SUN Microsystems Case Study
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You are going to write up a case study for a company that uses technology in the workforce. An internet/library search will give you a good idea about companies that have case studies on technology. In terms of the selection of the company, you could use one that is listed throughout the textbook or one from any of the articles you have read. No one is to do Apple, Iphone, Dell, Nike as everyone likes to do them, you will all be competing with each other. Try to choose a company that no one else will think to do.
When writing a case study analysis, you must first have a good understanding of the case study. Before you begin the steps below, read the case carefully, taking notes all the while. It may be necessary to read the case several times to fully grasp the issues facing the company or industry.
Once you are comfortable with the information, begin the step-by-step instructions offered below to write a case study analysis.
Here’s How:
Investigate and Analyze the Company’s History and Growth. A company’s past can greatly affect the present and future state of the organization. To begin your case study analysis, investigate the company’s founding, critical incidents, structure, and growth.
Identify Strengths and Weaknesses Within the Company. Using the information you gathered in step one, continue your case study analysis by examining and making a list of the value creation functions of the company. For example, the company may be weak in product development, but strong in marketing.
Gather Information on the External Environment. The third step in a case study analysis involves identifying opportunities and threats within the company’s external environment. Special items to note include competition within the industry, bargaining powers, and the threat of substitute products.
Analyze Your Findings. Using the information in steps two and three, you will need to create an evaluation for this portion of your case study analysis. Compare the strengths and weaknesses within the company to the external threats and opportunities. Determine if the company is in a strong competitive position and decide if it can continue at its current pace successfully.
Identify Corporate Level Strategy. To identify a company’s corporate level strategy for your case study analysis, you will need to identify and evaluate the company’s mission, goals, and corporate strategy. Analyze the company’s line of business and its subsidiaries and acquisitions. You will also want to debate the pros and cons of the company strategy.
Identify Business Level Strategy. Thus far, your case study analysis has identified the company’s corporate level strategy. To perform a complete analysis, you will need to identify the company’s business level strategy. (Note: if it is a single business, the corporate strategy and the business level strategy will be the same.) For this part of the case study analysis, you should identify and analyze each company’s competitive strategy, marketing strategy, costs, and general focus.
Analyze Implementations. This portion of the case study analysis requires that you identify and analyze the structure and control systems that the company is using to implement its business strategies. Evaluate organizational change, levels of hierarchy, employee rewards, conflicts, and other issues that are important to the company you are analyzing.
Make Recommendations. The final part of your case study analysis should include your recommendations for the company. Every recommendation you make should be based on and supported by the context of your case study analysis.
SAMPLE ANSWER
SUN Microsystems Case Study 2
Background
The company was founded following the conception of a workstation based on UNIX by Andy Batchtolsheim, a Palo Alto graduate student, which he dubbed “68000 Unix System” in a project of networking named Stanford University Network. In the month of February, 1982, his colleagues, Vinod, Bill and Scott inaugurated the SUN Microsystems company from the initials of Stanford University network. In 1992, SUN introduced the world’s leading multiprocessing desktop computer, the SPARC station 10 system, which was the first in the competition of desktop performance. That very year saw them ship the most multiprocessing UNIX any other vendor ever did in history.
The other key products of the company include Sparc microprocessors, Solaris operating system, the famous java technology as well as the Jini technology that enabled any kind of device to connect to the network in the form of plug and play. The company also enjoyed revenues going up to 1.3 billion dollars from server sales in 1996, and topped in the 1998 quarterly sales by 16 billion in the technology frenzied internet boom (Afua & Tucci, 2013).
Competitive and Industrial Analysis
In the analysis of the company, Porter’s Five Forces and SWOT analyses will be very effective to help bring out the various factors that the company is currently facing. By design, Porter’s Five Forces Analysis helps in carrying out the assessment of the external environmental effects that an industry will have on any firm towards serving of customers and profit making. On the other hand, SWOT analysis is a tool that has the potential of analysing both the internal and external forces that may affect the company, in this case, the SUN Microsystems and the computer industry. Both may be used in a combination to analyse the current state of the company as well as come up with the most appropriate move for it to achieve the competitive advantage over its respective rivals (Burrows, 2010).
SWOT Analysis of the Firm
This analysis will help in establishing the current position of the firm in the computer industry as well as the internal as well as the external forces that hits it (Sun Microsystems 2009 Annual Report, 2009).
Strengths
- The firm has the most stable server platform even than that of Microsoft.
- The company has been able to establish a research and development division, which helps it keep up with the constantly changing and advancing technology.
- It has forged several corporate alliances with other companies such as Advanced Microsystem Devices Inc. (AMD).
- Its service revenues are constantly increasing, thus, increasing its bargaining power and the ability to expand and capture new markets.
Weaknesses
- The end products and services of the company tend to be comparatively expensive, hence, locking out some of the potential customers.
- The company has a major weakness on their product marketing platforms as they mainly use the internet (their web site), which is quite selective as only the users of the internet may be able to access their new product adverts.
- It had a period of negative revenue from the period between 2001 and 2005.
Opportunities
- The company has the potential of furthering the Java open source.
- It has the advantage of the new CEO, with the new management and marketing strategies.
- It has the ability to outsource internationally, hence, widening its market scope.
Threats
- It faces competition from Linux, which is more open.
- Microsoft Windows poses a major threat to the company as it offers much more capabilities than the firm’s OS products.
- The UNIX server can be made by the company’s competitors
- The PC Research and Development currently being carried out by IBM poses a very great challenge to the company.
Porter’s Five Forces
This tool takes into account five different forces in the determination of the strengths and weaknesses of a firm: substitutes, rivalry, threat of new entrants, suppliers and customers. Porter shows that through the analysis of the attractiveness of the company with respect to the forces, it is possible to come up with strategies that give it competitive advantage over its rivals. For Sun Microsystems, the following analysis may be established (Afua & Tucci, 2013).
Substitutes
There is a very strong threat posed by substitutes based on the grounds that there is constant evolution in the computer industry. To help counter this challenge, the company has greatly invested in the Research and Development, which ensures constant innovation. In the year 2006, the company invested as much as $2 billion.
Rivalry
The industry in which the company is has gained very tremendous competition over the recent past with the technological advancement and the numerous firms that have risen and produce the sane products. The company is facing competition from the top companies manufacturing servers such as, IBM with about 31% of the market share, Dell with 10.5% share and HP with 29.6% share (IDC, 2009).
Threat of new entrants
The industry has a relatively good barrier advantage to the new entrants based on the grounds of the obstacles involved: the costs involved in starting a business and brand loyalty. Most clients tend to stick to particular brand names and convincing them to try out new products tend to be very futile. As such, the chances of facing threats from new emergencies are very minimal in the industry (IDC, 2009).
Suppliers
The company’s supplier base is very unbalances since the company is trying to diversify on its suppliers and the needed supplies. For instance, there is high supplier power in the computer chip market since there only two dominant manufacturers of CPU. In 2003, for instance, AMD got into an alliance with Sun Microsystems whereby it was to use Opteron of AMD in its servers (King, 2008).
Customers
The customer power of the firm is currently very weak as a result of constant cost fluctuation, complications in the switching of software and hardware platforms, software and hardware needs as well as the proliferation of networking. A real scenario case is the pressure that Microsoft has put on its clients to upgrade their software or go elsewhere, for instance, the deadline that was given to the US Army by Microsoft to upgrade their OS to Windows XP latest by 1st October, 2005. This leaves a customer at the dilemma of deciding on whether to move to a new company or stay (King, 2008).
Recommendations
The principle market objective of the company is the small business owners and large corporations. The company should take advantage of its workstation product in order to increase its profit. The company has currently started teaming up with Wal-Mart in an effort to reach out to the small businesses, however, the workstations are not being sold in the stores, but over the internet. To increase its sales of the workstations, the company should start offering them in the stores rather than purely online (Burrows, 2010).
The second move for the company is to take advantage of the open-source software sale. So far, the company has made Solaris OS available for download as well as free download of Java (King, 2008). Lastly, the company’s website is currently concentrated mainly in its performance rather than advertising of its products, making it difficult to surf the website to get to the item desired for purchase. It is, therefore, recommended that the company balances between its performance and advertising.
References
Affua A. and Tucci T. (2013). Internet business models and strategies (2nd ed.). New York: Mc Graw-Hill.
Burrows P. (2010). McNeally: Why Sun is Black. Retrieved on [25th June, 2014] from BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec20051202_718873.html.
IDC (2009). World Wide Server Market Shows Growing IT Investment Across Platforms, According to IDC. Retrieved on [25th June, 2014] from http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp.
King R. (2008). Sun’s Surprising Openness. Retrieved on [25th June, 2014] from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2014/tc20141113_729349.htm.
Sun Microsystems 2009 Annual Report. (2009). 2009 Annual Report. Retrieved on [25th June, 2014] from http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/annual_report/sun_ar06.pdf.
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