Network identity has become "the fundamental Web service," according to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun executive vice president of software. At the recent quarterly Town Hall meeting with the media, Schwartz reflected on new software products, the marketplace and feedback that Sun is hearing from its customers.

According to Schwartz, network identity has become a major market driver. "We have obviously spent a lot of time and money talking about the relevance and the role of security and authentication in networks," he said. "(But) it didn't really come home to me -- the degree to which network identity has become a prominent element of the economy -- until I walked into my local Starbucks. I picked up my Starbucks store value card, put $20 on it, and realized that I could take that card to the Web, register it, and actually begin participating in Starbucks' affinity and loyalty program."

And it's happening across the board among retailers. Network Identity has become "the single most common denominator of all systems as they evolve," Schwartz said. "Whether it's the identity of a box of detergent, the identity of a package on a freight ship or the identity of an individual, the investments, I believe, we've made in that are really beginning to resonate with customers as they increasingly look at how it is they serve customers, wherever they may be, in a personal life in an effective way."

Customers are focusing more than ever on value, choice and operational efficiency, he reported. "I think across the board we just continue to see the dominance of the network model of computing being browser-based, and even open-standards based, despite the progress that Microsoft has made around .NET. There are still some issues that I think will increasingly begin to hinder their progress as we go forward."

Schwartz outlined what he's hearing from customers."Value is just a pretty way (of) saying, `Please make it less expensive for me.'" he said. "Less expensive doesn't mean just total cost of acquisition, which is what people are ruthlessly focused on right now. It's also the total cost of integration and in the long run total cost of ownership."

Choice has emerged as a key demand, Schwartz said. "I think now more than ever the issues surrounding choice have taken on a different level of prominence, and whether that's the evolution of Linux or the anti-trust settlement against Microsoft, I think that the element of choice has become much more prominent in the minds of our customers."

Operational efficiency is the third demand Schwartz is hearing from customers "as they continue to operate these very, very complex heterogeneous systems, unlike all of us who have kind of a virtualized system in the form of a personal computer. Obviously CIOs don't have that, and they are trying to grapple with that in an environment where they have less money to spend and have potentially even increasing demands on their systems."

Data Center Outlook

Schwartz also explored the role of the data center in the Sun strategy. "The data center is where, for the most part, you are worrying about persistent storage, and it's either file access, database access or directory access. No one really writes their applications and databases anymore. We've all pulled that out and are writing business logic and JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) software without the evolution of application servers."

In Schwartz's view, Sun's focus on the network is the correct one. "The connection to customers through the access to your Web is really about massively redundant Apache or SunTM ONE Web Server (formerly iPlanetTM Web Server) farms running in the hundreds, if not thousands, to connect and deliver performance to customers. The things to which those systems are actually attached have historically been desktops. Clearly that is evolving now. As I've talked to medical equipment manufacturers, airline companies, and vending machine companies, everybody is attaching everything to the Net. Whether that's just because the standard exists or because there's a business opportunity, that's their issue and their challenge."

Sun is answering that challenge, said Schwartz, in recounting new product releases and strategies. "We rolled out N1, which we think is kind of the next big wave of solving problems for the data center, a kind of cable-once run-forever computing."

He noted the rollout of Mad Hatter, and the "massive StarOfficeTM donation to the academic community, and something you should probably look to see more from us in just donating StarOffice to the planet."

Schwartz promised more tools to promote efficiency. "We think that the office productivity in many places has become just a basic commodity, part of getting your job done. There's no reason why your file format should be caught up in somebody else's applications. It's your data. We're going to continue driving that forward."

"We then delivered a variety of technologies from the remote access pack, along with AppServer 7.0 (SunTM ONE Application Server 7.0), which we made free and delivered to the world." The Sun ONE Application Server was formerly known as the iPlanetTM Application Server. [...read more...]

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