifics of the segments we’re going after. The end of the day, customer will define that. The customer will determine what they want to buy from Sun and what the underlying infrastructure needs to look like? That applies by the way to software as well as hardware because we do an awful lot of business out in the marketplace now, satisfying Window’s demand as much as Linux’s demand.

So, that’s not so much a grand strategic plan about how we carve up the market that’s really a – let’s look at the marketplace let’s go figure out where Intel innovation really creates new opportunity, let’s go after that.

Ian Kinfer - Bloomberg News
Ian Kinfer; Bloomberg News. Jonathan. you mentioned number of facts is one into your decision, but all other the things you said about Intel is pretty much always been true of the Intel in terms of scale, size, power in the marketplace, so why now would be the question place.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Well I think a few things, number one the fact that Solaris was growing as rapidly as that has not always been true. I mean go look at the chart is just been a rocket ride up into the right that changes again. Secondly our server business has been growing double digits and that’s over the past four consecutive quarters on the spot side, triple digits on the x64 side. Frankly I think we’re different company in were obviously coming at this relationship in a very different way.

Thirdly, I think there has been a change in our view of the marketplace and how we want to go after it, maybe leaving some of the rhetoric of the past behind us. Again, one of the first calls I made having gotten my shiny new job was to call Paul and say, “what can we do together?” because clear — of course, we’re going to compete we’re both very large companies. We compete with almost everybody in the marketplace, but where can we go collaborate to create value for both companies, so again this is an either/or relationship for Sun. This is very much in an relationship. I think it is also a reflection on time and place, but maybe I’d also ask Paul to respond to that.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Sure. From our perspective, this is not just a chip deal, that’s certainly is what we’re all about and is important to us from both the credibility standpoint and the commercial aspects of the relationship, but it is not insignificant for us to commit to endorsing Solaris. This means we’ll put deep engineering on it, we’ll put field resources on it and that is from our perspective not just because I like Jonathan, but I think it’s a really good commercial opportunity for us. The install basis Solaris in a lot of places where Intel is not in some cases. Financial services and telecommunication are two markets where Solaris is very strong there being able to offer an optimize environment on Solaris, on Xeon into those marketplaces, make sense for us and it goes beyond the traditional chip sales aspect of the collaboration.

Speaker
The questions (ph) seem to be very quick.

Merv Adrian - Forrester Research
Merv Adrian from Forrester. Can you give us a little color as to when you think you’ll start to ship systems. You said this year, but can you be anymore specific; you think it’s year end, you think it is going to come any quicker on that?

Paul Otellini – Sun
We’re shipping right now; Solaris running on Xeon - go to Sun.com/solaris, get it downloaded, run it. It runs well; it will only run better. And for the specifics of when we start shipping Intel systems, I guess I’d defer to John, late in the first half of 07. Can’t you do better than that John?

Stephen Shankland – CNetNews.com
Stephen Shankland from CNetNews.com. In the past, you guys have been concerned about keeping a cap on your R&D budget; clearly this increases the amount of R&D. You’ll have to do engineering; you’ll to do hardware and software qualifications and certification. I wonder if you can comment on how much of a difference this is going to mean to Sun’s business also in terms of – would just take some supply chain — are you - presumably you think it is going to be justified, but how important is that factor and are you going to be getting any help in those activities from Intel?

Jonathan Schwartz – Sun
Yeah and in fact just to the beginning part; this, is in our view, actually lowers the expense because now we’ve a collaborator who is willing to work with us to court and cultivate and invest in the success of the ecosystem. So, this is a way of making R&D much, much more efficient. We can do what we do best and really now work with Intel to make sure that they can bring all that Intel has to bear against ensuring the success of Solaris. I think the way we look at R&D, we’re not interested in – nor is Paul for that matter in capping R&D. We are interested in the return on R&D.

And so long as we can get a return, we are interested in amplifying that to the extent certainly possible. And I think this is a way of ensuring, we get a better return for the R&D we are doing. Again, Solaris just running on Sun — on SPARC Systems or just running on AMD systems misses the majority of the marketplace. We want to go after the majority of the marketplace. Sun simply delivering SPARC Systems or simply shipping AMD systems misses the Intel opportunity. We want to make sure we can participate in both equally. I think one of the unspoken assets that Intel has is, they got a big software team.

They know an awful lot about software; and the fact that we can get together to optimize Java, we can optimize Net means that we can optimize Solaris; makes their systems look better, makes our operating system look better, makes the overall customer set happier — that’s all goodness as far as I am concerned. And again, I don’t know if you want to add to that.

Michael Singer – InformationWeek
Michael Singer with InformationWeek. Talk about your — you might have alluded to it before, but what were the previous barriers, because both of you had guiders before you took your posts that had a different relationship than you two have today. What was it that broke down those barriers and for you Jonathan and then for Paul? Was it just that you had a new opportunity with Sun that allowed you to take that choice to make this decision today or can you kind of, give us some call on that?

Paul Otellini - Intel
I think it was a bottle of Barolo at Delfina; I think that really - really good bottle.

Jonathan Schwartz – Sun
You know leave history aside, we think — and I think what motivates both of us is, we think there is opportunity – let’s get busy - let’s get after the opportunity. And what do you got, what have we got, how do we put it together in ways that goes off and creates value. So I think, we’re both looking forward and looking at customers — and by the way, just talk to any customer out there; no one could possibly think that this is anything other than a brilliant partnership; all these does is create options and choice for them.

Paul Otellini - Intel
One of the things I think is interesting to observe is that we are coming together at a time when both companies had very positive momentum both in the market and in our products; a momentum behind Solaris, we had a momentum behind the double-digit growth in servers, momentum behind Intel’s new product lines and so forth. And I have always thought that momentum breeds momentum; and the idea that we could get — the two of us working together, could only multiply as what we could have done independently and that was the principal reason for me to really want to do this.

Audience Member
So Jonathan, you’re going to start releasing Dual Processors, Xeon Systems in the first half, which is pretty soon. How long have you actually been developing these systems and also can you comment on when you expect the 4P and uniprocessor systems to come; but basically when did you start working it? How long has this been under cover?

Jonathan Schwartz – Sun
We – and again just so you think about — we don’t take the team that’s working on these systems and have them completely segregated and isolated from every other team at Sun. We have really deep systems engineering expertise; and frankly, the fact that they were only working on SPARC - you know, microprocessors, under-leveraged the talent they had that could enable us to get into new markets. So we have a unified systems team at Sun that builds all the systems we build.

So, in that regard, along with Solaris, which is obviously more than two decades in evolution, we’ve been working an awfully long time in the same space. The question was, when were we really going to commit to build common products. And I think that relationship has been going on for a while, because we’ve seen one another in the marketplace so often.

So I don’t know if I could put a specific date on when did we actually sit down and say okay, what are the aspects and performance and in-outs and how do we go make this — just didn’t work that way. And in terms of the specific ship dates, I am not going to give that to you. You’d give it to the other guy. Yeah, it was a good try still. But again, I’d like to remind you, Solaris runs beautifully on Xeon, is available at Sun.com/Solaris.

Rush
I guess Michael.

Michael Singer - InformationWeek
On the software side, obviously Intel is adopting more the Solaris, but Jonathan talk about Intel software business, and what are the sort of gold nuggets within say TBB or BePro (ph) or what are the things that you’re looking forward to sort of enhancing that you may not already have in Solaris or NetBeans or Java for that matter?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Are you asking him or me?

Michael Singer - InformationWeek
You.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Let me give you a very simple example. Virtualization in a chip is less interesting if it’s not exposed by the operating system. If the operating system doesn’t know how to deal with it or leverage it or take advantage of it that makes the overall systems package less interesting. If we can synchronize and coordinate our releases around virtualization, whether it’s application virtualization, OS virtualization, or network virtualization, that’s only upside. I was with a customer just last week, who is in a very, very high scale and very high value environment, and one of the points they made, which was I think similar to the point that Paul made, is we’re the only company in the marketplace today that delivers both the operating systems and the underlying system infrastructure, the only one.

Now, a few years ago that was viewed as a deficit that was a bad thing, because that wasn’t the future. Well, now the fact that we can coordinate our releases and work with partners to make sure that we sit down with Paul’s team and say, what’s coming up and how can we help you amplify it in the marketplace, that adds value to them and also adds value to us. That applies across Solaris as well as Java. I mean again, to really understand the Sun model, we want Solaris to absolutely scream on Xeon, to blow everyone else in the marketplace away.

Paul Otellini - Intel
If I could just jump in there. The two other areas I think would be interesting, at least from our perspective. Solaris being able to take advantage of Intel’s I/O acceleration technology for the whole I/O part of the system to run faster. Demand based switching, so we can move task back and forth very quickly, exposing that from the hardware to the operating system would be very interesting to us.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Ultimately, if we do a better job of optimizing Solaris on Xeon, because we can, then that means it’s going to win in the marketplace, but we want to present customer with choice, we want to do what we can to amplify the best of everything we build.

Rush
Steven.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Don, you’re silent back there, what’s going on?

Don
Happy to yield the mike down.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
I read your blog, I can start asking you questions now. So Don, what do you think of the deal?

Don
So, where do you see now SPARC and Itanium competing in the future, how do you divide the x86 line from the SPARC line, and in your case, Paul, the Itanium line?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
We don’t divide it, we try to go after as much market as we can, but these are loosely coupled than highly aligned business, and so we want to see Solaris succeed on all platforms on which it ships. The fact that we’ve got four consecutive quarters of growth behind us suggests there is more than enough opportunity across all the disparate product lines. We want to go after all the opportunity and not just isolate ourselves to one.

Paul Otellini - Intel
I guess for my perspective, the very positive part of this relationship is the ability to work together to get the Xeon based systems greater than four, up and running, and delivering really good results into the marketplace. Sun is a good company to collaborate with from that perspective. I think it will be the wrong thing to do to reopen the religious war or Itanium. Itanium is a separate product line right now, Solaris does not support Itanium. If they decide to support it, we’d love it, if they don’t, that’s just business decision on their side.

Russ
Steven.

Steven
So, related question, which is big-iron on x86, it’s something a lot of people have tried for a very long time, Sequent, all these companies that have vanished into the midst, and it’s something I guess really, IBM is the only enthusiast for, do you think that Sun is going to be the company that finally gets big-iron x86 to break out, Paul?

Paul Otellini - Intel
Gosh, I hope so, but…

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
He meant to say yes.

Paul Otellini - Intel
The reason I said that is, is that there are other customers working on 8 and above Xeon as well, not necessarily in this country, so you probably don’t have as much visibility to them, but we see that happening elsewhere. I think that in — if you look at, from our perspective, a snapshot or a side view of the Solaris marketplace in terms of some of those very critical mission, mission critical markets and data intensive markets like financial service or Telco, well, the thing is it has to be reliable has heck, that allows us to get Xeon into the space where it isn’t really today.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Maybe then to give you more confidence in that, the single biggest determinant of the success of a high scale x86 system will be the popularity of the operating system that runs on a single socket x86 system. You cannot start by saying I’d like to build a 16 way x86 system, and oh, I would probably need an operating system. No one starts their business on a 16 way system, they all start their businesses and they all start their projects on one way.

So, the fact that we can show up in the marketplace with a one socket system that — I mean again, this is the recipe we know well. What’s led to the success of Sun Systems business is the fact that we’ve had complete binary compatibility up and down the product set. So, the fact that we’re going to be in this space with our own systems, and by the way with an operating system that eats threads for lunch and scales beautifully, should give us a little bit of a boost that maybe some of the other players haven’t had.

Russ
So, I think I’m going to have one more question here. So, if anybody would like to be the last questionnaire, that would be great, if not, we will end early. Michael, give it another go?

Speaker
No question Duncan.

Audience Member
So, the last question is on Service Oriented Architecture, SOA. We’ve heard about writing to the chip, writing to the OS, we write to the SOA stack, so what is it that you now bring to the table, Paul, that wasn’t previously already there with the current processor systems that you have in place Jonathan?

Paul Otellini - Intel
I’m sorry, what is it, that we bring to the…

Audience Member
Yeah, what is that you’re now bringing to SOA that Jonathan couldn’t do already?

Paul Otellini - Intel
Well, on his SPARC side, he’s been doing it for sometime. On the x86 side, I think we’re very comfortable with our first implementation, a visualization. We’ve a second instantiation of that coming down the pipeline that I think is substantially better than the competition. We have other things I talked about earlier in terms of I/O Acceleration, demand-based switching. The terms of the ability for us to use the advance silicon technology we’re about to deploy, to deliver not just performers, but energy efficient performers, leadership, makes the end systems better. SOA isn’t just what it does, its how it does it and how much does it cost, and we think that we help that whole equation in terms of power performance.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Just to amplify what Paul said that, the single biggest issue with SOA in the marketplace — and look SOA is a horrible buzzword, and we can all agree that it represents something, but no can quite identify what it is. The single biggest issue in the data center, just economics, brutal efficiency, environmental capacity, that I think is — that’s become the dominant issue in large scale enterprises, that’s very different than developer productivity, where obviously we’ve been making a lot of progress with NetBeans and the Java platform.

So, I think just ending here, I want to thank Paul specifically and also especially the Intel team. This has been a long time coming and I know there’s been a lot of hard work that’s been put into it. We are thrilled to death with the market opportunities. We’re both going to go evolve and couldn’t be happier with the progress we’ve made to date, and couldn’t be more excited about the progress we’re going to make in the marketplace. So, thank you all very much.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Thank you.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
It is much appreciated.

Paul Otellini - Intel
We iterate that from our side, thank you.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Good.

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CEO and co-founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani was a featured speaker at the recently concluded first TiE India entrepreneurial conference in Mumbai. We caught up with Sanjeev at the conference and spoke to him on a whole range of issue ranging from what it takes to go IPO on the Indian stock market, and what are the similarities and dissimilarities when compared to an American IPO.

Info Edge was founded in May 1995. Sanjeev and his team bootstrapped their company before they landed their first round of funding from the venture arm of ICICI. Sanjeev talks about how the environment for entrepreneurs has changed in the past 10 years, and how organizations like TiE help foster entrepreneurship.

Sanjeev also offers advice to first entrepreneurs and some of the do’s and don’ts when starting a business. Sanjeev holds a bachelors degree in Economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi and an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad.

Transcript:
Host: Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Guest: Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
This is Kamla Bhatt for PodTech. Today, we have Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and CEO of Info Edge (India) Ltd. Info Edge recently went IPO. It was the first Indian Internet based company that went IPO. Info Edge owns properties like Naukri.com, which is a job portal, Jeevansathi.com, a matchmaking portal, and 99 acres, a real estate portal. Welcome to the show Sanjeev.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Thank you.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Congratulations on your fantastic IPO. You are the first Indian Internet company to go IPO.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
On Indian markets.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
On Indian markets.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Rediff and Sify went earlier in 1999-2000, on NASDAQ.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What was the process for going IPO in India?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
There are a lot of similarities between IPOs in India and the US. There you have the SEC here you’ve SEBI, which is Securities and Exchange Board of India. There you have Sarbanes-Oxley, here you have Clause 49. You have investment bankers in both places. Many of the investment bankers here are also there in the US for there are Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, anybody. So, therefore, there are many similarities, but you know listeners (ph) in the US, there are a couple of differences, which I’d like to point out. The first difference is that by law in India, any Indian company — any company incorporated in India has to list in India before it lists overseas or at least, it cannot not list overseas before it list in India.

So, therefore, if you’re incorporated in India, you would IPO in India first. The second big difference is that there is no open auction process in India for IPOs. There are silos, so, for example you have two IB component of 60%. In the book-built IPO you have a retail component of 30% and a high net worth individual component of 10% and therefore, within these silos there are levels of subscription, under subscription, over subscription, and therefore allocation. The third big difference in IPOs in India versus the US is that there is no discretionary allotment of stock among institutions.

So, the banker and the company cannot decide whom to give how much allocation to. It is all pro rata, all proportioned allotment depending on how much you applied for, you will get a certain percentage of that in case the issue is over subscribed you’ll just scale back. These are three differences that I’d like to highlight, but otherwise road shows, investment bankers, process, DRHP, RHP are very similar.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What was the initial offer that you had?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, we raised about $37 million of capital. Although, the IPO was open for 4 days, we had gone in with the price band of 290 to 320.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Rs 293

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Rs 290 to Rs 320 and that Rs 320 for delivering about 19.5% of the company, we would have raised $37.5 million, which is what we did.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What is the trading at today?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, today, I don’t know, but it fluctuates between somewhere in the 500s.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
So, it doubled.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, it slightly less than doubled, yes.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What are you going to do with the money that you’ve raised?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani – Info Edge (India) Ltd.
This is more or less — we’ll stick to what we’ve committed in the prospectus. This is basically growth capital, so we’re looking at new businesses and new markets, potential acquisitions. We’re looking at consolidating our Noida operations into one premises, therefore, possibly a campus. These are some of the uses of this profit money.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
You’re not a young company. You founded your company 10 years ago, so, it took you 10 long years before you went IPO. What does it take to run a company in India?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, I think if I go back to the early days, clearly the struggle was we didn’t have enough capital. That’s different now, I mean, there is a lot more venture funding available now. There was only one or two venture capitalists maybe in India, when we started out in ’97 and the second is the — because you don’t have capital you don’t have access to good infrastructure, office infrastructure, connectivity and so on. So therefore, almost every business in India would start on a bootstrap mode, self-funded mode or your family is already in business and therefore, is able to fund you.

So, you’ve either access to capital, which is personal capital. Clearly, for ventures like ours debt was not an option, so, while India did have debt available from banks, but, the banks would basically do asset based lending, which is that you‘re buying land, building. Okay, and then they will lend you money, but they would look at your cash flows. Can you sustain the repayments? So, for startups, it is very hard to get money.

So, clearly, access to capital was one thing. I think that’s changing. I think entrepreneurship as a career choice for educated white-collar youths who are not from a family business background, whose family is not in business, it was a brave and bold decision in the ‘90s. I think that is changing because there are enough success stories now. I think the presence of an entrepreneurial network like TiE, mentoring, meeting other people, I think that is a big help. We had nobody. So, it took a lot of bootstrapping when actually — while we started Naukri in 1997 — I have been an entrepreneur since 1990, and the first 10 years we struggled. Then, finally, we got venture capital from ICICI venture in early 2000.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What was the first venture you started?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
The company was still the same, it was Info Edge and it was in various avatars. First there was a partnership, then there was proprietorship and finally, there was a private limited company in which we launch Naukri. We were doing salary surveys, databases; we were basically selling information — ideas, whatever came over, we were struggling, we were running out of servant quarter after paying 800 rupees rent. We had one employee, then two employees, finally we had nine employees when we launched Naukri. So, there was 10 years of sort of struggle out servant quarters.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
So, the inspiration for Naukri, which is a jobs portal, I am assuming came out of the online job portals in the US?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well actually, no. I didn’t visit any online job portal on the Internet till about two years after we launched Naukri. This was an idea, which came to me when — in 1990 I was working in a company, early in 1990 late 1989, which is now called GlaxoSmithKline. I would observe my colleagues — we were sitting in a hall and I’d observe my colleagues would always look at appointment ads in business magazines before reading the rest of the magazine and then they would discuss.

So, I came to the conclusion that jobs are a high interest category of information and the next thing I noticed was that every week five or six headhunters would call and try and hit at one or the other of my colleagues. These jobs were never advertised and they were different headhunters each time with a different job. I figured there’s a whole fragmented database of jobs out there, which is not advertised and jobs are a high interest category of information.

So, if somebody would compile a database of jobs, keep it live and current and a national kind of archive, which is current, it would be a very powerful product. The only thing I didn’t know was how to implement it because there was no Internet that time. So, when the Internet came in ’95 in India and I saw it the first time in ’96 is when I revived this idea and I said look we can do this. So, the initial sort of Website we launched in March ’97, was something which was pure job listings. There was no resume database, so, we didn’t have the benefit of looking at other job sites around the world otherwise, we’d have launched with a much wider range of products, initially.

So, that’s how the idea came out. Of course, we evolved as we looked at competition, we looked at customers, we’d began to speak to people, we saw what’s happening. So, now it’s a very different product, but initially, it was an idea we just got by observing job seekers.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What is the status of the job market today? What percentage of the classifieds does Naukri have?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
You know, market share figures are — there is no sort of industry documentation. Market share figures are therefore are hard to come by, but if you look at online classifieds and you look at data like comScore or Alexa, on traffic share if you define the market as consisting of Naukri, Monster Plus Jobs and TimesJobs. You define traffic as total page use. According to comScore, we’re somewhere in the 50%-ish range, 54%-55% and according to Alexa, we’re in the 60’s. So, this is the kind of percentage we have. So, we’re definitely clear leaders with higher than 50% market share.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
You’re also running AdSense on your Websites?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
We’re running AdSense on our Websites.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
So, that’s also a big revenue.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, I won’t say it’s big revenue, but it is good revenue. It’s passive revenue, it doesn’t require sales force and therefore it’s very good margin revenue.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
How has your company changed the online jobs market, the matchmaking and the real estate market, because all three are in many ways fragmented, they share a lot of characteristics in common?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, see on the online jobs, obviously, we’re clear pioneers and leaders in India, on matrimonials, we are the Number 3 player, also we started early in ’98, but this is a company we acquired in 2004, so, Jeevansathi started in ’98. We had a minority shareholding from 2000 to 2004 and then in 2004 we bought it from the other partners and began to run it ourselves. We’re Number 3 there. So, clearly, you know, but we’re catching up and it’ll be hopefully in the next — we’ll have some good news to report in the next 12 to 18 months on Jeevansathi. As far as real estate is concerned, see nobody did anything significant on real estate, right from the midst down. There were no prior players prior to the met down who succeeded.

So, this is a huge empty space and when we looked at the amount of money being spent in print media, on television, on radio, on outdoor in promoting real estate project, we figured there was a better way of doing this and if we did something on the Internet we’d be able to get some share of that ads spend (ph) and that’s what the target is. Having said that, it’s a bit early, it’s very new. Right now what we’ve is proof of concept, we’ve got a few clients, we’ve got traffic, we’ve got people getting – getting enquiries and leads. So, that’s happened and that’s good news, but it’s still a long way away from being called a large category on the Internet.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Final question is, what advise would you give to young entrepreneurs today who have stars in their eyes and are looking for — because there are many VCs who are out here? There’s a lot of money chasing very few ideas that’s something that I keep repeating.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, a few things. First is, get some experience first. While there have been a lot of success stories of people who succeeded in businesses without working anywhere else, my recommendation is get some experience. It’s a good idea to have good reality check before you start a venture of your own because it’s kind of harder to lead large team, in the organization scales unless you‘ve had some experience from being at the bottom of the organization. Second is, start businesses in those areas where you’ve domain expertise. The third is, don’t just copy an idea either from the US or from anybody else in India; be different.

Ultimately, it’s the differentiated ideas that will succeed and become big. Being different also enables you to sort of learn early and to make mistakes when it’s cheap to make mistakes before competition comes in and that’s what helped us also, because we launched in ’97 and there was no competition. First competitor came in 2000, by that time we’d learned the business. Competition took a lot longer to learn.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
But today, though you may not have that luxury of learning the business because things are evolving so fast, so, what do you do?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, that’s not true, actually, if you’re focused on the customer and you know your customers really well and you know what his real needs are. You’ve got to base your business proposition, your value proposition, on some deep customer insight. You’ve got to solve the problem that is currently not being solved or in a method that it’s not being solved and it will take, possibly years for competition to get that insight. So, build your business around focused customer insights.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Thank you so much for your time.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Thank you.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
You were listening to Sanjeev Bikhchandani Co-Founder and CEO of Info Edge. This interview was recorded at the TiE conference in Mumbai, on December 18th, 2006. This is Kamla Bhatt for PodTech and as always, thank you for tuning in.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Info Edge, Naukri, 99 acres, Jeevansathi, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, ICICI, entrepreneurs