Evolution of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is validation (though none is truly needed) of Peter F. Drucker's view of how large enterprises deal with innovation. It was his belief that "a couple of guys in a garage" are not the only source of innovation but that, instead, disruptive technologies could as easily emerge from the laboratories of large enterprises if the culture is conducive to their development. Rick Wartzman, director of Claremont Graduate University's Drucker Institute, considers the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System and the Sun culture from which it grew for BusinessWeek.

Mike Shapiro, engineering director and chief technology officer for Sun's Open Storage operation and his associate Bryan Cantrill were two of the individuals who provided the motive force behind the Sun Storage 7000. Wartzman interviewed Shapiro, whose experience helps give the lie to the tired shibboleth about innovation being the sole province of the outsider.

In Drucker's view, one of the most limiting behaviors of employees in the large enterprise is that they too often and too exclusively focus on solving problems rather than discovering opportunities.

Both Shapiro and Cantrill elected to make opportunity their target, which they identified as the special-purpose appliance, in particular the data storage device. The pair divided their time between the laboratory and the street, where they surveyed potential customers on what they were looking for in the way of data storage technology.

This behavior, too, followed Drucker's strategy, which he sums up in saying, "Because innovation is both conceptual and perceptual, would-be innovators must...go out and look, ask, and listen," Drucker wrote. "Successful innovators use both the left and right sides of their brains. They work out analytically what the innovation has to be. … Then they go out and look at potential users to study their expectations, their values, and their needs."

Drucker also contended that, "A successful innovation aims at leadership" in a given market. If it doesn't boldly seek such a position, "it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely to be capable of establishing itself."

It soon became clear that customers were looking for a truly disruptive product, not merely some warmed over version of legacy systems. "We had to cost half as much and be twice as fast," Shapiro says.

Once the target picture was clearly in view and the technology outlined, it became clear to Shapiro that the work of developing it could be more easily accomplished outside the walls of Sun. Hence, the off-site FishWorks (fully integrated software and hardware) was born. This provided not only the opportunity for breadth of vision but also removed the project from the infighting that might have beset it had the project been housed within Sun proper.

Now, Wartzman concludes, the hundreds of Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System units that customers have selected for their IT infrastructure themselves validate both Drucker's view of innovation within the enterprise and Shapiro and Cantrill's success at developing that technology. As Wartzman writes, "When it comes to innovation, it's smarts, not size, that matter most."

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Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System

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