Sun anticipates moves to software services

In the IT shop of the near future, personnel likely will manage services instead of systems, a Sun Microsystems official said Monday in elaborating both on Sun's internal plans and what can be expected of the IT landscape at large.

While the average enterprise IT shop now has many servers and client systems, companies including Sun can be expected to utilize online services available over the public Internet, said Robert Worrall, Sun chief information officer and senior vice president. This will make IT staff act more as service managers than systems managers. Meanwhile, internal application developers instead would find work building applications for service providers.

Sun expects to be at the forefront of this wave.

"We've been out talking quite a bit about this notion that the IT organizations of tomorrow are going to look very different from the IT organizations [of] today," Worrall said. IT will focus more on business than technology, he said.

IT shops will transform from building, deploying, and supporting traditional applications to serving more as aggregators of network services, said Worrall.

Like doctors who do high-level diagnoses and then refer patients to specialists, IT will refer users to providers of services, Worrall said. He cited online CRM specialists Salesforce.com, one of the most prominent examples of a SaaS (software as services) vendor, as such a company providing application services.

"We're simply [espousing] that over a period of time, that will become the norm and not the exception," Worrall said.

Other examples of online services gaining prominence include e-mail applications from Google and Yahoo and the Oracle On Demand service. ERP and human resources applications also will be leveraged online.

"I think it's time for us as industry leaders really to get our hands around how we're going to evolve that model, because like it not, the current models of building hundreds or thousands of customized business applications simply aren't sustainable," Worrall said.

Acknowledging user concerns over security and protection of intellectual property, Worrall said services providers will have to provide a model that ensures privacy and data protection. Service-level agreements will become critical in meeting this goal. Concepts such as federated identity will help take care of security issues.

At Sun, the company currently runs about 1,200 business applications. There is no reason these cannot be provided as online services, Worrall said.

In Sun's vision, the company will buy services, then run them in a browser on a device such as a laptop or a thin client. There will be no need to maintain legions of servers.

Sun currently utilizes about 3,000 servers worldwide to run its business. Sun ultimately would like to be relieved of maintaining its own datacenter, but some servers still would be needed for applications that service providers probably would not offer, such as engineering applications, Worrall said.

"I'd love to say the vision is zero [servers], but I don't know that we'd ever get to zero," said Worrall.

The market is already moving to this more efficient paradigm, but Sun internally expects to be largely services-based by 2015, although it could be a few years earlier or later than that, said Worrall.