OpenSPARC : how giving away CMT chip hardware implementations creates value for Sun microsystems

This thesis uses systems thinking and system dynamics modeling to explore how open source communities such as OpenSPARC can lead to enhancement of the performance of Sun's multithreaded systems and thereby increase its market share by increasing its share of the CMT ecosystem, and the share that CMT systems have within the overall computer server business ecosystem. This study explores Sun's motivation behind its investment in the OpenSPARC community, and explains how OpenSPARC creates value for Sun. The insight into Sun's value creation and capture strategy gained from this study can be generalized and applied to similar companies who are entering a new market where the ecosystem is not yet fully developed. The companies who benefit most from this study are ones which are strategically positioned to disclose relevant knowledge of a critical component within the ecosystem that enables its development without thereby compromising the full potential for value capture within the market. The key findings of this study include: a) Market adoption of multitcore and multithreaded servers is dependent on the rewriting of software applications with parallelization in order to boost the performance of multicore and multithreaded systems. b) The overhaul of these software applications will take the coordination and involvement of all the major players in the computer industry. c) The specific business structure of Sun allows for open sourcing the components of its systems while still gaining revenue on the sale of the system as a whole.

Department dc:contributor.department

System Design and Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Mitchell, Julie, S.M. (Julie A.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael Davies.

• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47869

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47869