In my role at Sun, I speak to many educators, senior administrators, and IT professionals around the world. I hear a similar message at many institutions: You're under tremendous pressure to do more with less. Budgets are being tightened, staff is often cut, and you're left trying to meet increasing demands to roll out new services and applications with fewer resources.

This problem is compounded by the fact that there are few commercial applications that support your core mission: learning and research. You can't go out and buy what you need, so you're left to create it on your own.

We believe that one of the best ways to handle this problem is to engage in collaborative creation of your mission-critical applications. Work with other educational institutions that are developing similar applications and services. The most important factor is collaboration — working with others, you have more leverage to get the job done. This concept is the foundation of the open source and open standards movements.

I'd like to offer some specific recommendations for approaching the issues of open standards and open source.

First of all, decide what your requirements are, and make the long-term strategic decision to implement your mission-critical applications using open standards. When you use open standards, you protect yourself against the future with a modular, flexible system that allows you to replace one component with another, so long as it implements open standards. Work collaboratively with other educational institutions to leverage your effort.

Sun works with many collaborative organizations such as the IMS Global Learning Consortium, the Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIF), the Sakai Project, the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA_SIG), and many more.

Standards-Based Success
When you consider the middleware that you'll need, standardize on middleware that's used across all industries. This way you'll get the benefit of using software that has a large user base, increasing the likelihood that your own staff already has experience using it. The Sun Java Enterprise System is one example, providing a complete set of pre-tested, pre-integrated enterprise middleware that can now be downloaded and used with no license cost.

With your foundation built on open standards and standards-based middleware, focus on building your mission-critical educational applications. At this point, you can make your buy, build, or open-source decisions on a case-by-case basis, using the components that suit your needs best. What was once a big decision — should we go all open source? — now is a tactical decision that you can later change with little penalty.

Finally, don't forget about your operating system platform. Use standard platforms like the Solaris Operating System on SPARC or x86-architecture platforms, or Linux. Choosing a good platform is like choosing good middleware — you protect your future by making sure that you can run it on your choice of platforms now and well into the future. With the recent announcement of the Solaris Enterprise System, customers get the Solaris OS, the Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 Management software, and Sun developer tools at no cost for both development and deployment.

Sun has a long history of creating and supporting open standards, and competing to create the best implementation of them. This approach helps to produce high-quality, cost-effective commercial products. By competing in the open marketplace, Sun takes a big risk — you can choose software from the competition instead of ours. That's what keeps us on the leading edge, producing some of the best software available anywhere.

Sincerely yours,