Jonathan I. Schwartz - As CEO of Sun

As CEO of Sun

As CEO of Sun, he dramatically amplified Sun's historically tepid embrace of open source and freely distributed software, attempting to drive adoption, in particular, of Sun's operating system, Solaris. Sun's historic decision to abandon Solaris on Intel compatible x86 computers, he stated in subsequent interviews and blog postings, had entirely undermined the hardware platforms on which Sun depended for revenue - hardware systems that ran only Sun's Solaris.

Sun's stock reached a high of $26.25 in 2007, a point just prior to which private equity investors KKR invested $750m dollars in a convertible debt financing. Toward the end of 2007, with nearly a third of its revenue derived from financial services companies, the global financial crisis hit Sun especially hard. With large customers going bankrupt across the world, Schwartz began looking for a buyer for Sun, apparently contravening the wishes of Sun's founder and Chairman, Scott McNealy, and stirring resentment among employees.

Schwartz ultimately finalized an acquisition a couple of months later, when he signed an agreement for the sale of the company to Oracle Corporation on April 20, 2009. Oracle had been Sun's largest ISV, and had a disproportionate ability to determine the competitiveness of Sun's offerings.

As CEO of Sun, Schwartz was known as one of the few Fortune 500 CEO's to use a blog for public communications. He was recognized for his efforts to bring greater transparency into the corporate world, and managed a public exchange with SEC Chairman Christopher Cox about the use of websites and blogs for the dissemination of financial information to meet Regulation Fair Disclosure. Schwartz generally believed the internet, and Sun's web presence on it, was a far more fair and efficient vehicle for the dissemination of Sun's financial information - as opposed to the expensive, and proprietary networks fostered by ratings agencies and the Wall Street Journal.