Sunil Joshi

A common thread: Java, Solaris, OpenSPARC

A friend recently said to me "I don't get it! Sun talks about all this Participation Age and Sharing and everything. I can see how it is good for your customers and users that you are being so open, but how does it help Sun?"

That indeed is a very fair question. Although the words "participation" and "sharing" have a goody-goody feeling about them, I believe that they actually represent a key business strategy for Sun. The internet or web around us is changing. You can call it what you want - internet.next or web 2.0. It is essentially becoming a read-write internet . As millions of users share information, share pictures/files/music, blog, shop and transact on Ebay/Amazon, participate in internet gaming, and as businesses create supply chains and developers collaborate on open source databases to build complex apps, we are already in the midst of the Participation Age.

Sun loves participation this way. The more the users, the more the possible connections between the participants. The more the kinds of things people share the more the transactions on the web. All of these transactions create a demand for infrastructure. Sun is in the business of supplying the infrastructure for this transaction-rich, highly interactive web.

The good news is that what we see today is just the tip of the iceberg. Just a glimpse of what is to come. So far we just talked about participation from humans. Next comes participation from devices! Devices measured in billions. Everything from web cams sending data streams for other devices to process, store and display, all the way to sensors providing real-time data, to smart dust collecting more needless information. The more the merrier! Sun is there to fill the demand for the infrastructure.

But notice one interesting thing about this new web. Most of the transactions are threaded. Zillions of transactions need to happen simultaneously, some in real-time. That's Throughtput Computing for you! The more the users depend on a participating culture to live their life, the more demanding they get. The more the demands on the infrastructure, the better it gets for Sun. We want the customers to ask for higher scalability, higher throughput, higher dependability, higher security, competitive pricing and cooler systems that fit in less space . All are key areas that Sun has strategically invested in for this next generation internet.

It starts fitting together very nicely. The internet demanded by the participation age is highly threaded. So is Java! Intrinsically threaded. And Solaris gives you the best threaded OS you can find. OpenSPARC completes the picture with hardware now that is designed from ground up for threading.

Sun is sharing them all. So that everyone has the building blocks they need for the next generation internet and as the users participate more and ask for more, we can be the best choice for the infrastructure on the planet! Go CoolThreads!

[T: Threads, Solaris, Sun, OpenSPARC]

Posted at 05:22PM Dec 12, 2005 by sunil in Sun  |  Comments[0]