Reflections: Denis Heraud, Sun
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Q. What was the top news in 2006?
Heraud: In my opinion, it was probably the sale of YouTube to Google. The success of YouTube proves one point: that the consumer wants to be actively involved in the production of content and not passive recipients. This is simply the realization of the Participation Age where the exchange of ideas and content is the lifeline of a programme. The Internet is definitely changing into a more participative network, driven by the rapid adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.
Sun recognized this, and open sourced its Java software in November last year to further facilitate developers worldwide in creating applications that will help enable more people to access and participate on the network. We are deepening our commitment to the developer community by fully open sourcing our software--from Solaris OS, NetBeans and Java--all with the aim of lowering the threshold for adopting and creating new technology. We think that this will boost the type of participation on the network, which will drive economic and social progress.
What do you foresee as the No. 1 corporate IT challenge in 2007?
Boosting efficiency with diminished budgets will continue to be the number one corporate IT challenge. We foresee that companies will keep looking for methods to improve IT performance amid rising costs such as those related to energy consumption, and increased pressure to minimize impact on the environment. According to Gartner's predictions, enterprises will waste US$100 billion buying the wrong networking technologies and services through 2011. With the increasing move towards virtualization, companies will need to re-evaluate their IT requirements and invest wisely into the appropriate hardware to ensure long-term sustainability and growth. The other challenge is then to not primarily focus on managing IT costs, but to strategically select and re-align corporate IT processes to meet business efficiencies and enable innovation.
Name one issue that you think the industry should collectively work harder to address.
The move from the Information Age to the Participation Age has revolutionized the way people utilize the network. One may call it the democratization of the Web citizen, as reinforced in TIME magazine's Person of the Year 2006: You. As written by Lev Grossman, "The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter."
The Participation Age is about individuals stepping forward to solve a problem, and using a global network ecosystem to facilitate the exchange of ideas. The currency of this era is in the exchange of ideas; it is in the collaboration of globally distributed participants. You have to decide between isolation and participation--we all have to decide. What will our contributions be towards bridging the digital divide? Sun Microsystems aims to equip individuals with tools that harness the potential of the network and enable people to take on the world's hardest problems--whether they relate to the movement of electrons or to the consumption of the world's resources. The true power of the network is in sharing ideas and technologies to drive innovation and create new opportunities--both social and economic--around the world.
To date, we have open sourced Solaris and Java--key building blocks for the development of next generation applications--but we also continuously help our developer communities turn ideas into solutions. These are solutions that not only impact the marketplace, but also the environment through our eco-responsible solutions. For instance, Sun has been working to reduce the energy demands of computing and networking: from server to desktop and computer grid, to remote access work environments for employees.
However, it takes all, not just one, to cooperate towards bridging the digital divide, and build a truly participative age.
Name three hot technologies to watch.
Instead of naming specific technologies, I would rather focus on three technology areas. The first is eco-responsible technology. In Asia-Pacific, governments and companies are placing more emphasis on how technology affects the environment and business economics. According to Gartner's predictions and highlights for 2007, "corporate social responsibility will be a higher board and executive-level priority than regulatory compliance by 2009. Regulation has become a key issue for government and the corporate world, with the aim of ensuring more-responsible behavior".
Server virtualization will continue to be on the CIO's agenda, which creates a demand for server/hardware manufacturers. Sun's industry-standard x64 products, thin client model, internal iWork remote working program external Open Work Practice, as well as Sun Grid utility are some of our eco-responsible technologies. In specific, Sun's UltraSPARC T1 processors with CoolThreads technology was the industry's first eco-responsible microprocessor which employs 32 threads operating concurrently to keep pace with the increasing speed of the Internet, but uses less power and creates less heat than a common light bulb. Efficiencies like this can help save customers millions of dollars in energy, space, and cooling costs.
It is interesting to note that Gartner analysts have predicted that by 2008, nearly 50 percent of data centers worldwide will lack the necessary power and cooling capacity to support high-density equipment. This is due to the increasing number of Internet-based activities that run on high-energy usage servers.
The second is open source. We will see more pressure placed on software proprietors to embrace the Participation Age. According to IDC 2006 report, the adoption of open source is already used by approximately 71 percent of developers and 54 percent of organizations worldwide.
Open source is receiving government support in Asia and to date mainland China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines have stated preference for using open source. Sun's decision to open source Java was made to inspire a new phase of developer collaboration and innovation. This brings us again to the migration from the Information Age into the Participation Age, where the constant sharing of ideas and information is fundamental to fuelling the economy. Therefore, we see open source increasingly becoming the requirement for software companies to compete internationally.
The third is Web 2.0, which continues to influence and change users' network usage behavior. In Korea, CyWorld is garnering overwhelming response with over 90 percent of South Koreans aged 20 to 29 posessing Web pages on the network. Japan's leading social network, Mixi, has an 85 percent market share.
In order to engage the Web 2.0 developer community, Sun is offering developers the latest Java Standard Edition (SE) 6.0 with such features as a standard interface to plug-in scripting languages and engines, including JavaScript, PHP, Python and Ruby, with the languages able to work inside the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
We believe that this bridge into Java will help the growing generation of Web 2.0 developers create increasingly high performance applications to leverage the full benefits of the network.