With the ICT industry moving towards a general purpose infrastructure where more and more disparate devices are beginning to connect to the Internet, vast opportunities have been created for vendors.
This was announced by Jonathan Schwarz, COO of Sun Microsystems, who was speaking at the company's Network Computing 2005, Q3 function held in New York City this month.
"The rise of industry standards and an insatiable global appetite to connect all these devices together are colliding and creating even more opportunities. Sun Microsystems is meeting these demands and turning its focus to the OEM market.
"The OEM market for medical equipment, automotive industries, networking, power meters, jet engines and power turbines all produce devices that are being connected to the Internet. But they need large data centres to control the information and provide basic networking capabilities.
"Clearly Sun has played a strong role in the OEM software market and to a somewhat lesser extent the hardware side. We are going to continue to create and drive the evolution of Sun's technology into every device one can imagine."
Earlier in his presentation Schwartz said that Sun's StorageTek acquisition was in line with the current wave to consolidate the industry.
"This acquisition was not simply the purchase of a tape company, but a data company. If you have a presence in the data management strategy of a company you are at the core of everything from compliance to personalisation to how they serve their customers. The customers are their data," Schwartz said.
The acquisition, he said, has positioned Sun at the core of 17 000 of the world's largest companies.
"One-third of the world's archived data is now being supported by a Sun Microsystems infrastructure."
Of Sun's relationship with AMD, Schwartz asked Dirk Meyer, president of AMD's Microprocessor division to share the stage.
"AMD has begun to deliver a fundamentally different view of what the X86 market can look like. Two years ago when we first started working together we discussed volumes, innovations and standards.
"That, coupled with the vision of Solaris in a true enterprise class solution has sparked a lot of enthusiasm within the AMD and Sun Microsystems technology communities," said Meyer.
He added that there was an "incredible momentum shift" to large-scale deployment of the Solaris X86 architecture in the market.
He noted that as far back as 1999 AMD had identified the need for 64-bit scalability to pave the way for multi-core technology. AMD, he said, would continue to innovate on that fundamental base.
Schwartz said that opportunities are "everywhere you look and the market is only growing".
"Every customer I visit is looking to the Web as a means of exploiting business, making their business more efficient and using the Net to adapt to the market. Everything that fuelled the bubble four to five years ago is in fact coming to fruition now and Sun sees itself poised for the build-up," said Schwartz.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision - "The Network Is The Computer" - has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.
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