The World Is Connected

I finally got around to reading Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat after Bill Coleman's repeated recommendations. A key theme of the book is that over the past couple of decades Globalization has had a dramatic affect on the world's economy. In particular, networking and the internet have closed the distances between countries and people and allowed new efficiencies to emerge. In fact, a better title for the book might be The World Is Connected.

The waves of Globalization described are about using computers to connect people in new and interesting ways. I found these ideas very interesting in the context of the work I do here at Sun. In particular, I rejoined Sun a couple months ago to run a new business unit called the Connected Systems Network. The network connects Sun's systems (Servers, Storage and Software) back to Sun in order to provide low-touch, value added services to Sun's customers. These services range from automated software updates to automatic break-fix support for high-end storage devices.

People in IT know that the most expensive part of running a data center isn't the cost of acquiring the hardware. It's the cost of all the humans required to run all these systems. This is one of the market forces that drove the outsourcing to India described in Friedman's book. However, even the cost savings of moving to low-cost geographies isn't enough. We need to rethink how we service these types of IT systems. I think this connected model is the first step in that direction.

Posted at 11:24AM Oct 02, 2006 by Stephen Wilson in Sun  |  Comments[0]