While many of its competitors brand themselves as solutions providers, Sun Microsystems is re-inventing itself as a consultancy firm with its iForce concept.
According to today's Computer Faire keynote speaker, Alan Townsend, director of Sun Microsystems, Middle East and Africa, the drive will be backed by Sun's enterprise architectural group, which will have a local presence.
"We are turning Sun into a consultative company in the dotcom era," said Townsend. Part of the process includes the Incubator programme, which is designed to help start-ups with services and product, similar to Hewlett-Packard's Garage initiative. "The incubator programme is very important for the Middle East and Africa, and will be started here."
Townsend also touched on Sun's current three key focuses. Firstly, the company wants to integrate hardware and software to offer one cohesive tool to its market. "The solution must be a cohesive, monolithic structure. It must be hard, fast, and extremely easy to use."
The second focus will revolve around the need for continuous, real-time computing. The requirement for high availability has been demonstrated by the recent cost to online companies due to downtime.
Lastly, massive scalability will be required to service the needs of the Internet economy which Sun champions. Townsend cited the success of Sun's E10 "StarFire" range as proof that business is taking scalability seriously. "There are some really large computing environments coming down the line from Sun," said Townsend.
He envisions the next wave of access devices to come from mobile devices. Cellular phones are the most prevalent of these, but Palm Pilot/cellular hybrids are also expected to make their mark in the user interface market. He believes that Java, and its associated technologies like Jini, will have a large part to play in the access device arena.
Despite the various opportunities delivered by the Internet, the one area that excites Townsend the most is the possibility for vertical portals, both business-to-business and business-to-consumer.
"There is tremendous opportunity for narrow portals," he said. "Take it very seriously. The opportunities for every individual are amazing, and we have the skills and infrastructure to do it."
The Computer Faire keynote addresses were sponsored by ITWeb.
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