Interview: Schwartz smells the services

Sun Microsystems set tongues wagging last week with the launch of its Java Enterprise System and Java Desktop System. InfoWorld's Executive News Editor Mark Jones sat down with Sun's Executive Vice President of Software, Jonathan Schwartz, at the SunNetwork show in San Francisco last week to discuss his penchant for software services and beating Microsoft.

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InfoWorld: How well do you know Salesforce.com's Chairman and CEOMarc Benioff?

Schwartz: I know Marc very well.

InfoWorld: Sun's CEO Scott McNealy has made a couple of Salesforce.com references lately, and now you're talking about the services business. Do you agree that Sun and Salesforce.com offer the same flavor of software philosophy?

Schwartz: That flavor's been around for an awfully long time. It's called the service provider model. You have to understand something important about Sun, which is that Sun doesn't operate services. What we wanted to do is take advantage of the service provider licensing model without being a service provider and competing with our core customers. This actually enables them to be far more transparent about how they are pricing. What [you] can do now -- whether you are a brokerage house, a transportation company, a media company, or health care concern -- is you can look at the software that you [acquire] at $100 per employee and then with impunity turn to your customers, whether they are brokerage account holders, travelers, patients, or viewers of your TV show, and deliver services to all of them and not pay a penny. So what is a real disembarking point for us with the service provider model is we wanted them to pay for the software that they could then run for their customers at infinite scale with an infinite right to use.

InfoWorld: Will Sun ever become a hosted software company?

Schwartz: Absolutely, flatly not. That's because we believe every company is a hosting company. Think about it: Your company is a hosting company -- you have way fewer employees than you do customers online. The same thing is true for a hospital, for a brokerage account, for a telecommunications company, for a media company, for a travel [company], for an airline -- it's all the same. They're all becoming service providers, it's just that the services they vend are Web services.

InfoWorld: People like to talk about software as a utility delivered by wire. Is this the same strategy you want to see played out in enterprises?

Schwartz: In the long run, yes. There are four phases in the evolution of Web services. First, you run a stand-alone box. Once you put it on the network, you can now share resources with a small population of people on your LAN. Second, if you put it on a shared network, like an Internet network, now you have a shared service. In the instance of an MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging] machine, if it runs stand alone it's interesting, if it runs on a local area network, the whole hospital can use it and you don’t have to run downstairs to get the image. [Step three,] if you put it on a public network, or at least on a wide area network, now a whole state can take advantage of that imaging system. The fourth evolution of this is really interesting. Once you've gotten to a shared service, now you can host that service [or] someone else can host the service for you. There are beginning to [be] imaging centers -- not in hospitals -- where all they do is provide hosted imaging services. And what's more fascinating is that the people who provide the diagnostics on those imaging devices are in New Zealand. Why? Because after 5 p.m. PST in the U.S., radiologists go home. Well, 5 p.m. in the U.S. is whatever, 9 a.m. in New Zealand. So now everybody is available to do diagnostics.

InfoWorld: What are large companies looking to roll out now?