Sun eyes today's poor for tomorrow's growth

Jonathan Schwartz believes that large cities will become the hotbed of technology innovation

Sun Microsystems is to focus on densely populated urban areas for its future growth, chief executive Jonathan Schwartz announced at a company event on Wednesday.

"We have seen very aggressive growth in the developing world, and the developing markets are growing faster than Sun [in terms of overall revenue growth]," Schwartz said at an Emerging Markets Summit at Sun's Menlo Park campus in California.

"It is just that today they are the minority of our business, not the majority of our business. My view is that this will shift pretty aggressively over the next three to five years."

The use of technology is no longer controlled by the world's chief information officers, according to Schwartz.

Companies will instead seek to please consumers of services that are enabled by technology, which in turn favours densely populated areas.

Schwartz argued that large cities are poised to become the hotbed of technology innovation.

Because the vast majority of the world's largest cities are in developing nations, such places will be at the centre of future innovation and will offer attractive markets to Sun.

But emerging markets should not be targeted the same way as their developed counterparts, according to Schwartz, because they are not inhibited by legacy technology and favour open source technology.

Sun is already warming up developers to become tomorrow's customers with its support for OpenSolaris, OpenOffice and other open source projects.

"We are trying to focus in on the next wave of developers, students, research and economic growth to best position Sun for the next decade, not the next few weeks or next quarter," Schwartz said.

• A video of Schwartz's developing world pitch is available on vnunet.com TV