Feature Story

License to innovate.

Agents of change in Sun Labs battle the spectre of business inefficiency.

25.Jun.02--Looked at from a computer geek's perspective, the innovations that have come out of the Sun Microsystems Laboratories in the last decade are to network computing what James Bond's gadgets are to fighting S.P.E.C.T.R.E.: indispensable, clever, always there right when you need them, and instrumental in restoring order to a complex world.

The SPARC® V9 architecture, the Java programming language, Java technologies, the Sun Cluster 3.0 software, the Sun Ray appliances--all of these technologies and others have contributed tremendously to enterprise and Internet development. While Sun will leave the world-threatening megalomaniacs to Mr. Bond, the Labs' archvillain is business inefficiency. The threat Sun Labs' researchers fight is the ever-increasing amount of information that must be better managed within enterprises. The weapons the Sun Labs use are a unique approach to technology transfer and a dedication to improving processes.

Flow of Innovation

The Sun Labs is unlike other prominent research organizations. For one thing, it's not as mysterious as the Q Branch that supplies Bond's dazzling gadgetry. Although it has facilities in Massachusetts, California, and Grenoble, France, the Sun Labs organization is comparatively small (management layers aren't conducive to innovation), preferring to scoop up as much knowledge as possible from outside. It's not engaged in a patent arms race (though it owns its share). Most important, the Sun Labs successfully straddles two worlds, with one foot planted firmly in research excellence and the other dug into the very real world of profit and loss. The Labs contribute much more than a balanced, focused approach to developing new technologies that solve real-world problems. The organization is fundamental to Sun's success and evolution as a company.

How did the Sun Labs come to play such a crucial role in Sun's success, when so many other shops have languished or drifted into irrelevance? The vision comes directly from Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy, who chartered the Labs in 1990 to be Sun's "eyes and ears" on new developments in the industry at large. While McNealy immediately recognized that the Sun Labs organization is one of many sources of innovation in a healthy enterprise, he also recognized its crucial role within the ecosystem of the business as a whole.

To play its role properly, the Sun Labs organization has to be a renewable agent of change by:

1. Acting as a magnet for top research talent
2. Encouraging individuals to champion ideas--from within and without--that are both far-reaching and implementable
3. Transferring people along with technology to product teams, which creates a need to hire more talent

The resulting flow of innovation refreshes and energizes the whole company. For those who move to the product teams, the "real world" experience instills a sense of discipline no academic institution can teach. When some of these individuals return to the Labs, that discipline informs their subsequent work.

Better Processes and Tools

Sun Labs researchers may have lengthy credentials as world-class scientists, but they're not academics and Sun Labs isn't an ivory tower. They are veterans of rough-and-tumble capitalism who have the courage to take a stand, commit to a project, and back up theories with working prototypes. Sun Labs has a well-known and well-developed track record when it comes to product innovation. Equal, if not so well known, is the emphasis in the Labs on process and tool innovation.

Better processes may not be as glamorous as new products, but they're essential to a smoothly functioning, and profitable, organization. The beauty of process innovation is that an organization can reap financial benefits immediately, without investing resources in product development, testing, and rollout. Bringing out a new product is a risk--a big risk--and process innovation can minimize that risk. Sun never works on innovations that it cannot make use of, so the company itself is the proving ground for many breakthrough process innovations that have emerged from Sun Labs.

Additionally, as the amount of information increases, processes become more critical. Enterprises can be drowning in data, but without effective management tools, they are unable to transform that data into assets. In the current economic environment, the need for better processes has become essential in reducing overhead and increasing efficiencies. Process innovation is therefore significant not only in the development of products, but in optimizing a company's existing business.

For example, demand forecasting is the toughest thing a company does. If you don't forecast correctly it costs money--overestimated demand costs money in oversupply and underestimated demand means lost revenue. The Sun Labs have developed a demand forecasting process that uses available data to build an accurate forecasting model, which is both a methodology and a tool. The methodology is currently being implemented and tested in a collaboration with Sun Worldwide Operations.

As a result of Sun's unique philosophy, the Sun Labs organizaton not only plays a pivotal role in the development of technology for itself and its customers, it is instrumental in maintaining a culture of dynamic innovation throughout the company. Because of its approach to technology transfer and dedication to process innovation, the Sun Labs continue to stand apart from more typical research facilities. Although the Labs won't be coming out with a tear-gas-squirting briefcase any time soon, it's a good bet that the organization will continue to wield an extraordinary influence on the evolution of network computing.

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