President and COO of Sun Federal Bill Vass' Weblog

Wednesday Feb 25, 2009

Did You Hear the Gov. Could Save BILLIONS Using Open Source Software?

This study is worth checking out and sharing with EVERYONE in the Federal Government:

Study: Federal Gov't Can Save Billions in IT Spending (PC World)
Meritalk predicting the gov't could save nearly $4 billion using open source software

From where I sit, the conclusion is obvious, open source is the way to achieve Open Government and save tax payers money, at a time when controlling wasteful spending could not be more important.

Also, the folks in the UK are really getting on board with Open Source, it's wonderful to see. Take a look at this story - Today, the UK government launched a new strategy for use of open source and open standards in Great Britain.

In summary, it:
*mandates use of open standards,
*mandates use of open source where it is not cheaper to use proprietary software,
*requires revision of procurement policies to make open source the equal of other options,
*encourages re-use of developed code - for example, by open sourcing government solutions.

We could learn a bit in the Federal Government from our friends on the other side of the pond!

Posted at 02:51PM Feb 25, 2009 by BVass in General | Permalink

Wednesday Feb 18, 2009

The Open Source Light at the End of the Proprietary Tunnel…

For all of you in favor of improved security, increased procurement speed, improved quality and reduced cost to license and support, that light you see is the end of the proprietary tunnel. If you are in favor of vendor lock-ins, barriers to exit and massive integration projects and budget line items, I may not be able to help you.

From all that we have heard, read and seen, 2009 appears to be when our federal government will finally make open
source ready for primetime. And why not?

For some time, I have been touting the top six reasons for moving to open source:

1. Improved Security and Privacy over proprietary software

2. Increased procurement speed so agency's can get their programs deployed faster

3. No lock into one vendor, support can be provided by anyone since the code is in the public domain

4. Reduced cost of license and support, on average, open source products provide same functionality at a 80-90% lower cost to the taxpayers

5. Improved quality, normally, supported open source products go through three times more quality reviews than proprietary software as part of community review, indemnification review, and then productizing.

6. The Government can become part of the open source community and directly inject their specific requirements into the product.

I plan to create separate blogs on each of the six reasons for anyone still on the fence about moving to open source.

Open source has already proved itself allowing the National Health Information Network (NHIN) to develop a pilot solution that enables multiple federal agencies to securely link their existing systems to NHIN, allowing for the beginnings of a true electronic healthcare record. The pilot was developed with no need for long procurement cycles or massive costs since the entire software backbone is 100% open source.

We hope programs such as NHIN will lead the way to the day when government open source deployments will not be news anymore, they will be the norm.

Imagine a time when:

· The White House will be free from the shackles of proprietary systems and able to take advantage of both the transparency and the security of open source solutions.

· Agencies don’t need their IT solution criteria to focus on legacy and integration, and are able to seamlessly adopt new solutions based on cost and functionality.

· IT deployments are NOT antiquated before they are implemented.

Yes, that light at the end of the tunnel is approaching quickly and luckily, there isn’t a toll booth at the end.

Posted at 01:32PM Feb 18, 2009 by BVass in General | Comments[2] | Permalink

Wednesday Jan 21, 2009

Sun's Open Source Curing Health Care Woes

Once the Inaugural celebrations are finished, the new Obama Administration promises to hit the ground running on a variety of critical programs. Near the top of the list is eHealth reform with more than $20 billion proposed in President Obama’s massive stimulus package.

The key to any eHealth reform program (no matter the price tag) is to facilitate information sharing across multiple agencies and to eliminate the information silos that exist today, allow the government to reduce costs and errors and to better serve our veterans, senior citizens and disabled.

Many have called me an open source evangelist (see Joab Jackson, Government Computer News). But once again, an open source pilot, which has been built and tested without a dollar of government expenditure spent on software, has done what proprietary solutions have not. Open source has enabled the secure and interoperable exchange of health care information across more than 20 organizations.

So, here is the background: If the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is the information highway for health data exchange, CONNECT is the universal on-ramp for federal agencies. CONNECT is a software solution that lets federal agencies securely link their existing systems to the NHIN. More than 20 organizations collaborated to build CONNECT through the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), and as a result, agencies are heading down the road toward interoperability.

Using Sun's entire Open Source middleware stack as its foundation, including our SOA and IdM technology, the FHA built the CONNECT gateway software from open-source code. Talk about an Open Source poster child! The solution was jointly developed by federal agencies yet it will be deployed individually at the agency level. The decision to build the solution in open source provided the usual benefits (I know you have heard these from me before):

· Cost reductions for each agency and taxpayer savings

· IT consistency and compatibility across multiple agencies

· Decreased deployment times

· Security

The CONNECT initiative sped from concept to reality in 2008. In March 2008, FHA awarded a contract to develop the CONNECT solution. The solution was built with federal agency participation, and in September of 2008, three agencies were already demonstrating the ability to share information with the private sector through the NHIN. The number of participating agencies grew to six for the December 2008 demonstrations, and the plan is to have those six federal agencies participate in the NHIN by the end of 2009.

Once completed, the CONNECT software will be available to any stakeholders in the health information exchange community for download. The goal is for CONNECT to be a platform on which government and industry can innovate. This will allow the industry to build and sell better interoperable solutions to the healthcare sector.

We are happy to say that CONNECT Gateway will be made available to the public in March of 2009. Three primary elements make up the CONNECT Gateway:

· The Core Services Gateway provides the ability to locate patients at other health organizations within the NHIN, request and receive documents associated with the patient, and record these transactions for subsequent auditing by patients and others.
· The Enterprise Service Components, which provide default implementations of many critical enterprise components required to support electronic health information exchange, including a Master Patient Index (MPI), XDS.b Document Registry and Repository, Authorization Policy Engine, Consumer Preferences Manager, HIPAA-compliant Audit Log and others. Organizatons are able to use existing applications within the NHIN CONNECT Gateway and free to adopt the components or substitute their own implementations.
· The Software Development Kit (SDK) enables agencies to develop adapter components that integrate their existing electronic health information systems with the NHIN Core Services Gateway.

CONNECT has identified a number of opportunities for federal agencies to utilize the Gateway to address their mission needs in 2009 and beyond. These citizen-centric initiatives will provide a roadmap for 2009 development. Expected FHA activities include helping agencies deliver solutions that lower cost and improve access to and quality of care:

· Collect patient status assessments as they move among various care settings to track effectiveness of treatment
· Populate patient personal health records with information from federal and commercial systems
· Support health services in combating fraud and waste
· Improve coordination of benefits with other payer organizations
· Enhance onsite care for patients during disasters and other public health emergencies
· Support data collection for analysis of potential adverse events associated with drugs and medical equipment
· Help establish local networks among community health clinics that provide care to underserved populations
· Provides anounymous bulk test data for pandemic and bio terrorism analysts

If you haven’t noticed, open source has consistently been a major focus of nearly every new proposed IT program. Perhaps the CHANGE we will see will be the opening of our IT infrastructure.

Posted at 11:16AM Jan 21, 2009 by BVass in General | Comments[1] | Permalink

Thursday Dec 11, 2008

Dismantling The Digital Divide For People With Disabilities

I recently met with Pierce Crowell who manages Section 508 compliance for Sun Federal. He arranged a demonstration for the Sun Federal leadership by Sun's Accessibility Program Office. I was very impressed with what the accessibility team and the open source community has done as far as adding features to Open Source Solaris and Open Office.

Even if you don't have an accessibility requirement, I believe you will be impressed with what these products can do. I don't think you can adequately describe the features without seeing them in action, so I asked the team to put together some short videos that would demonstrate the features. I would encourage everyone to take a look.

I believe from an accessibility feature point of view, the Solaris platform is becoming a leader in the software industry.

Pierce also helped me pull together all the information for this blog.

Sun has been contributing to accessibility and usability for decades, and is now leading an industry transition toward architectural support for accessibility – whereby support for people with disabilities and the assistive technologies they use is built directly into the computing platform.

Sun began this industry transition with the Java platform accessibility framework in 1997 and is doing the same with the OpenSolaris desktop (GNOME) and applications like OpenOffice.org and Firefox and Evolution. We likewise support and develop open source assistive technologies including the popular open source Orca screen reader. These are powerful and free alternatives to the traditional commercial accessibility model. Often software assistive technologies can cost many times more than the PC hardware on which they are installed.

Sun's just-released OpenSolaris 2008.11 is the pinnacle of open source accessibility, and is already receiving rave reviews from blind users. Josh Lambert, a blind user, summed up his first experiences with OpenSolaris: "congratulations to you all at Sun, and thank you so very much for making my boyhood dream come true. Ever since the early 90s when I used to dial into shell accounts, and would hear "unix r system v release, I have wanted to sit behind a Sun console. Now I and many others can."

Regarding the accessible installation experience in OpenSolaris 2008.11, Everett Zufelt responded: “I am overwhelmingly impressed with the 2008.11 accessible install.” He went on to say: “it was the smoothest operating system install that I have ever performed.”

The digital divide does not stop at mere access to IT and online information though; it is also about being able to afford access. Over 70% of blind and low vision citizens in the United States are unemployed. People with other severe disabilities have similar employment statistics. Assistive technology software costs as much as $1,095 for a screen reader that enables blind people to use their computers, which means that access to computing is out of reach for the majority of Americans with disabilities. OpenSolaris, open source and free, fosters digital inclusion that was economically impossible under the costly commercial model associated with Microsoft Windows.

Take a look at these demonstration videos to see for yourself how we are welcoming people with disabilities to the Solaris user community.

Posted at 05:36PM Dec 11, 2008 by BVass in General | Permalink

Friday Nov 21, 2008

Sun Microsystems Federal Adds Yet Another Industry Vet to Board of Directors…

For the past year-and-a-half, the Sun Federal board of directors has been a major priority for me. I want to provide our company with a vast array of resources that will allow us to better understand and serve our government customers. It has been very important to select board members who offer a wide range of experiences in the both the private and public sectors.

It is my pleasure to add another high-powered acquisition to our board of directors – Mr. Arthur L. Money. It would be much easier for me to tell you what Art hasn’t done, as his list of accomplishments is nearly unparalleled in the government IT community. Art brings more than 45 years of public and private IT leadership to our board. He has a distinguished 20+ year career at TRW and currently is the president of ALM Consulting. Plus, Art has held several Senate appointed positions including serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence as well as the Chief Information Officer of the DoD.

I am really looking forward to having Art as an active member of the Sun Federal board. When I worked in the CIO office in the Pentagon, he was a great leader, that moved the DoD and Intelligences IT environments forward. We worked closely to set up the CIO council, complete the Y2K program, improve software quality, secure the Pentagon's networks, and he was always supportive of other progressive initiatives. In addition, Anthony Robbins worked with Art at SGI, since he was on the board there when Anthony was head of their Federal business unit. One of the reasons I believe that Anthony and I both tend to view the Federal market and customers in similar ways is due to how we were influenced by great leaders like Art. We have no doubt that Art will be an active member of our board, helping to ensure that Sun’s roster of open software and hardware solutions maximize the return on investment for our government clients.

Posted at 09:43AM Nov 21, 2008 by BVass in General | Permalink

Wednesday Oct 29, 2008

First Annual SunFed Duck Pin Bowling Extravaganza!

Last week about 160 SunFed, Force3 and AMD bowlers hit the lanes at White Oak Duck Pin Lanes, on New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland. For those of you out there that have never tried Duck Pin Bowling...I know last week was my first time...I highly recommend it. The balls are about the size of a cantaloupe and there are no finger holes. The pins are also smaller than regular bowling pins, and sometimes very unpredictable when struck dead on. I played with Anthony Robbins, Ken Rollin and Russ Craig. I won't tell you my score...Let's just say the event was a HUGE success and we plan to make this an annual outing. Hopefully next year, our very own Tom Vitale will once again bring his band to play...that's right, not only did we duck pin bowl, but we did it in style with "Vital Synz" rocking the lanes. For additional photos of the event, goto http://firstannualsunfedduckpinbowlinge.shutterfly.com. And, if you know of a good duck pin bowling alley in the San Francisco area...please let me know...my kids are dying to try it.

Posted at 05:54PM Oct 29, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[2] | Permalink

Friday Oct 10, 2008

DoD Continues to Welcome Open Source

The DoD continues to be open about open source. The Defense Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is getting ready to put specifics behind the department’s move to widespread use and approval of open source software.

The days of the DoD placing open source and shareware and freeware in the same bucket, thankfully, appear to be over.

Those of you that follow Sun closely surely know about our open source pedigree. After all, the free and open source Solaris Operating System has the largest installed-base of any other commercial UNIX or Linux distribution. We have always believed that the benefits of open source are vast and, most importantly, measurable. Below is a great list of facts and figures about open source Solaris:

1. The free and open source Solaris Operating System has the largest installed-base of any other commercial UNIX or Linux distribution.
2. Solaris 10 has over 7,400 supported applications. There are more applications available on Solaris than any other open operating system. Even if you count just applications for x86 systems, that's 4,300 -- four times the number of apps as Red Hat 5.
3. Solaris is supported on 1,082 SPARC and x86 systems.
4. Systems vendors like Dell, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens chose to resell Solaris because of strong customer demand.
5. There have been more than 11.5 million Solaris downloads to date.
6. Solaris 10 downloads have consistently averaged in the multiple thousands per week for more than a year.
7. OpenSolaris has more than 160,000 registered community vendors. Behind Sun itself, Intel is now the second largest contributor to the OpenSolaris community.
8. Gartner rated Solaris a Strong Positive (the highest possible rating) in its recent Sun Vendor Rating.
9. Solaris 10 has set and re-set dozens of performance and price/performance world records on a wide range of benchmarks, covering a variety of workloads on x86 and SPARC systems of all sizes.
10. Publicly referenceable Solaris customers include BT, eBay and Qualcomm.
11. Solaris 10 has set more than 200 world records in price and price performance (149 UltraSPARC, 58 x64/x86). Check here for the details and stats: http://www.sun.com/solaris/benchmarks.

These challenging economic times, coupled with the need for multi-leveled security architectures, has created a perfect storm for open source implementations. The DoD’s upcoming memorandum is just one of my many actions that will increase the ability for open source to benefit both government IT administrators and American tax payers.

Posted at 02:44PM Oct 10, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[2] | Permalink

Tuesday Sep 23, 2008

The Open Source Coming Out Party…

Thus far, September has become a true coming out party for open source software in the U.S. Federal Government. The benefits we have been touting for years, including lower cost to entry, lower barriers to exit and the ability to better customize, have caught the attention of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Just recently, the House released The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009 (H.R. 5658) which includes language that calls for all DoD agencies to consider open source software when procuring manned or unmanned aerial vehicles. Including such language is a milestone for the open source movement and just the beginning!

Joab Jackson of Government Computer News wrote this in his blog, “The Defense Department has traditionally been somewhat wary of OSS, at least for official duties. So some feel the language could pave the way for greater acceptance within the Defense community.”

And that's not all. This week, come by and visit the 24th meeting of the American Health Information Community where you can see other open source projects in action. Sun Fed will show how electronic patient records can be shared across four key government agencies seamlessly and securely…all because of open source.

Also, the Navy and the OSJTF have been pushing their Modular Open Systems Approach, that not only includes open source software, but also open systems hardware.

More and more we are seeing the federal government move towards open source due to its increased security, reduced procurement times, large scalability (hey if eBay, Yahoo, Google, Army, and Navy can run on it, that is true scale), reduced cost to the tax payers, and escape from vendor lock in.

Open source will just continue to grow as the world moves to open storage (low cost hardware with open source storage management software that makes it perform as well as high cost proprietary storage devices), open network (low cost hardware with open source VoIP, routing, and switching software that make it perform as well as high cost proprietary network devices) and open source virtualization (xVM and Xen cloud computing with out the cost of proprietary virtualization and management software). All of these will bring open source into the enterprise as part of a solution, so it will be there even if people don't know they are deploying it.

So it's good to see the federal government start to recognize that open source is already thriving in their environments (including downloads of Open Solaris, MySQL, Glassfish and Open Office), and they are already seeing the benefits of it. Like the growth of the Internet in the 90's within the federal government, it's much better to embrace it and understand its value than ignore its growth.

Posted at 12:24PM Sep 23, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[2] | Permalink

Friday Aug 15, 2008

All You Mac Users Out There, Welcome to Sun!

It's nice to see that as more and more people start using Macs, the Apple users and developers are seeing more and more of Sun's technology.

Not only are OpenOffice and NeoOffice two of the most popular office productivity software products on the Macs, now Sun's new VirtualBox program brings Windows, Linux, and Solaris to the Mac. And did I mention that all Mac users can download these products for FREE!

Check out this Macworld article You can even see from the video, that the author Rob Griffiths runs Solaris on his Mac... and demos the video! And look at this Slashdot posting filled with tons of accolades...

In addition, starting with Leopard version on the Mac OS, ZFS and DTrace are both included in Mac's operating system. You just gotta love how open source drives adoption.

Soooo...All you Mac users out there, welcome to Sun

Posted at 09:23AM Aug 15, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[1] | Permalink

Sunday Aug 10, 2008

Special Thanks to Wayne Horkan

You may have noticed that my blog has some new added features this week. I want to offer my special thanks to Wayne Horkan for his help in modernizing my blog. This will make it easier for people to find my blog, and improve international access. Not to mention an improved look and feel!

Thanks Wayne, I think it looks GREAT!

Posted at 07:17PM Aug 10, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[1] | Permalink

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