When I joined Global Government, Education and Healthcare, I promised that I wouldn't assume I knew too much because I happened to have worked in Sun's Global Education and Research division for several years. As it turns out, I'm glad I made that promise. There are some significant changes in the technology market and what Sun has to offer education customers. These changes center around energy efficiency, preservation and archiving, secure client computing, and partners.

So what's changed?

Energy Efficiency
My biggest surprise is the concern about energy consumption and efficiency. Three years ago, we didn't talk about how the proliferation of technology caused power consumption to explode or how much it was going to cost to cool that technology. (Of course, you only need to have an Intel dual-core laptop on your lap to realize how hot those chips get!)

Now it's a huge concern for our customers that we're addressing with the Sun Eco Innovation Initiative. We wrote about this initiative — and its relevance to education — in the September issue of EduConnection.

Preservation and Archiving
Although initially presented in the context of a university library, there are very unique needs for the archiving and preservation of content that go well beyond what typically comes to mind when we think of data storage. There's also the whole digital conversion process that's under way through projects like the Google Books Library Project, the Open Content Alliance, Europe's i2010 Digital Libraries Initiative, the Stanford Digital Library Program, and the California Digital Library.

There's also all the content that is not only "born digital," but published online. How will we record and preserve these items for the next 400 years? Anyone who tries to open a 10-year-old word processing document knows how challenging that process can be. But this challenge moves well beyond libraries — it includes medical imaging and the preservation of research data.

Since I last worked in this group, Sun has come out with some amazing products to address these challenges. I saw this first-hand in August at the three-day training events we held for our sales engineers. (I was actually a systems engineer when I started my career, so it was interesting to be back among these folks. They were patient with me). Several training sessions focused on storage. It was the first time I really understood how smart Sun's StorageTek acquisition was.

Combine our StorageTek products with some amazing technology like SAM-QFS, the Sun StorageTek 5800 System (Honeycomb), and the Sun Fire X4500 Storage Server, and we've got a solutions portfolio that nobody else has. This portfolio gives our customers the ability to store the right type of data on the right type of media at the right time. And more importantly, we give customers the ability to retrieve that data whenever they want.

Some of our competitors believe that everything needs to be stored on spinning disk — mostly because these companies don't offer tape solutions. But tape is not only more economical than disk — it's more energy efficient as well. (Check out Nigel Dessau's blog for a perspective on the "green" aspects of Sun's storage solution). Needless to say, I'm bullish on our storage lineup.

Secure Client Computing
There's not a university, government agency, or enterprise out there that isn't concerned about the CNN moment of having a laptop with confidential data stolen out of someone's car and then dealing with the aftermath of that theft. Then there's the complexity of managing all these desktops and the energy they consume. All of these concerns have escalated during the past three years.

Like storage, Sun Ray thin clients have important ecological, economic, and security benefits for our customers. When I last worked in Sun Global Education and Research, we were trying to get universities to use Sun Rays in dorm rooms and labs. We may have been ahead of ourselves. Over the last three years, we've made significant strides in desktop virtualization, while at the same time, people have become increasingly disenchanted with the cost and complexity of managing desktop PCs. (Oh, and did I mention how hot they get? Once again, we come back to energy and cooling costs.) Then, as I mentioned, there are the well-publicized security problems universities have when laptops — and the confidential information on them — get stolen.

Educational institutions are starting to understand the value of thin clients. By installing Sun Rays, Valparaiso University reduced its IT administration time — from eight hours a week to one hour a month — in critical lab environments. It also reduced the risk of loss by theft or system failure. In Holland, we sold 10,000 Sun Rays to help doctors better run their offices so they can focus on healthcare delivery instead of desktop maintenance.

Sun's New Partners
Our partners have changed over the last three years in ways that very few people could have foreseen. We know that you want to work with vendors who innovate, and who partner well (who "play well with others," in other words). Well, I can't think of a better example of our ability to partner than our recent announcement that we're expanding our strategic alliance with Microsoft. As you've probably read, Sun signed on as a Windows Server OEM, and Sun and Microsoft will collaborate to further enable the deployment of Windows Server on Sun x64 systems.

Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz talks about this new development quite eloquently in his September 16 blog posting, "Are You Serious? (Sun Partnering with Microsoft)." If you have any questions about what this means for our education customers (quite simply: more value, choice and innovation), please feel free to email me at Joe.Hartley@sun.com.

In other competitor-turned-partner news, IBM recently joined the OpenOffice.org community. IBM will help Sun (the project's creator and primary sponsor) and other stakeholders further develop OpenOffice.org and the Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO-standard for office documents used natively by OpenOffice.org and other applications. In August, IBM also expanded its support for Solaris on x86-based systems.

The bottom line: It's an exciting time to be at Sun. I'm thrilled to be back in sales and back in the public sector marketplace.

Best regards,

Joe Hartley
VP, Global Government, Education and Healthcare

Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com