An expected surge in Internet sites such as YouTube and Facebook will help drive revenue growth in coming years at Sun Microsystems, company officials said on Thursday."In the Internet, we see in effect limitless opportunities," Juan Carlos Soto, Sun's vice president of marketing, said in an interview with Reuters during a visit to Tel Aviv. "Media-rich content needs a lot of computing and storage capacity."
Despite its popularity, much of the world is still not connected to the Internet, though growth rates look set to soar in areas like India, China, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe over the next few years.
And as demand grows, so will the need for bandwidth, servers, and storage, Carlos Soto said, adding that much of future Internet surfing will be done wirelessly.
"More people will connect to the Internet via a device like a cell phone than a PC," he said, noting that most mobile devices already use Sun's Java software, which was partly developed in Sun's Israel research and development center.
Sun, the third-largest maker of server computers for business, competes with bigger rivals International Business Machines and Hewlett-Packard for sales of servers and data storage gear.
Carlos Soto said he expected Sun to grow from a market share in the global server market of 13 percent but would not give a specific forecast. He said spending on server and storage products was rising along with growth in network connections.
Life science companies are spending to model drugs more effectively, while auto firms improve crash simulations, he said. "There is a lot more demand for computational abilities."
Boaz Yehuda, Sun's Israel country manager, said he had also seen strong growth from the defense and homeland security sector. He noted that a growing number of airports were using cameras that stream images over Internet Protocol.
"There is now demand for a lot of bandwidth and bandwidth management," Yehuda said in the interview, adding that Sun Israel's revenue and profit doubled over the past four years.
As part of its growth strategy, Sun continues to expand its Sun Startup Essentials (SSE) program, launching it in Israel and the U.K. on Thursday.
The program was launched in the United States a year ago and expanded to China and India in August. It aims to help develop high-tech start-ups less than 4 years old and with 150 or fewer employees through discounted Sun hardware and software and access to components on its Solaris operating system.
Carlos Soto said he was hoping for 500 Israeli companies a year to sign up for the program and perhaps grow to large companies that will use more of Sun's hardware and software.
"You never know which little guy will be the next big guy," he said. "We are getting in on the ground floor."
Early in 2008, more countries in Asia and Europe will be added to the SSE program.
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