Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks about his vision of IT for the 21st century, the WebTone concept, and more, in an exclusive interview with Tech Update editorial director David Berlind.
Tech Update: In October, you addressed a large audience of strategic technology decision makers at Gartner's Symposium and used most of the opportunity to attack Microsoft. After, attendees at the event as well as ZDNet's audience who viewed the Webcast said what they had been looking for was an IT-driven business vision. If you had another chance to give them neutral consultative input, what would it be? What should their top five priorities be?
| McNealy's Top 5 Priorities for IT |
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Choose a single architecture that can deliver dial tone-like reliability for the services and applications you provide.
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| 2. |
Pick an integrator or consultant who can help you with the job.
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Put Netscape on every desktop as the standard interface for all your applications and services.
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Before transitioning your legacy apps and services to the new system, load a directory service with every one of your customers, employees, resellers, suppliers, shareholders, etc.
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| 5. |
Use everything you put in place in steps 1 through 4 to Web enable all of your applications and services.
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McNealy: The first thing is that I wouldn't go to the Gartner conference because they ask all the questions. All they did was ask Microsoft questions and their whole deal was to bait me and I'm pretty easily baited on that subject because I have a passion for it. So I apologize for that. I wasn't in control of that. They have two moderators up there asking me questions that aimed the thing in a bad direction.
We do have a strategy, a vision, a platform, an expertise to go do that, and it's all wrapped up around our SunONE initiative. I did talk about that but I wasn't able to expand on that nearly enough. The vision is services--on demand. You should be taking all your legacy applications and services and publish them into this Solaris iPlanet "jukebox"--a digital services-on-demand jukebox. Take all your eight-tracks, cassettes, CDs, DVDs, old and new legacy environments, and publish them through this digital jukebox and provide these services to a secure, conditional access, authenticated, single sign-on through the iPlanet access server. Use our directory and portal and metadirectory capabilities with the ability to sign on from anyplace, anywhere, anytime--for anybody--and get all these services on demand. We're able to do this without forcing you to rewrite your applications. We do security and authentication in a way that the .NET architecture just doesn't do it. SunONE and .NET are really the only two architectures out there that you can re-architect your current IT environment with and make it all network-ready.
Tech Update: So the top five priorities are?
McNealy: Top five priorities would be: (1) put a Netscape browser on every desktop. (2) Web-enable every one of your services. In other words, tie it into to your jukebox that's based on the architecture you picked--one with an integration server, an app server, and a Web server. (3) Build a directory, an LDAP directory, that has every constituent, every shareholder, employee, customer, reseller, supplier, whatever. (4) Pick an integrator to help you with all of this. Platform independence can bring you great technology. Do not choose IBM Global Services, because they'll bring IBM junk in there. (5) Choose an architecture, a platform. Choose a company that can provide you with as much of that big friggin' WebTone switch as possible so that you have fewer throats to choke. Try to get out from being chief integration officer and chief infrastructure officer by choosing the big friggin' WebTone switch and going to hosting as much as possible through SunTone certified service providers. This way you can spend more of your time being chief information officer.
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