As Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, has mentioned, Sun is very focused on organizations that consider IT as a source of value, as a competitive weapon and not as a cost center. Hence, we also follow this principle and have been using technology in many ways to reach out to customers, new markets, partners and employees.

Sun Microsystems is one of the pioneers of corporate blogging and the strongest driving force behind that is Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer, Sun Microsystems. Jonathan, an early entrant in the senior management blogging stakes, began a public blog in June 2004 and was one of the first Fortune 500 company presidents to do so. Today, Jonathan's blog gets an average of 400,000 hits per month. His blogs have been joined by the blogs of over 1,000 other Sun employees and continues to prove incisive, insightful, and refreshingly free of either over hyping Sun or over-slating his competitors.

Likewise, Sun's Chief Technology Officer and Executive VP R&D, Greg Papadopoulos and General Counsel Mike Dillon also have blogs. Jonathan's blogs are widely read (among top 10 in blogs from Sun employees). His innovative approach has been recognized and other leaders in the industry are also taking it up. Sun considers this as a competitive advantage and encourages employees to blog. An important aspect is that readers can comment on blogs. Jonathan has mentioned that he reads comments about his blogs.

Sometime back, Sun provided users a facility to review our products (similar to user reviews at amazon.com). We expect more products to be included here. Users have been reviewing some of our new products, as can be seen here.

Our Open Source projects are classic examples of how we leverage technology in our product development process. Although Sun has actively contributed to Open Source for a while (e.g. OpenOffice.org, Netbeans.org), the recent projects that have been very popular are OpenSolaris and GlassFish. Developers give feedback to our blogs and via forums, thus growing the community. There have been over 6 million downloads of OpenSolaris in over a year, since it started. That is rapid growth, demonstrating increasing user interest and participation. "The Aquarium" is a single place for all our middleware community activity and news. It is also one of our most read blogs.
Project GlassFish is the community where we have the open source development of a Java EE 5 Application Server. As part of the development process, we are now publishing feature lists and taking feedback via the GlassFish Wiki. We also published a draft of our principles, in the spirit of transparency and participation. This is still new. We expect this to continue and and be used in other Open Source projects at Sun.

We get valuable contributions from the community, in our Open Source projects. As an example, there has been a port of OpenSolaris to the PowerPC platform! As mentioned in that article, this was done with little help from Sun. Similarly, Ubuntu Linux has been ported to our UltraSPARC (Niagara) platform. We have more such examples of contributions from the community. These have helped in building a vibrant community.

The above examples demonstrate how we are leveraging Web2.0 technologies in the way we work (product development), interact with customers and prospects. Although we have been using Web technologies for a while, the above clearly illustrate how the "Participation Age" works. There are other innovative ideas we are considering. As an example, Jonathan has asked the US SEC chairman about announcing our quarterly results via his blog.

One of the barriers to adoption of change here, can be moving from a ‘closed' to a more ‘open' approach, when open sourcing. This is natural and somewhat expected. It is important to learn from earlier successful projects and adapt/adopt best practices. As Solaris was being open sourced, it was a difficult experience for some. However, over time, the team understood the benefits and adapted wonderfully, while contributing towards the success of open sourcing Solaris. It is important to have champions in the organization, who have a clear vision and are drivers of change. At Sun, Jonathan Schwartz has led by example. His belief and enthusiasm towards adopting this change, has been contagious.

Another aspect of change, is understanding the licensing aspects of Open Source. Sun spent quite some time in understanding the needs of our customers, partners and the community, before selecting the Common Development and Distribution License(CDDL) for OpenSolaris and GlassFish.

Many of these technologies we used, are Open Source and easily available. E.g. Wiki, blog, RSS. They have been widely used for a while and are therefore mature, with strong community support. Organizations are increasingly using these, not just for traditional IT use, but also to reach out to their customer and partner communities. Open Source is a great example of participation and communities, which Sun believes in strongly. As seen from the above examples, Sun has been adapting to this change quite well and continues to constantly innovate in the use of technology as a competitive weapon. 

Murthy Narayanan Engineering Director, Sun Java System Application Server Java Enterprise Developer Group Sun Microsystems(India) Pvt. Ltd.

Issue BG68 Nov06

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