“India has an execution advantage as far as utility computing is concerned, since a lot of managed services and outsourcing has happened here”

Daniel J Berg, VP and CTO for Global Sales and Services at Sun Microsystems,
believes that India would be an important market for Sun

In the present scenario what is Sun's technical strategy for providing
IT as a service?

Today, the technical strategy for Sun Services is focused on delivering 'IT as
a Service'. Sun is driving itself and its customers to transform their
datacenters from being 'places' to being 'services'. The transformation
to delivery of IT as a service will drive service delivery metrics of the future
with an emphasis on security and privacy. This will dramatically reshape
software pricing and delivery.

Daniel J Berg, VP and CTO-Global Sales and Services, Sun Microsystems

How is Sun applying these concepts to improve service delivery both for
its internal IT operations and with customers?

Sun Services is focused on this transformation via the use of technology and
solid engineering-not necessarily by constantly scaling up the number of
resources customers may need. Sun is up-leveling the capabilities of its
services resources to take advantage of their innovative culture to drive
increased value for our customers. It pushes people to think about how they
receive value from the collection of hardware and software they have. The
technical end state in my mind is utility computing, or grid. In this case,
everything is delivered as a service be it the power, cooling, hardware,
software, administration, network, etc.

Talking of delivering IT as service, what would your thoughts be on the
utility computing model? Has this model worked well abroad? How has it fared in
the Indian scenario?

The idea of utility computing is still very nascent. The case is true of not
just India but globally as well. The concept seems to work well in some parts of
the world and not so well in others. Not all industry segments and applications
are ready for this as yet. Increased focus on concepts like managed services,
would really be the first step to get closer to understanding utility computing.

As far as India is concerned, the country has at least an execution advantage
as far as utility computing is concerned, since a lot of managed services and
outsourcing has already happened here.

As far as Sun is concerned, our experience in telecom and the increase in
mobile computing in India provide us a huge opportunity to grow in the utility
computing as well as managed services arena. Globally I believe that as
computing grows, utility computing as a concept would get popular.

How has Sun's growth In India been thus far? What are your plans for the
Indian market on the sales and services front?

We believe India is a good place to do business not only because of the cost
arbitrage but also because of the diversity in innovation here. Our focus would
continue to be technology innovation and we would work with our partners to
deliver.

While we would continue to focus on the enterprise market, we are also
looking to work more closely with the developer community as well as the
channels so that we get close even to the SMB market.

Subbalakshmi BM