Bill Vass' Weblog Bill Vass' Weblog

As you can imagine, it's been rather busy these last couple of weeks of Q4 at Sun Federal. But I wanted to do a quick blog on our new and improved Current Sun Authorized Government Channel Partners listing on Sun.Com/Federal. It is located under the Get Started tab and has been receiving rave reviews from our partner community. It's a lot easier to read, more organized and has a cool feature where you just hold your cursor over the partners name and it provides you with the a link to their homepage, address, phone number, and a link to a contact's email and the Sun partner rep's name. Take a look and let us know what else we can do to improve it, as well as any suggestions to improve sun.com/federal.

I just received my new Tadpole M1400 Ultra-Thin Client Wireless Sun Ray from General Dynamics C4 Systems. It's very cool and you can use it anywhere...from Starbucks to hotels...and even on JetBlue Flights. It features built in 802.11a/b/g wireless technology and allows users to login at any time for access to their session any place there is Wi-Fi, or 3G cell based wireless networking for access from remote locations where there isn't any Wi-Fi. If your cell phone works, or you can get Wi-Fi, or have a broad band Ethernet connection... you can have your desktop.

Like all Sun Rays, all communication is completely encrypted/secured with an IPsec tunnel over the network (each device has its own SIM chip), with an additional 128 bit SSL tunnel within the IPsec tunnel based on a second user SIM chip on the JavaBadge (two factor) that goes all the way to the virtual desktop in the server's memory. That's two multi-factor tokens, and two sets of encrypted tunnels, along with firmware validation and dynamic packet compression with masked headers. All this works together to provide one of the most secure connections you can find short of classified rated encryption....which of course is also an option.

Can't wait to see what Bob Gourley thinks...He just received his too. We also just started testing it with some of our government partners and customers, so check back for updates and reactions.

The last couple of months have been action packed at Sun Federal.

I often talk about the future of IT, the evolution of SaaS and cloud computing, and what the future of IT will hold...so I put it into a video that talks about how IT professionals need to be ready for the Evolution of IT Services. If you have time, take a look and let me know what you think.

Also, I feel that I need to do a brain dump blog on news from Sun Federal.

I think Sun Federal VP of Sales, Anthony Robbins, did an outstanding job of summarizing the current state of Sun Federal on Federal News Radio's Amtower Off Center. Hosted by Mark Amtower, a great guy with more than 30 years of federal experience, we had the opportunity to discuss a wide range of topics from eco to open source to SEWP.

Plus check out another great video interview with Scott McNealy evangelizing the need for more open source policies in the federal government on the homepage of Government Computer News. Scott kept rather busy in Washington, DC earlier this month, keynoting several events including an SRO crowd at The Potomac Officers' Club and a Who's Who of government technology at the first annual Sun Federal awards dinner.

But, we at Sun Federal are still focused on traditional print media too...I wanted to make sure that you saw two major stories in Washington Technology. One story featured the hunt for new talent and the other focused on our new partner programs.

Stay tuned for a feature story on thin clients in Federal Times.

Last but not least, I have also been meaning to steer folks to the new and improved Sun Fed homepage. Please make sure to stop by often, as we will be updating it with new PODCasts, opinion pieces and news.

That just about covers it...Bottom line, we are getting the word out there ... radio, net talks, pod casts, articles, award dinners...You name it, Sun Federal is out there...Now I need to get back to a Sun Federal Board of Directors meeting...one of the agenda items includes introducing them to Sun's Second Life Islands... =-O

At Sun Fed, too often we have seen other industries bestow honors for excellence. From the Grammys to the Emmys to the Webbies to the Major League Baseball All-Star game, we have sat idly by as those on the front lines of government technology innovation sat quietly in the background, enabling our citizens to access critical services but never garnering the true acknowledgement that they deserve.

Well, I say that now is the time to say “No More.” No more anonymity for those working behind the scenes leveraging new and “old” technologies to keep those checks coming from the Social Security Administration or ensuring full access to all content at the Library of Congress or enabling the protection of a National Security infrastructure that secures our nation, just to name a few.

So, Sun Fed took this task into our own hands Monday night and decided to hold our first ever Innovation in Government Technology Awards ceremony at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. It was our honor to highlight best practices in three major focus areas: eco-innovation, open source and network security. The following winners were judged by a panel of Sun Microsystems Federal (Sun Fed) executives and partners:

Eco-Innovation

Victor Giordano,
Transportation Security Administration (TSA)

Giordano is the branch chief, enterprise applications and infrastructure and oversees the test, development and operations and management of all TSA applications as well as the UNIX infrastructure.

Catherine Cesnik, U.S. Dept. of the Interior

Cesnik's eco responsibilities have been large and vast including leading the first pilot test of the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool in 2004. So far, Cesnik's efforts have helped to save the electricity equivalent of more than 400 household and prevent more than 19,000 metric tons of air emissions.

Open Source

Stephen Smalley, National Security Agency

Smalley has been an open source steward within the intelligence community, developing and driving the deployment of both SE Linux and now the implementation of mandatory access controls into Open Solaris.

Andi Snow-Weaver, IBM

Snow-Weaver is the worldwide accessibility standards program manager for the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center. She has been responsible for bringing industry-specific expertise to the development of worldwide accessibility standards for information technology.

Security

Dr. Ryan Durante,
U.S. Dept. of Defense

Durante is a program manager at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate in Rome, NY.  The lab conducts research, development, test and evaluation, and provides acquisition management services and logistics support necessary to keep the Air Force fully prepared at all times. 

Stephen Smalley, National Security Agency

Smalley is as versatile as they come and we could not present a security award without acknowledging his tremendous contributions.

Excellence in Technology Award

Before we closed, we felt we needed to give one more special recognition.  Those in the government IT industry have been able to innovate and succeed in large part due to the policies and programs implemented by elected government officials.  At Sun, we believe no one has helped to facilitate the deployment of technologies to serve the public good more than Congressman Tom Davis (R-Va.).  It was our honor to recognize the departing Congressman for his tremendous work.

So, there you have it, the true Hall of Famers of the government IT industry.

Next year, we are working on a Red Carpet Show on E! and a Sunday night broadcast on a major television network.

The Information Technology environment is a complicated place with many messages about the future; and what CIOs, CTOs and business leaders should be investing in. As enterprises scale out to meet the demands of their mission, business, customers and employees; the need for open end-to-end IT solutions becomes more important every day to IT executives and business leaders.

People often ask me questions like "is Sun a hardware company or a software company?" or "Sun does too much, maybe you should focus on only one thing, and what would that be?" If you stand back and look at the forest rather than the trees, the reality is that Sun does only focus on one thing. In our view, it's many of our competitors that are trying to be everything to everyone. Sun's focus is on Enterprise and Web scale computing, we are not about printer ink, TVs or cameras. If you are a customer that is deploying Enterprise and Web scale computing that needs security, high availability, high performance, dynamic scaling, open architectures, at the best value....Sun is the company for you. We build Enterprise class, open source, hardware and software that is made to solve large scale problems at the most economic price point from the desktop to the datacenter.

To achieve this integrated solution, we focus our R&D in the following areas:

Sun is the #1 leader in Open Source. We have contributed more than any other company to the open source community. EVERYTHING we make is either already open source or going through indemnification to become open source. MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, Java, Glassfish, PostgreSQL, and many other products are all open source.  Our software runs on ANYONE'S hardware. Since we started open sourcing our software, SunFed's software revenue has gone up over 300 percent. We open source to improve security, increase quality, reduce cost, lower barrier to entry/exit, and engage developers. In fact, Sun's software leads the industry in security, and has passed the most rigorous government security protection profiles in the industry.

Sun has three supported operating systems that we focus on, we believe that an OS needs to at least run on the x86 Intel and AMD platforms to be viable. We focus on these three enterprise class operating systems: Linux, Windows, and Open Source Solaris. All our enterprise class middleware runs on these three operating systems.  These operating systems are supported across our hardware platforms, we even hold world record benchmarks on Windows.  Here are the support prices on the GSA schedule for each OS: RedHat - $934.78, Windows - $713.36, Solaris - $599.00. BTW, here is a copy of the production version of open source Solaris, you can get the production version for free, as many copies as you want. Also, open source Solaris focuses heavily on massive threading, since that is the way Enterprise and Web scale computing is moving.

Our servers support three chip families: AMD/Intel x64, Ultra SPARC, and the 64-way CMT. Our Intel and AMD servers are leaders in space and power reduction, and will run your Windows applications in half the space, and with 25 percent less power than HP or Dell at the same price point.Our high-end SPARC servers provide massive scale and hold world record benchmarks for large ERP and database applications. We are the first to offer a 64-way processor that will allow you to consolidate as many 64 web servers onto one low power, low cost chip (one watt per thread). Our servers start at $675.

Sun is a leader in open source enterprise class middleware.  Our SOA/ESB, Database, and Identity Management products are in Gartner's top quadrants as leaders in features, value, scalability, performance, and price. We can help you with HSPD12, with SSO, and in moving to a service oriented enterprise.

Sun is one of the top three storage vendors on the market. Thirty seven percent of all the world's enterprise and web scale storage is on Sun's StorageTek open platforms. We have a comprehensive portfolio of storage and data management products across the entire range of storage platforms.

If you are looking to reduce cost, reduce your power footprint, move to open source software, consolidate and virtualize your applications, or improve scale, performance, and security... you should be talking with Sun.  All of our products are designed to integrate together through open systems interfaces to deliver Enterprise and Web scale computing, that is what Sun is all about.

Lots of excitement during these early spring days in Washington, DC. Last week our very own Peter Korn was recognized at the Fed 100 for his dedication to Section 508 accessibility standards of the Federal Rehabilitation Act and the Section 255 accessibility guidelines of the Telecommunications Act.

Then we had Project Blackbox in the south parking lot of The Pentagon for two days, where we provided tours non-stop from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. to numerous government officials. And now we just learned that Project Blackbox received a Best of FOSE award.

This week Scott McNealy keynoted at FOSE about Sun's open source strategy and did a great job of explaining how the more Sun open sources, the better our software revenue becomes, and the more our customers save by using open source products.

Lastly, I had lunch with my old friend David Wennergren from OSD. He continues to be very supportive of the open source initiatives he started while he was at the Navy. I hope to see more support coming from OSD in the future from a policy point of view.

Can't wait to see what the summer months hold for SunFed, but right now I'm heading back to California...glad I got to see the Cherry Blossoms this trip.

 

Jonathan Schwartz and I have both been blogging for about the same amount of time. Initially, when I was CIO of Sun, I maintained two blogs, one that was internally facing and another that was externally facing. This allowed me to really say "anything" I wanted to employees on the internal blog, often giving user tips on how to use IT features to be more productive, or thanking people in IT that had done a great job. On the external blog, I focused more on industry trends and where I thought things were going and how Sun had a part in the future. I felt both blogs were a great way to communicate to my user base (Sun employees), our customers, the industry, and most importantly, the members of the Sun IT team.

In one of our many meetings, Jonathan gave me a hard time about running two blogs and said I should just take the plunge and do an external only blog, which I did when I moved to Sun Federal as the President and COO.

Recently, Jonathan said I should write more about myself in my blog and that I focus too much on business. When I pointed out that 95 percent of his blogs are about business and the future of IT, he had two comments. 1) That he and each of his blogging staff had created "5 things you don't know about me" blogs - which I still plan to do 2) That my blog needed to have more pictures... which I am working on.

Anyway, I usually don't like to talk about my private life in public, so I focus on the IT industry, open source, and Sun. Well now I have a chance to talk about both the IT industry and a little about my personal life. And I will even work in a few pictures

A few months ago I was having dinner with Rishi Sood, VP of Research at Gartner, we were talking about business and then about our families. I mentioned that my wife is Shari Steele head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) .

Being the tech savvy guy that Rishi is, he immediately recognized EFF as the organization that set up the legal constructs for the Internet, made encryption legal on the Internet so we could have the electronic commerce we all enjoy today, and the organization that is often considered the "ACLU" of Cyberspace protecting our online privacy and freedom. He followed that recognition with the comment "Wow... your wife is MUCH more important than you are." Well I had to agree with that comment as well

Shari and I have made a great team for years, and I am very proud of what she has accomplished at EFF along with everything else in her personal life. She has often been in the press and has been recognized for her accomplishments in many public forums. Shari was just selected as one of the 50 Top Women in Technology by Corporate Board Member Magazine. Shari is on the same page as Nancy Stewart, CTO at Walmart and Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay.

Shari has received a lot of recognition over the years for all the great work she has done... but don't take my word for it ... "do a Google" on her name to get an idea of how great and important my wife really is...

This InformationWeek story "Cincinnati Bell Adopts Virtual Desktops And Thin Clients - The company finds that desktop virtualization is a better alternative to upgrading hundreds of PCs running Windows 2000," is yet another great example of how a growing number of organizations are improving security and saving money through desktop virtualization and thin client deployments - it's not just Bob Gourley and I using thin clients at home and at work. Any organization that has employees working on connected desktops at work and/or at home can take advantage of the security improvements, energy reduction and operational cost savings of a thin client environment. I can't see why anyone would still be deploying old fashioned desktops any more, unless they just like to spend a lot of money, put all their corporate data at risk AND use up a ton of electricity.

Bob Gourley, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) hooked up his new Sun Ray 270 at home and did a great blog on his experience.

I just received the best news from Stephen Smalley at the National Security Agency (NSA). A project to add the Flask architecture for flexible mandatory access control to OpenSolaris has been submitted to and approved by the OpenSolaris security community. This represents another milestone in bringing flexible MAC to mainstream operating systems and will broaden the set of platforms that support this technology. The project is a joint initiative of the NSA and Sun.

This is sooo great, we are excited about working with the NSA to add the Flask architecture to Solaris. We believe this will augment Solaris' already strong adoption and security profile. We look forward to working closely with the NSA and the Flask community of developers to extend this advanced security technology into Open Solaris.

Sun's John Weeks and Rose Mucci deserve much of the credit for working with the great engineers on the Solaris security team and the NSA to make this project move forward. My special thanks to both of them for all their hard work to make this happen.

The original project proposal and feedback can be found on the opensolaris-security-discuss mailing list. The project now has a page and separate discussion list set up.