Q&A With John Loiacono of Sun Microsystems

Q&A With John Loiacono of Sun Microsystems

In the following Q&A, John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's software group, provides perspective on the announcements made at Sun's Network Computing 05Q2 launch in Washington, D.C and how they relate to the public sector.

Q: What are some of the hot technology trends that you are seeing in the government market? And what are the opportunities for system vendors like Sun?

Loiacono: I think the main trend for all our customers right now is responsiveness balanced with cost efficiency. Our customers want efficiencies of scale combined with a new level of infrastructure responsiveness that adds real business advantage. Government scale is about as big as it gets and we believe that Sun is able to power organization's better than any other vendor out there.

On the software side, a big government trend that we are seeing is the emergence of open source software as a requirement of their RFPs. Sun has a long, deep-rooted history in open source and is the largest contributor of code to the community. With the availability of Solaris 10 under a certified open source license -- one based on the Mozilla Public Licenses -- we feel that we are in a unique position to help our government customers mitigate the risks associated with open source. Sun is the company to turn to for open source solutions for the enterprise and for government. In addition, with about 80% of Trusted Solaris 8 now built into the Solaris 10 OS, as well as some new security technology not available on any other platform, Solaris 10 is the most secure operating system on the planet.

Q: When you're on the road, visiting customers, what types of challenges do you hear about most frequently?

Loiacono: The number one request I hear from customers is to make it simple and reduce the associated costs of network computing. I tell them Sun is attacking this issue head on across many fronts, including our innovative per-citizen subscription-based pricing for our Java Enterprise System and by helping organizations to standardize their infrastructure and scale to meet their business needs through products like Sun N1 System Manager and Sun Java StorEdge Software, along with Sun Connection services.

Additionally, customers remain focused on managing regulatory compliance issues—mostly from a security and accountability standpoint. We have great offerings in these areas as well, led by our Identity Management suite of products and the Sun Compliance and Content Management Solution. Sun's N1 tools are also ideal for helping companies manage compliance issues. For example, the latest update to the N1 Service Provisioning System can track changes throughout the deployment process, tell you if a configuration has changed and maintains an audit trail.

Other challenges include being able to scale existing systems to accommodate business growth, while maintaining the reliability/availability of these systems; and simplifying overall management across the data center -- particularly for time consuming activities like upgrades, patch management and OS provisioning.

Q: How are the new Sun Connection Services going to address these customer challenges?

Loiacono: Sun Connection offers a new approach to the relationship between Sun and its customer ecosystems. By offering a continuous portal link between Sun, our customers, partners and developers, the always-available subscription-based offering provides continuous benchmarking of IT performance, remote servicing, predictive diagnostic services, availability status and software and security updates at no additional cost to Sun customers. It offers an economical method to standardize one's IT infrastructure for consistently high service level delivery.

Q: Does this new offering tie back to Sun Grid? Have you seen any interest regarding Sun's $/cpu-hour model?

Loiacono: Yes. Sun Connection offers customers an entry point to the Sun Grid and gives them cost-effective grid computing access on a utility basis. With Sun Grid and Sun Connection, customers give up the expense and complexity of building out an entire computing infrastructure—and gain more flexibility to run their businesses at significantly lower costs.

Since the last Sun NC, we have made big strides with both our customers and partners, the Sun Grid is live and we have more than 30 proof-of-concepts underway with companies in a variety of industries including: financial services, oil and gas, and entertainment. The Sun Grid allows customers and partners to derive immediate benefits from an open, grid-based computing infrastructure on a utility basis — at the transparent price of $1 (USD) per CPU per hour pay-per-use or $1 (USD) per gigabyte per month.

Q: How does the N1 platform compare to what IBM is delivering with its utility computing vision? How do Sun's latest advancements (NC News) extend the N1 platform?

Loiacono: Whereas IBM's solution is predominantly services-based, Sun's solution is based on open standards and leverages our innovation in research and development. We've taken the N1 effort and dramatically simplified it. The new N1 products provide customers with the ability to provision and manage large and small installations of Sun systems from a single console. The new Sun N1 System Manager is an easy to use tool for managing systems beginning with Sun's X64 line of servers.

The Sun N1 Service Provisioning System provides a standard method of rapidly deploying business services and tracking changes throughout the deployment process to help customers manage their application lifecycle and meet regulatory compliance.

Q: Are your two new N1 products only available on Sun?

Loiacono: The Sun N1 System Manager runs on Solaris and Linux (on any supported platform). Today it manages Sun's x64 systems and provisions Solaris and Linux to these systems. We plan to build out from there.

The N1 Grid Service Provisioning System supports a wide variety of non-Sun platforms. The software itself is supported on Solaris, Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX. Additionally, N1 Grid Service Provisioning System offers: an Application Library of industry-leading Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications, web servers and databases, along with provisioning services for multiple operating systems.

Q: It's been a few months since Solaris 10 was made available on Sun.com. Tell me about market reaction.

Loiacono: Over the last quarter we have seen a tremendous response to Solaris 10. Not only have we distributed more than 1.3 million registered licenses to customers since January, but we also have also received an overwhelming support from the ISV community – resulting in over 1000 applications have been specifically tested and certified by the vendors on Solaris 10.

The Solaris 10 OS is guaranteed binary compatible with previous versions of Solaris going all the way back to Solaris 2.6. All your applications will run on Solaris 10 out of the box and also can take advantage of new features in Solaris 10 such as DTrace, Containers and the advanced security without any changes to the application.

Q: So tie it all up. What does this mean Sun is delivering to the market?

Loiacono: Incredible innovation from both a product and business model perspective, including: Solaris 10, the most advanced OS on the planet - now free and open source; Java Enterprise System, Sun's flagship enterprise infrastructure software that has transformed the way software is purchased, deployed and managed; Sun Connection Services, the best of network-based service offerings and our cost effective Sun N1 tools for provisioning and managing systems and applications. All this adds up to unprecedented value and efficiency for our customers - helping you gain the scale and economies of scale that we at Sun enjoy in our own data centers and that allow us to deliver Sun Grid, a standardized, open, grid-based computing infrastructure on a utility basis at $1/cpu-hr.