THE CHANGING FACE OF SOFTWARE

THE CHANGING FACE OF SOFTWARE

By Jonathan Schwartz
February 26, 2003

It's time to tell the truth about software.

Complexity has reached a business-choking threshold with companies confronting a mind-boggling array of products, versions, and vendors -- all coming at them on different schedules. It has nothing to do with when the company is ready, and everything to do with when the product is ready. But will the new version of this work with the old version of that? CIOs grapple with that question every day. And it's not just the number of software components -- operating systems, portals, app servers, directories, identity systems, security, mail, streaming media, security, calendars, clustering -- that has them buying the big bottles of Exedrin. Or even the per CPU, per entry, per mailbox, per stream, per node licensing madness. It's the unpredictability of it all.

We want to change that.

It's time to recognize, as an industry, that we can't keep throwing software at our customers and leaving it up to them to see if they can make it all work. It's time to bring some order to the chaos. Customers tell us they want software that has been tested the way they use oftware. Not just unit testing, but system testing -- real-world scenarios.

To that end, we've started a new initiative, Project Orion, which takes a radical new approach to the design, development, and delivery of software -- a holistic view of the vendor, partner, and customer software lifecyle.

To address the chaos of software delivery today, Sun is moving all its offerings onto a regularly scheduled "software train" -- with each component required to meet stringent criteria before being allowed onboard.

The proven prototype is our Solaris operating environment, which has been on a quarterly release schedule for the past five years. Customers like the predictability -- and the rigor -- so we're applying the same approach to all our server-side products to create a holistic software system.

This software system will standardize on a set of common components, establish a predictable baseline for extending complementary functionality, and utilize uniform procedures for installation and other common functions. The customer will no longer need to be concerned with software version misalignment and compatibility issues.

If it's in the software system, it all works together.

Make no mistake. The goal of Project Orion is to be an open, multivendor software system. It provides partners and technology vendors alike with a reference for extending and integrating additional software. As an integral part of the software release cycle, the software system will be "hardened" prior to release by testing specific customer scenarios that will raise the level of production-ready quality. Whether partners wish to take advantage of the same benefits customers receive from a predictable and reliable software system, or include their own products on the software train, all are welcome to join and drive complexity and cost out of today's software infrastructure.

Project Orion will eliminate a lot of guess work. Customers will be able to try any or all components of the software system free, then buy using either traditional pricing or a subscription model with predictable periodic payments. In the future, we will introduce "metered" payment plans for even greater flexibility.

With Project Orion, we're raising the bar for the whole software industry. Some may prefer to create complexity so they can make money managing the chaos. But we think it's wrong that companies today have to spend 80 percent of their technology budgets on maintenance and only 20 percent extending their capabilities.

Imagine what they could do if those percentages were reversed.

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Jonathan Schwartz is executive vice president of software for Sun Microsystems, Inc.