TT: What, exactly, is Sun One?
Phipps: Sun One is the architecture to deliver smart Web services over the Internet in the future -- today's Web services (e-mail, etc) with context added. It is a Web service that is able to benefit from the context of your location, your calendar, your finances and other information about you to deliver you the right information rather than just give you the ability to browse. It is a smart service.
PHOTO: SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC
TT: I'm not sure I get it, could you explain further?
Phipps: Actually, there are three questions you should ask me: What is a Web service? What is a smart Web service? And what is Sun One?
TT: That's a very Smart service right there, a Smart interview, I appreciate that.
Phipps: (laughing) Exactly, I try to take your context into account and deliver you just the information you need.
Now, what is a Web service? Information or a transaction you need delivered to you over the Web. Everyone's doing that, that's the flavor du jour.
What is a smart Web service? It is a Web service that is able to benefit from the context of your location, your calendar, your finances and other information about you to deliver you the right information at the right time and space.
What is Sun One? Sun One is Sun's architecture for starting today with a view to provide Smart Web services tomorrow. Sun One itself consists of tools, a platform, a service container, delivery to any device, contextual information and the service application itself -- and these include integration with existing systems and legacy and delivery to multiple networks.
Key words for this are: context, multi-net, `I want to be able get my smart service through a Web browser at a workstation,' `I want to get it through a cell phone,' `I want to get it through a PDA' [personal digital assistant] and `I want to get it through voice prompt in my car.'
Smart services are Web services with context added.
TT: Is Sun One more of a software engineer's tool or a user's tool?
Phipps: It's on the same level as Sun's statement: `The network is the computer.' It's a guiding philosophy for both engineers and business people. For engineers, it says open standards are the key to success in the future. The future is going to be massively interconnected and in a massively interconnected world, it's pointless to try to do anything other than open standards.
The best way to think about the Sun One architecture at the moment is it is a positioning guide for standards and product implementation.
It will help select the products and standards that are going to positively contribute to your future instead of run you into a dead end.
I don't know if this is an issue in Taiwan or not, but it certainly is in other places.
Companies try to buy products that are easy to get started with without thinking about what the consequences are if they succeed. People who usually do succeed are those who use scalable, open products because that's what successful companies need.
The right thing to do is to plan for the future when they succeed and plan for it by using open standards and interoperable technologies.
TT: What programming tools and Web software `products' do you already have available today?
Phipps: We already have iPlanet and its suite of services [Internet software], and Forte for Java, community edition, and Forte for Java Internet edition [programming tools].
In the future we will be adding the Web services development facilities onto that and roadmap has those coming out in the second half of this year. Then we will be adding more and more of the context sensitive Web services features by the end of 2002. What we anticipate is that by 2002, we should have a fully populated smart Web services delivery vehicle.
By comparison to that, .Net, of which this is apparently a copy, is not going to have full Web services delivery until 2003. So if we're behind and following then we're, moving at a very fast pace.
TT: Oracle is strong in Internet software, are they part of Sun One, or are they developing their own initiative?
Phipps: It would be early to make any statements about that. Let's just say that they're not saying anything bad about it. And you can expect to see more announcements about Sun One in the period between now and Java One. In the intervening period you can expect to see our partner community making expressions of support ... for some partners, they're going to be very cautious about making those kinds of statements.
TT: What was your `Sun One' pitch in Beijing when you were there?
Phipps: There is a very rapidly growing industry over in Beijing and Shanghai ... and the fact of the matter is, the future market is going to be massively connected. In that massively connected market, people have got to use standards. If you don't use standards you'll be written out of the equation.
So part of the message over in Beijing was to say it is critical to use open standards and open technologies, invest in those, invest in your future.
Don't make the mistake that many people have made of getting started fast and finding that the solution they picked doesn't scale or finding that the technology they picked is owned proprie-tarily by a company that then changes the spec after two years and so you have to re-implement.
I've been kind of keen to say to people: plan for success. Success is a long term thing. Success isn't making money next week, it's continuing to make money next year.
TT: People in Taiwan and China are increasingly turning to Linux and other open-source (software code is available for anyone to use freely) initiatives. What is Sun doing to promote that and how will it benefit Taiwan?
Phipps: There's a dimension to Sun that isn't very well reported. That is key to that thought. Sun is probably the biggest vendor of open-based solutions on the Internet.
When you say open source people think Linux, and of course Sun is a great friend of Linux and is a key player in the community although there are very few places that we ship it. We provide the favorite develop tool from forte, we provide the favorite office suite, Star Office. People couldn't use Linux today if it wasn't for Sun.
But actually open source is much more relevant to us. If you look at Forte for Java for example, Forte for Java was based on open source. Forte for Java today was built from components that are all open source components, they are hosted in a community called netbeings.org and then there's a free implementation of a build with these components and this free implementation is called Forte for Java community edition.
Then Sun has products and services it offers for a fee based on this foundation of services. For example, we have Forte for Java Internet edition. And be-cause this is open source and this build here is free any company in Taiwan that wants to get into the software tools business is able to use this open source as their own.
So let's say you were a Taiwanese company trying to develop a Taiwanese language development tool, you could pick up this code and ... build your own product. We like this because you are doing is investing in this pool of open source components but you are also making your own market and making your own money.
Now if you want to design a Taiwanese Office Suite with full file compatibility with Microsoft Office, you could pick up all of these components and you could produce your own product over here. This is all already compatible with Microsoft.
You could compete directly with Microsoft tomorrow, you don't have to spend 10 years developing the code ... because it's all open source.
So yes, I think Sun has a great deal to offer a country like Taiwan who is producing its own local software.
TT: The Taipei Times is all for open standards, but Sun is a corporation ... what's in it for the firm?
Phipps: Sun's business model differs from the business model of many other companies in the Internet and software industry.
If you take a typical company like Microsoft for example, they seek to grow the business by capturing the market. We seek to grow the business by growing the market. Those sound similar but they are very different from each other. Our approach is vision-driven and open standards-based.
What we want to do is we want to see open standards being defined so that our partner community is able to profit from those standards.
We have a very Keiretsu type approach to our idea of a partner, so a company like IBM is a partner, a company like Oracle is a partner, there would be nothing to stop a company like Microsoft from being a partner. But of course their problem is they're not big team players when it comes to these things.
So, our approach is different, and the result of that is we expect to profit through the growth in the Web services market.
We will sell more hardware, we will sell more storage, we will also sell more Solaris licenses, we will sell iPlanet services, we will sell forte for Java Internet edition licenses for software developers. In the process of doing those things, I don't anticipate any of those becoming monopolistic.
There will be other players in that market. It's an interesting relationship we have with iPlanet because we also want (competitor) VA to succeed because they're our partner ... we have many partners and our philosophy has always been we cooperate on standards and compete on implementation.
Now what you're seeing is us having more growth on implementation. We intend to be a strong competitor. IPlanet products will be the best server products available but that doesn't mean we're going to want to stop being partners with Oracle or VA or anyone.
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