Sun Vision Extends Beyond Web Services to Services-on-Demand Marge Breya, Sun Microsystems' Vice President of SunONE, was the missing management link in the company's SunONE strategy. Until she was brought in last summer from the iPlanet server group to centralize the thinking behind Sun's major initiative, SunONE seemed like a good story without a headline. We wanted to know what Breya thought the headline should be. Interview by Chris Preimesberger

: What is your personal mission?
A: I've got four key goals. The No. 1 goal is to align the product strategy within all the software assets, if you will, of the company.

No. 2, then, is about the services that will be running on the platform. It's an alliance strategy, because we won't be deploying the services ourselves—we don't compete with services providers at all. An alliance strategy to effectively have counter-offerings in that B2B and B2C space, ala HailStorm, Blizzard, and all that sort of stuff. And that's really where Liberty Alliance came from. The third thing is a killer marketing program for SunONE—highly efficient, making sure we're getting at the right people with our message, and taking that forward.

And finally, affecting cultural change at the company. Basically ensuring that we've got all our leaders, our executives, our sales people, etc., software-savvy and able to move, in many ways, through the same cultural change we had when we moved from workstations to servers. Now [the move is from] servers to systems.

Marge Breya, Sun Microsystems' Vice President of SunONE

Q: How do you explain this approach to the software developer or IT manager who is unclear on the SunONE concept? For months, many people thought Sun was making this up as it went along.
A: Actually, up until July, we had no one who had the title of head of SunONE. Here I was running the marketing group at iPlanet, George Paolini had the software organization—Pat Sueltz's group—we were all putting out releases from our own product portfolio in support of the SunONE message. But nobody was actually owning the SunONE message. In many ways, we were describing the platform from a piece-by-piece standpoint; we were describing the forest tree by tree as opposed to the forest itself. So in July, when we pulled the team together, that's when we starting working really heavily on going from a top-down standpoint, not just a bottom-up.

Here's what I tell developers and IT execs: SunONE is the vision, architecture, platform, and expertise for the creation and deployment of services-on-demand. What's different about services-on-demand vs. Web services? The whole approach is the encompassing of different service styles. Web services are an important, but singular style [of a service-on-demand].

In the services-on-demand approach, it does not matter whether you're going to deploy a client-server app, Web app, via Web services, via peer-to-peer technologies, et cetera. What we're trying to figure out is which are the business processes that have to be reused all over the place, reused throughout a value chain, exposed to partners, employees, etc. I think it's a fundamental rearchitecture of the IT environment.

What Are Services-on-Demand?

A service-on-demand, in Sun's lexicon, is really no different than a Web service. But essentially, Sun uses the term services-on-demand as collective way of referring to a company's use of multiple Web services—a network, so to speak, of hundreds or even thousands of Web services—and doing so in a way that significantly enhances the company's efficiency. So while Web services, as a term, will eventually fade into the background as the technical concepts that drive it become commonplace, "services-on-demand" is a level of abstraction that Sun can use long into the future to communicate the business goals and objectives that can be achieved by providing partners, customers, consumers, internal departments, and employees with Web services.

So, yes, we're developing applications; yes, we're developing services, but the real deal in terms of these services is: What are the subcomponents that can be used all over the place? And then how do you describe those, so they can be reused in a manner that can be effective? This is going to be so exciting over the next 10 years because now we're not talking about little parts, or EJBs, or things that you can touch. We're talking about [reusable] systems.

Q: So, how is Sun's philosophy around Web services and Services on Demand different from what Microsoft and IBM are talking about?
A: Well, I'm not sure that it is, or should be, any different from what they're talking about. The nice thing about the promise of Web services is that they should all be open technologies that we all support. Because really, if you're going to call any service from the great yellow pages in the sky, it ought to be platform and vendor neutral. And so there really shouldn't be a huge difference at all, between the three companies.

But I think there is a difference today, perhaps, in the emphasis each company is putting on it. And I think at Sun we're taking a very pragmatic role that says, hey listen, in this kind of economy you need to choose really well in terms of exactly when you're going to move into Web services and what are those things that you're actually going to get a lot of value from, in that architecture.

Q: How does SunONE one-up Microsoft's .NET platform, which has simplified so much of this development?
A: I don't think it's a matter of one-upping anybody. We all offer different approaches to the idea of building Web services. Sun is already well established in the Web services space; .NET has miles to go to catch up.

Our approach goes beyond Web services. We're talking services on demand, reusable anywhere, by anybody. Let's do an example: Say you want to write a travel [Web] app. You have all these different steps to build; you've got a requisition, an itinerary, then you need an approval, then you're going to book it. At least one of these processes is going to be reused all over the place, for sure. Some processes are just simple forms, and some are more unique. The question is this: How do you put together a set of business-process components, so that I—not having to call IT at all—can do drag-and-drop for my yellow pages (UDDI listing). That will be the critical thing. That is the vision for the next 10 years. I don't think that Microsoft or anybody has got this right yet.

There are a couple of steps in terms of thinking about this: Will those services be hosted and run by outside companies, like HailStorm (MyServices.com), or are these things actually going to be inside each company? [Sun is] addressing the developer who's going to write the automated itinerary app, for example, and also the services guy who's going to be building systems around this. Then you've got you and me, who are going to reuse this all over the place. There are different tools in the black box for each one. At this level, we're defining what that black box is.

Microsoft's obvious advantage is that they have a single design house that knows how [the tools] all fit together, and you can reuse that. The real critical thing is: When can you reuse anybody's [services] from anywhere? When you look at Liberty Alliance, that's really what it's all about.

Q: So Liberty Alliance (a single-user identification system) really was the missing link in the whole SunONE strategy.
A: Exactly. Passport came out in April [2001], and that's when everybody got kind of scared in the industry. I think that's when it became clear that these services were going to need to be available for reuse running on a platform, and so that's when we began thinking about, okay, what's the base of the service? Network identity is at the base of it. In order to have a rich platform going forward, you've got to have every industry having their services on top. It's really all about business process reuse.

Q: Microsoft apparently is thinking about joining Liberty Alliance. What's your take on that?
A: It's a no-brainer. What I can't figure out is why they haven't, except for sort of saving face.

Q: Finally, how is Sun getting out its new message to the development community?
A: In a couple different ways. We have our Technology Days (seminars) around the world. We also have our two JavaOne events—one in Japan, which had more than 8,000 folks there—and the big JavaOne (San Francisco) in March. The other thing we're doing is putting together online events and programs that developers can opt into. A lot of that is targeted at the service developer. For the service developer, we're trying to do best practices, [by having] systems integrators and professional services people talking through how services are set up, how to do them rapidly, and with good security models, etc. We have a new portal called InsideSunONE.com. And we have our own services-on-demand summits around the world, which have attracted a lot of interest.

We have the strategy and the outreach in place; now we have to deliver the new-generation products.

For clarity, certain portions of this conversation were composited from a second interview.