Keeping its managers IT-engaged

From social networking sites to telecom vendors, open source technologies are being embraced by one and all. The company that originally walked in this path is reaping rich dividends. Sun Microsystems Inc., founded in 1982, continues to grow stronger in myriad markets mainly because of its path-breaking open source technologies that have been kept afloat by developers across the world.

Robert Worrall, CIO, Sun Microsystems spoke to Prasad Ramasubramanian from CyberMedia News on his role as a CIO of this open source behemoth and challenges that are present in the ever changing technology topography.

Excerpts from the interview:

It’s been close to two years since you became the CIO of Sun Microsystems Inc. As a CIO, what steps have you taken to ensure that Sun's businesses get augmented and its technology deployment strategy is in sync with its business strategy?

There are a couple of keys to keeping in sync. First and foremost is having an engaged senior executive team. For our largest business and IT initiatives our senior executives are engaged and drive company direction with IT as a partner. From an IT perspective we have assigned what we call “engagement managers” to each of the business units. Their primary function is to keep IT driven initiatives aligned with business goals on a daily basis. And finally we have developed an IT vision and strategy that is shared across the business to further ensure our long-term alignment.

Sun has been famous for deploying its products internally before unfurling it for its customers. What advantages does this provide your company especially in terms of knowing what the customer would require and how his/her expectations are going to be met?

Early deployment gives us several advantages. First of all, it allows us the ability to help shape products that we use internally for our own IT functions and thus anticipate our external customer needs. Our IT organization contributes requirements to the various product R&D teams within Sun, which enables them to design products that are specifi-cally tailored to our internal customer needs as well as our external customers. We then work with the product groups to do early “testing” of the product as it is devel-oped.

This means running it in production early and finding and reporting any bugs. Our company culture has always been focused on running our own products to gain in-sight into how they can be improved and better utilized. Our employees not only expect us to use our own products, they want us to use them as we all know this will lead to a more reliable and stable products for our external customers.

In an epoch where people shift loyalties at the drop of a hat, you have been with this monumental organization for such a long time, how has the work culture helped you achieve a broader outlook of the functioning of IT in Sun both as an employee and now as the CIO of Sun?

I have been at Sun now for a number of years; indeed time does fly by. I have stayed to pursue many professional and personal objectives. Working in a corporate culture that is focused on innovation is truly energizing. Having the opportunity to participate in the delivery of market-leading products, and the challenge of working with some of the greatest talents in the industry is also motivating and fulfilling.

But first and foremost, it is important for me to work with a company that has integrity, focus, and drives for suc-cess. It attracts the kind of people I want to work with. It is exciting to work with a company that both challenges and changes an industry. Maybe the single largest challenge to me as CIO is to keep up with the rate of change we have come to expect within Sun. We are early adopters of technology, and as you can imagine this often bring with it the challenge of providing a stable and predictable computing environment.

How challenging is it for Sun to keep its developers happy in terms of offering newer and innovative applications at their disposal?

Sun has geared itself to not only embrace but also support the Open Source environ-ment. As the largest provider of Open Source in the world our focus has been and con-tinues to be on supporting not only the product but more importantly the developer communities. Clearly no single company or individual can keep up with the rate of change in open source products - that is the power of it. A key to success is collaborat-ing with the developers and delivering to Sun’s strength while leveraging the overall community.

How is Sun coping up with the consolidation of large business applications on a single frame within the given time frame?

Within Sun we are driving very hard at application consolidation. Like most large enterprises we have a much larger inventory of business applications than we need to effectively run our business. Over time and as a result of business acquisitions, the number of applications has grown. At the moment we are supporting the business in driving sig-nificant process change within Sun, implementing a global ERP application which will enable the business to EOL in excess of 500 applications.

You can imagine the disruption a change of this size can cause. To that end, senior business executives are actively working as a team to set the direction and manage the project. This level of participation and drive is essential for an initiative of this magnitude.

What are the current projects that are keeping you busy and what according to you would be the chief technologies to look out for from a Global CIO's perspective in the coming quarters?

We are paying attention to a number of emerging and existing technologies and changes. Of course the drive to consolidate and virtualize applications, data centers, and networks will continue. Watch for improvements in software and hardware as the “Green Initiative” continues to take center stage. Virtualization across the computing stack will continue. At the same time reliance on service providers will grow as more and more trusted services come on line. This will over time have a “shrinking” effect on the number and size of data centers the typical enterprise runs today.

Mobility continues to explode, IT organizations need to keep an eye on emerging management platforms to provision and operate multi-vendor environments with a particular focus on intellectual property and data protection. Social networking and virtual reality platforms will continue to make their way into the enterprise. On a more tactical level, big changes in voice and data networking continue to present themselves.

For example with seamless VOIP (over 802.11) on the handheld (cell phone with SIP client) do we really need desk phones? And finally, for now, technologies in the unified communications space continue to evolve. We are finally seeing the opportunity for the unified part of it presenting itself. Bottom line, while these are only a few of the technologies on our radar, they all have the opportunity to have a large and positive impact to our business.