Innovate and share: McNealy

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Tata Steel completes $546-mn exchange offer for CA...Dell Q3 profit dips 54 per centRIL shareholders approve 1:1 bonus issue

Mumbai, May 17: The corporate world needs to keep innovating and sharing the learnings, said Scott McNealy, chairman of the global tech major Sun Microsystems in Mumbai. Delivering the keynote address to leading IT executives, McNealy highlighted the importance of breaking down barriers and creating communities to drive participation.

Drawing from his 22 years in championing Sun Microsystems, McNealy cited that the world was witnessing the third wave in technological innovation. The first was about enterprise solutions where information was digitised and systems created to enhance productivity. The second wave was about the Internet and related technologies. The third wave, McNealy adds, is about participation. “The age is already seeing the increase of user-generated content. By 2010 there will be more than 100 million bloggers,” McNealy asserted.

With technologies following the Moore’s principle, which says that computing speed doubles every 18 months, companies will need to keep upgrading their systems on a regular basis. And there will be tremendous cost pressures in exiting current legacy systems. McNealy says that exit barriers for corporates using legacy systems is ten times the cost of acquiring newer, more efficient technologies. Conjuring up an analogy, McNealy stated, “How can you board an airplane that has no doors?”

A strong commitment to open source has always been at the focus of operations at Sun Microsystems. “It’s mankind against proprietary technologies, and in this battle, mankind will win most of the times,” asserted McNealy. Such a pace of change and the cost of exit necessitate the need to have open source based technologies, he added.

He observed that several Indian companies, as with their compatriots in other developed markets, had the tendency to build systems and data centres without a focus on the future. “Many resemble a Frankenstein, all patched up and sluggish,” he adds.

Taking the open source initiatives forward, Sun Microsystems will keep building on its energy conserving ‘Open SPARC’ microchips. The source code for the hardware design is already available for download. The company also looks to champion open source education through the ‘Curriki’ mode on the Internet. Modelled on the lines of Wikipedia, this initiative is designed to make education free and accessible to people around the globe.