It is always interesting to read the story behind the IT operations of a world-renowned IT supplier. They have the same problems as other companies, but they are (if they want to "eat their own dog food" and "walk their talk", which they should do) limited in their choices ... Sun CIO Bill Vass explains Sun's infrastructure in this Utility Computing article.
The company of which their president Jonathan Schwartz now claims that "PCs are so yesterday" (which is further illustrated and more scientifically analyzed in this Computerworld article "Decline of the Desktop") exploits 35.000 open source desktops on thin-client front-end devices, running all of the applications on a lot of Sun machines. The major applications are an ERP system based on Oracle and CRM applications based on Siebel and Peoplesoft, now also owned by Sun's buddy Oracle. There are still Windows PCs around, but these are gradually replaced by open source desktops. As Schwartz points out, the next wave of innovations will be based on services, not on applications that run on the desktop. This makes the desktop operating system irrelevant, and that is exactly what Sun (and Google and IBM for that matter) wants to achieve. Sun also wants to move its global application infrastructure over to a grid structure, simplifying the mess that was created - as in many other companies - during the Internet hype years; and to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), for which they can (and will) use the solutions that were acquired via the acquisition of SeeBeyond.
As in most companies, Sun's CIO was also forced to look for serious cost savings, and found this in an almost pure thin-client setup. While this purity may be politically unachievable for many companies, it is our belief that for larger organisations, a consolidated, centrally managed, server-based computing infrastructure may really have financial benefits.
Posted by Patrick Van Renterghem at September 27, 2005 04:56 PM