Bill Joy was a student at Cal Berkeley when he joined with other students at rival Stanford to create SUN. Bill is profiled in Malcolm Gladwells new best seller called Outliers. This book attempts to describe what makes people successful. Two factors cited are opportunity and commitment. Opportunity is defined as access. Commitment is defined by time.

I'm excited to have been at the St. Paul/Sun Center of Excellence opening because we are creating a place that provides opportunities for students to commit themselves to their success and the success of their local communities. Students will be given the opportunity to develop skills in Java and web development, Open Source technologies and virtual world technologies. This is exciting not only because of the opportunity for personal development but also because of the potential to transform how we educate students in the future.

The St. Paul Sun Center of Excellence is an example of Sun's threefold business strategy of:

• Building digital literacy which involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in the wider society


• Building communities in which we support student and professionals' abilities to start networking, learning, and sharing with peers and experts


• Building technology that in turn is constructed back into the communities which in turn builds demand for digital literacy

Jared Diamond, a UCLA professor, wrote an a Pulitzer Prize an award winning book called Guns, Germs & Steel to answer the question: “Why did human societies have such diverse faces.”

One factor was innovation and the speed with which technology was adopted by a society. He writes:

“Technology develops cumulatively rather than in isolated heroic acts and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.”

Sun was built on this concept as expressed by Bill Joy's law of innovation: "Innovation happens elsewhere". By embracing this law, we've been able to grow well beyond our own employee base.

The St Paul College Center of Excellence will advance technology in unforeseen ways that build upon the work of others. I look forward to seeing innovation happen.