Dinesh Bahal: Web 2 Industry Practice @ Sun

Jonathan Schwartz – our CEO – just did a morning keynote discussion with Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Discussion was wide-ranging, but I thought that I would mention this snippet... 

Tim asked Jonathan to talk about cloud computing, etc.  Jonathan said we aren't really there yet. He made the point that to be a true utility, two things need to happen:

•  Transparency on pricing, and

• Substitutability (or Portability) - the ability to take the plug out of the wall in one room and take it into another room 

By that definition, I don't know of any of the 'cloud' offerings that could be considered true utilities. 

 

 

I joined Sun 13 years ago, and until I took on this position last year I spent most of my career in Sun Education and Research – a group chartered to understand the needs of Sun’s education customers, and deliver programs and offerings to help solve their problems. I loved every minute I spent working with this dedicated and diverse group of customers.

You may be wondering, now that I’m the Web 2 guy, why am I still talking about education? Bear with me for a moment and I’ll connect the dots.

Frequently I used to meet with education industry customers and they would ask me why Sun focused on them even if  they didn’t necessarily buy much from us. The answer is, Sun has always had a special relationship with education. (Even our name reinforces this... Sun is an acronym for Stanford University Network, because our founders met at Stanford). We continue to foster strong connections with the education community because:

• The problems that educational institutions are trying to solve are the same problems that our commercial customers will be addressing at some point in the future.
• The technologies that students use throughout their education will be the ones they use to build out the architectures for companies that employ them once they graduate and begin their careers.
• The communities that have their genesis in the education sector eventually grow to influence other industries.

So, why do we care about Web 2? For very similar reasons…

• Because approaches to resolve scaling challenges that Web 2 customers are trying to solve today will be the ones that our commercial customers will face over time.
• Because the technologies that the Web 2 customers are pioneering will become part of the mainstream over time - and therefore the technologies that we build for our Web 2 customers will be the ones the traditional customers care about.
• Because Web 2 customers belong to communities that interact with and influence core commercial customers, tackling and solving the challenges that all enterprises will face over time.

Sun recently organized a meeting of some of our Internet-based customers with press  and analysts to discuss how they are dealing with ever-growing demands for computing power, data storage and open-source software. One of the participating companies was Flexilis, a Web 2 company focused on mobile security solutions.  Founder and chief operating officer James Burgess commented "In today's Internet landscape, we're forced to do more with less. Sun's open approach to computing provides us low-cost, high-performance solutions that enable my business to grow and rapidly innovate. There's not an enterprise vendor in the industry that understands my needs better."

We're proud to be working with and learning from our involvement with the hottest new companies. We also expect the distinctions between Web 2 customers and our more traditional customers will blur over time -- after all, who can afford a computing environment that doesn't support growth and rapid innovation?

The term Web 2.0 means many things to many people. It has been defined and redefined, refuted, and debated. It cropped up after the dot-com bubble burst, and was put forward as a shorthand term to encompass all the new ways we use the Web. Now, the term Web 2.0 is used in a context much greater than just technology - from new ways of developing websites, new kinds of business models, new applications or platforms for applications, new kinds of users, to totally new kinds of companies. Some people don't even believe there is such a thing as Web 2.0. Giles Gravier says “I prefer to think that the Web has no version number. It's a constantly evolving entity, and there will never be clearly defined thresholds that we will reasonably be able to label as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0.″ You can read more here.

I'm often asked what Web 2.0 means to Sun Microsystems, a company that has been driving the vision of network computing throughout its history. Within our company, I think that Web 2 can be used in four different contexts:

• A set of horizontal web technologies that impact all our customers as they increase the component of their business done on the Internet and harness the power of communities.
• New, open development processes that are radically collapsing the 'n degrees of separation' that historically isolated engineers/developers from customers/users, resulting in a new interactive and iterative development model with shorter time-to-market.
• An enabler of improved communication, collaboration and innovation among communities with similar interests, such as customers and employees, using the Internet as a vehicle. Popular Sun Microsystems blogger and Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray has said “The overwhelming characteristic of Web 2.0 is the culture of contribution.″ Tim's blog can be found here.
• A new set of customers with members such as new media companies, providers of Internet services, online gaming organizations, social utilities, online marketing and advertising platforms, and e-Commerce sites.

This Blog will be centered around  Web 2.0 in the context of these new customers.

Sun recently hosted a  meeting to learn from these communities, and spent time listening to CTOs from a number of these Web-centric organizations. (See Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Blog for a discussion of the insights we gained from these individuals.) Although the organizations were quite diverse, there was remarkable agreement about their key technology challenges, with confluence around these three critical issues:

1. Accelerating time to market with open source. Taking advantage of the leaps of innovation possible with open source software solutions, bringing products to market quickly and benefitting from the work of other community members.
2. Scaling their technology to accommodate massive growth. Being capable of surviving the 'TechCrunch Effect'. How do companies ensure that their architectures scale to meet the hyper growth that these new companies experience without over-investing in servers and bandwidth?
3. Managing the complexity of that scale by improving datacenter efficiency. With massive growth, the issues of cost and future flexibility become important. Attention is needed to create a cost-effective infrastructure. Efficient systems management, lower power and cooling costs, and managing the datacenter footprint are of increasing urgency.
   

Although these issues are also important to traditional enterprises, Web 2.0 companies are addressing them very differently. Scaling is accomplished horizontally with systems that are cheap and easy to deploy. Quantity is quite often more important that quality. There is virtually complete reliance on open source software. Scripting languages are used more than traditional programming languages.

Sun has set a path for serving the needs of these diverse new customers, guided by our understanding of these three challenges and the new approaches needed to solve them for Web 2.0 companies.

I am responsible for the Web 2/Internet Industry Practice at Sun. Prior to this, I spent a lot of time in the group responsible for the Education & Research marketplace at Sun - where I held roles in Marketing, Business Development and International Sales. I have been at Sun a long time - almost fourteen years.