Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, Federal, likens middleware to plumbing, the sort of infrastructure no one bothers to think about until, suddenly, it doesn't work. Vass reminds readers that IT technology is cyclical and that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) are part of the current cycle around distributed computing. He and Ashesh Badani have done a podcast that reviews the evolution of distributed computing to the current state of SOA, as well as how SOA is being used in the Federal Government, and some of the technical and business challenges involved.

In a SearchOpenSource.com article, writer Andrew Bardin Williams seeks an answer on whether open source solutions are secure enough for government IT infrastructure. Gartner Analyst John Pescatore believes that many open source solutions are more secure than closed source solutions and may even be a better fit in the government sector.

Sun has released its Secure Network Access Platform (SNAP), based on the Trusted SolarisTM Operating System, in the UK where it will offer government clients secure access to highly sensitive data and important applications. SNAP will also ensure safe collaboration between government organizations, dramatically reducing the threat posed by viruses, worms and hackers to the integrity of their networks.

The Army Accessions Command is implementing a document management system for use by its recruiters that will facilitate the sharing of information among interested Army systems and recruits themselves. The Sun IT infrastructure was chosen for its scalability and because of the potential it poses for moving in the direction of a paperless operation.

An advanced logistics platform of software and hardware will be delivered in a joint project by Sun and IFS Defense to Aerospace and Defense (A&D) organizations. This joint solution offers IFS applications running on the Sun JavaTM Enterprise System and the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS).