MANAGEMENT FAILURE AT SUN RAY

Management Failure at Sun Ray

Management Failure at Sun Ray

Introduction

Before being acquired by Oracle, Sun was based in Silicon Valley, CA, and had manufacturing capacities in California, Oregon and Scotland. Sun Microsystems used to offer network computing infrastructure applications which contained many brands for example the UltraSPARC, the MySQL™ database management system, Sun StorageTek™ storage applications processor, Solaris™ Operating System, Java™ technology platform, used by social networking, search, retail, news, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, entertainment, engineering, and energy companies.

This paper discusses excluding “innovation trauma”, other more noteworthy failures by senior managers were mainly to hold accountable for the Sun Ray failure . It also tries to find out how major management errors explain this innovation failure.

Discussion

The Sun Ray failure lead Sun Systems to be acquired by Oracle. The company was an important international provider of support, services products, and solutions for maintaining and building network computing settings. Before the Sun Ray failure, it made some major acquisitions of its own, mainly in the software space, before Oracle acquired it. In February 2008, Sun acquired MySQL, a Sweden-based provider of open source and proprietary database technology and software and services, for about $904.0 million. In the second half of 2005, Sun acquired three companies: Tarantella (software), SeeBeyond (software) and StorageTek (storage infrastructure solutions). Sun paid $4.1 billion to acquire StorageTek (acquisition competed in August 2005), having an annual revenue of $2.2 billion. From 2005 to 2009 (the most recent financial years available), Sun's revenue grew at an annualized rate of 0.8%. On Feb. 2, 2010, Co. was acquired by Oracle Corp. for $7,074,700,000 in cash.

Sun Ray decided to change its industry in 1999 where they improvised an easy, low-cost machine that required no desktop management was initiated at the New York Enterprise Computing Forum at a cost of $399. This was seen as a revolution in the desktop computing. Sun Ray still sells its product but not near their initial projections. Java Station prevented the Sun Ray from having a fair playing ground. (Prager 2000, 2-23 )

Sun Ray's failure was not an innovation failure but a management failure. If management had managed Java Station properly it would not have resulted in Sun Ray's failure.

Management and Innovation

Innovation is a social method in which technical knowledge and inventions are selectively exploited on behalf of (corporate or government) institutional agendas driven by marketplace values or political policies. Inventions, and more broadly scientific and engineering expertise, are merely raw materials for technological innovation, which is the value-laden, ethically provocative method that determines whether an invention is introduced into a society, the form in which it is introduced, and the direction of its subsequent development as society responds to the innovation. The introduction of the automobile, television, nuclear power plants, and the Internet are examples of the value-laden innovation method, including how societal responses feed back into the course of innovation developments over time. (Acs 2010, 203-18)

Management is the practice of forming a novel company or commercial enterprise, ...