In an interview with ITWeb, Sun Microsystems president and COO Jonathan Schwartz talks about the inevitability of utility computing and corporate blogging, and the cultural changes required to benefit from those new technologies.
The migration towards technology as a service is a cultural shift, says Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz.
Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO, Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems last week unveiled an online storage service, charging $1 per GB per month, as well as a Web site where individual users can buy computing cycles. The services are part of the company's utility computing offering that was first introduced in September last year.
Q: It has been mostly quiet since the introduction of the $1 per CPU hour service. Why?
A: We haven't started talking about the customer wins. What we have seen is a number of CIOs now benchmarking their data centres and trying to figure out if they are spending more than a buck an hour. I see a huge amount of proof of concepts where customers are looking at what they are paying for their own grid or what they are paying outsourcers. They are figuring out that they are overpaying by a factor of 10 to 100.
The migration towards technology as a service is a cultural shift. The number of people who use search today versus the group that used search 10 years ago is an unbelievable multiple. Because Google made it simple. But moving to Google is a cultural shift, not a technical one.
Similarly, most businesses today buy computers. My belief is that most businesses five years from now will be buying computing. It's not that one will make the other go away. It's just that there is a dominant model that says it's better to buy electricity from the wall than make your own with your own generator that you run with your own staff and your own chief electricity officer.
Q: You're one of a few executives in the technology industry writing a Weblog. Why is no one else doing it?
A: More often than not, what you see on my blog would otherwise have been a long e-mail to my staff two years ago. In the true spirit of transparency, why would I just communicate with 12 people that work for me and not with 12 million who want to read what I am saying?
Why aren't others doing it? It all depends on the extent to which the network culture is part of the DNA of a company. Even Microsoft for that matter. If you look at what Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble has done, it's just part of the culture of the company that it communicates that way.
At the end of the day, the secret to writing a blog is authenticity. If you don't really believe in the mission of your company or its mission statement, it's tough to write a blog. It's the consistency of vision and a willingness to engage in your marketplace. You can't just use it as a billboard because then people won't read it.
Q: HP in the past has sent you a cease and desist letter because of what you wrote about the company on your blog. How many letters have your received since?
A: I don't know; you'd have to ask our general counsel. I tend not to read those. They go straight to the general counsel.
Q: When you talk to CIOs, what is the question you get asked most often?
A: The top one is: "I'm feeling trapped. I'm spending a lot of money. I'm feeling like I don't have a good grip on [regulatory compliance]. Can you help?"
There's still a great deal of fear of being locked in. Customers now know that they are basically being locked into a proprietary solution.
You're seeing what JP Morgan did in exiting its outsourcing contract with IBM. There is definitely a sense of not wanting to be locked in.
Open source is not the avenue to ensure you won't be locked in. I think open standards are. There is an ever-increasing appetite around the standardisation of IT and ultimately around the delivery of IT as a service. The questions are the same as they have been for the past 10 years. There is just a different set of market opportunities that are causing users to ask them.
Q: What question should the CIOs be asking?
A: What cultural shifts do I need to drive to allow me to spend on IT a fifth of what I do today? Most challenges in IT today are not technical, most of the challenges are cultural - whether it is leveraging $1 per CPU hour or a $100 per employee for middleware, or leveraging a Linux-based desktop, or moving towards open source. Those are cultural changes, not technical changes.
Q: Why is Sun a company worth paying attention to in that cultural shift?
A: The top-level question is: what makes Sun unique? There is definitely a network culture at Sun. It is a company that lives online and that has always been driven by the communities on which it depends, including the open source and Java communities. We are very interested in revisiting not just the technology foundation, but also the cultural foundation.
What allows us to announce a $1 per CPU hour as a utility service is not just having the technology available, but also having the creativity to say: how do we bring this to market in a totally new way that the other guys can't even think about? They can't get out of their own way because their business is too complex. That's the question that I am focused on.
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