For insight into Sun's approach to the dynamic hardware-software markets, Mark Jones, news editor of InfoWorld, turned to John Fowler, the company's CTO for Software. According to Fowler, opportunity exists in security, storage and management issues. Fowler also sheds light on Sun's plans for N1, its hopes for influencing the standards process since joining the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), and a corporate effort to focus on solving actual customer needs.

Distinguishing Sun Microsystems from Dell and Microsoft, Fowler characterizes Sun as a systems company that provides customers with a combination of technologies to enable a cost-effective platform to solve particular problems. Citing N1 as an example, Fowler describes it as a set of tools for provisioning a data center, tools that increase efficiency, utilization and reliability. N1, he says, makes systems available to work across a variety of Web Services systems in a way that is wholly complementary.

Concerning Sun's membership in WS-I, Fowler says the company will promote restriction-free standards and act as a mediator in attempting to resolve issues that have arisen with OASIS and W3C. Customer needs will be paramount in that arena, not simply wrangling with various standards boards. Sun has a particular interest in Liberty and ebXML, which embodies its concern with customer issues, he adds. Sun also hopes to help keep the focus in WS-I on fundamental things like transport-level protocols, wire protocols and simple APIs, so as to allow as open an implementation as possible.

Fowler sees the Java Community ProcessSM (JCPSM) program as one that will continue to be useful to developers creating JavaTM technology APIs, not as an challenge to WS-I. The development of the Java programming language has become exactly the run time tool that enables customers to access whatever they need on any network through an end-to-end architecture. Management of end-point devices, however simple, with a dynamic and increasingly complex networking infrastructure is what N1 is designed to provide, and this will happen most comfortably if the efforts of WS-I result in JavaTM Specification Request softwares that render the changes in the infrastructure as transparently as possible.

Turning to Microsoft's SmartPhone initiative, Fowler pronounces the effort as one dictated more by business considerations than technology. He feels the carriers will block Microsoft's efforts to lock them in to its proprietary MSN product because what the carriers want most is to maximize per-customer revenue, which they can do best without being tied to Microsoft's own brand of entertainment and service properties.

Similar TCO considerations are making life difficult for Sun at the moment, Fowler maintains. During the dot.com era, the cost of an item was all but irrelevant; nowadays, he says, what something costs is more compelling a consideration than what it does -- exactly the reverse of the fervor that inflated the bubble over a decade ago. The prudent focus for Sun is on R & D, Fowler says, because that will best position the company to answer the needs of the market that emerges in the coming years. Security, he asserts, is a perfect example of this strategy.

Another direction for Sun that incorporates N1 is the melding of Storage Area Network management, applications management and systems management, optimizing the HTTP path in the applications server that uses the SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE). The result is remarkably scalable Web performance. Fowler hints at a series of product announcements throughout 2003 that will incorporate a continuing, deepening attention to solving customer problems. [...read more...]

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