So.... Whatever happened to SunTone?
Wednesday Jun 06, 2007
When the SunTone program started in the late 1990s, at the height of the dot.com boom, it was a an innovative approach to trying to ensure that the emerging Internet services met criteria to deliver reliability. These criteria were around areas such as security and availability.
The Program was a classic example of a community effort, with leading Service Provider partners contributing, to create a form of “opensource” specification. For Sun, the program became a way of developing the service provider market by driving a certification scheme for SunTone: those organisations whose services met the requirements could brand those services as “SunTone Certified”.
At the program's height, joint marketing activities and funds were available to certified Sun partners. At one point certification covered a number of categories – Services Providers, Integrators, Enterprise Services and Applications. These variances created a little confusion, but the overall number of organisations that have had a service or application SunTone Certified is over 250. In addition, at any one time, another 250 organisations may have applied for certification.
The specification for SunTone was evolved over the years by the member-driven Architecture Council. The specification defines the Organisational, Architectural, and Process aspects for best practice in network computing. As such, it has been a unique model in the industry: broader than just IT management processes (ITIL) or operations (MOF). The latest version (version 3) developed in 2005 incorporated the BS15000 requirements. In addition, SunTone was linked to application development to create the SunTone Architecture Methodology.
The specification and program was well respected by industry experts. For example, SunTone has often been cited by Gartner as an example of Sun being able to offer unique intellectual property to its customers and partners. In some GEMS (notably SEE) SunTone has been used as part of a marketing and sales campaign to provide an entry, a proof point of Sun's expertise. There are also some individual case studies where SunTone has been used as part of an overall IT improvement program.
But in 2006, the decision was taken to end the program.
In recent years we saw emergence of BS15000 and now ISO20000, and an increasing adoption of COBIT within the industry. Now that these open industry standards exist, is seems no longer necessary for Sun, a leading advocate of open standards, to continue to maintain our own certification scheme. The reference model developed as part of SunTone will continue to evolve and become a foundation for future Sun products and services.
Customers and partners who had existing (current) SunTone certification received formal notifcation of the end of the program in August 2006.
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