Sun Network: Welcome to the post-boom Sun

As it prepares for its annual user conference in San Francisco next week, Sun Microsystems Inc. has a lot to prove. The company that once boasted of being the "dot in dot com" has watched its position as an industry leader erode over the last few years as the iconoclast image and corporate culture that served it so well during the Internet boom has worked against it during leaner times.

This tough business climate was coupled with a major management shake-up last year that saw much of Sun's senior staff exit the company, including Chief Operating Officer Ed Zander, Chief Financial Officer Michael Lehman, Executive Vice President of Computer Systems John Shoemaker, and Sun's rising Linux star, Vice President and General Manager for Edge Computing Stephen DeWitt.

Now, 14 months after its executive reorganization, the computer maker hopes to use next week's Sun Network conference to show a skeptical industry that it is still a player.

Sun has struggled to lead the industry in a variety of initiatives. Its WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) Web services standard has been marginalized thanks to an alternative promoted by Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. called BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). The Jini networking technology, created by Sun's recently departed chief scientist, Bill Joy, has failed to catch on. And Sun finds itself increasingly alone in its support of the InfiniBand I/O (input/output) architecture.

But Sun still spends $1 billion annually on research and development, and it has high hopes for a number of developing initiatives, including its "throughput" computing microprocessor design, which insiders say will come to fruition with Sun's Niagara processors, expected in 2006; its N1 data center architecture; and with its suite of server software, code-named Orion, which will be a focal point at next week's show.

In interviews this week, Sun executives predicted that Orion, with its simplified pricing and better level of operating system integration, would change the rules of the game for the server software industry.

The question is, will the industry take notice?

Sun has always harbored a healthy contempt for conventional wisdom. Company insiders say this attitude flows down from the company's chief executive officer, Scott McNealy, who treats the term as derogatory ("If it was wisdom," he has been quoted as saying, "it wouldn't be conventional").

When competitors like IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. adopted the Windows NT operating system in the 1990s, Sun stuck with its Solaris operating system and in the process came to dominate the Unix industry. When the 64-bit computing market was expected to consolidate around Intel's Itanium processors, Sun declined to sell Itanium systems, offering instead to port Solaris to the new chip architecture. By 2000, it dropped even this initiative, leaving its hardware competitors to develop systems based on the struggling microprocessor on their own.

But lately Sun has been following rather than leading, often in humbling fashion. When IBM decided to give away $40 million worth of software to the open source community by founding the Eclipse project in 2001, Sun officials initially dismissed the effort as a cynical effort to buy its way into the open-source tools game, and said that Eclipse's support of a nonstandard set of software libraries, called SWT (standard widget toolkit), amounted to a fork in Java.