Intranet shines at Sun: Sun case study, 8/96<title> <META NAME="publicationDate" CONTENT="1996-08-01"><META NAME="icx_url" CONTENT="http://www.networkworld.com/intranet/896sun.html"> <script language="JavaScript">  </script> <base target = "_top"> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT">  </SCRIPT> </head>   <body bgcolor="ffffff" background="/gif/2back.gif"> <table border=0> <tr> <td valign=top width=100 align=left rowspan=2 align=top> <IMG SRC="/gif/fusoid2.gif" ALT="Fusion tool bar" WIDTH=103 HEIGHT=38 ALIGN=middle><BR> <a href="/netresources/search.html"><IMG SRC="/gif/butarchives9.gif" ALT="Archives" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=20 BORDER=0 ALIGN=middle></A><BR> <A HREF="/new41.html"><IMG SRC="/gif/butwhat9.gif" ALT="What's New" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=20 BORDER=0 ALIGN=middle></A><BR> <a href="/netresources/sitemap.html"><IMG SRC="/gif/butsite9.gif" ALT="Site Map" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=20 BORDER=0 ALIGN=middle></a><BR> <a href="/nw/subscribe.html"><IMG SRC="/gif/butsub9.gif" ALT="Subscriptions" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=20 BORDER=0 ALIGN=middle></a><BR> <IMG SRC="/gif/4shim.gif" width=2 height=4><BR> <MAP NAME="thismap"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 0, 98, 14" HREF="/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 14, 98, 28" HREF="/news/netflash.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 28, 98, 42" HREF="/news/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 42, 98, 56" HREF="/reviews/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 56, 98, 70" HREF="/forum/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 70, 98, 84" HREF="/netresources/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 84, 98, 98" HREF="/news/stocks.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 98, 98, 112" href="/careers/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 112, 98, 126" HREF="/pdg/seminars.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 126, 98, 140" HREF="/demos/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 140, 98, 154" HREF="/intranet/index.html"> <AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0, 154, 98, 168" HREF="/demos/index.html"> </MAP> <IMG SRC="/gif/toolthis.gif" ALT="Scroll to bottom for text toolbar" WIDTH=98 HEIGHT=169 ALIGN=middle USEMAP="#thismap" border=0> <P></td> <td valign=top colspan=5> <img src="/gif/4shim.gif" width=2 height=1 alt=""> <A HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.nwfusion.general/;top=;pos=top;sz=468x60;tile=1;ord=101932?"> <IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.nwfusion.general/;top=;pos=top;sz=468x60;tile=1;ord=101932?" border=0 height="60" width="468"></A> <br> <hr size=1 width=97%> </td></tr><tr><td><td width=4></td> <td valign=top width=469> <B><font size=+2 face="arial, helvetica">Intranet shines at Sun</font></b><BR> <font face="arial, helvetica"></font> <p> <b><font size=+1>By <a href="/Home/pwatt.html">Peggy Watt</a></font><br> IntraNet, 8/96</b><p> Sun Microsystems, Inc. and its live mascot - a dog named Network - both follow a simple rule of survival: Don't bite the hand that <IMG SRC="896woof.gif" ALT="" vspace=6 WIDTH=66 HEIGHT=85 ALIGN=right>feeds you. <P> Sun feeds Network, and according to officials he doesn't bite. But the company also feeds itself, with arguably the highest per capita corparate installation of Web pages running on an army of its own servers. <P> Even for a company loudly hailing the intranet for commercial purposes, Sun's devotion to Web technology internally provides a dramatic example of spending your cash like you urge your customers to spend theirs. This year marks the first ever that Sun will spend more on its information infrastructure than on its physical one. <P> Most of the information systems (IS) budget will be used to expand and support the company's evolving intranet. Sun's 16,000 employees in 44 countries have built more than 2,000 internal Web sites to manage development projects, people, equipment, cash flow and other daily business operations. William Raduchel, the company's chief information officer, estimates the number of Web pages at Sun has doubled every year to a quarter of a million pages today. <P> Every workstation inside Sun runs either the company's own HotJava or Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator browser under the Sun Solaris Unix operating system. Server software of choice includes Apache from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications or the Communication and Commerce products from Netscape. <P> Sun officials credit all those internetworked Web pages with saving the company $25 million annually. It says it has accrued savings by going electronic with expense reports, which also shortened payment time, and by drastically reducing printing and document publishing costs and postage, for example. <H3>Immersed in culture</H3> Listen to most Sun officials, and you'd think the intranet has been part of the company forever, even though the first Web pages didn't appear until about two years ago. Certainly, many intranet features - easy collaboration, ready access and a breadth of online resources - are characteristic of its corporate culture. <P> Talk may turn commercial when officials describe the corporate intranet, called SunWeb, for it is a natural showcase of Sun technology. Obviously the ubiquitous SPARC-based hardware is Sun's own, and the network operating system of choice is Solaris. But the fact is, the company finds it a strategic business practice to rebuild its own information systems on an extensive internal Web. <P> Ironically, legacy systems opened the intranet gates, says Raduchel. When Sun bought its mainframe in 1989, the IS staff decided to integrate it by running SNA over a standard TCP/IP network. So TCP/IP went in everywhere, preparing Sun for its eventual intranet. <P> Even back then, Sun had an electronic collaborative culture. ''People would send E-mail rather than run to one office over from theirs,'' says George Reyes, vice president and corporate controller at Sun, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. <P> As a natural extension of that culture, Sun's first internal Web pages went up within collaborative workgroups about two years ago, in the same grassroots manner experienced by companies around the globe. ''It's been all bottoms up,'' Raduchel says. <P> IT management stepped in about 18 months ago to actively plan and grow SunWeb because Raduchel saw how the technology complements the corporate philosophy of collaboration and innovation. Recognizing Sun's stated commitment to bottoms-up innovation, Raduchel won't dictate intranet policy. <P> ''It's our role to provide the resources for people to generate new ideas,'' Raduchel says. <P> Toward that end, IS deploys the equipment needed to support creative internal Web endeavors. The department oversees development of some corporatewide tools that couldn't come from individual workgroups, and it continues to ensure all Sun employees have access to the innovations. <P> Today, SunWeb connects just about everything inside the company, linking even international sites via the existing backbone and the Internet. Employees access the backbone itself by nothing less than a 56K-byte leased line, and T-1 circuits cross the oceans to link international sites. Remote or traveling users also can dial in to the corporate backbone. <P> SunWeb's contents grow daily, as any Sun employee or department can link a Web site to the main home page. Content ranges from corporate postings to sales material, product specifications and a multimedia corporate newsletter called WSUN Radio, which features The McNealy Report monthly, hosted by CEO Scott McNealy. <P> ''Our philosophy [in IT] is to architect and distribute,' Raduchel says. ''The job of top management is to lay out the infrastructure and the tools, and let people implement the solutions.'' Clearly, the intranet is rising at Sun. <P> <H3>Financial assistance</H3> Sun's earliest official intranet applications were financial, and one that is being Webified now actually predates the impromptu, scattered Web servers built by software development teams. The programs range from the just-completed Finance Web pages that corporate officers tap for the latest financials, to the 3-year-old Sun Travel and Expense Accounting (SunTEA) system used by nearly everyone. <P> Although SunTEA is just now being converted to support HTML screens, Sun considers this Unix application an integral part of its intranet. The application, which was one of the early internal groupware applications to implement wizards and automatic routing functions so users need only click a button to take the next step, is even accessible via Web browsers. <P> Employees fill out their expense forms online and E-mail them to their managers, who send them electronically to accounting, says Reyes, the corporate controller. Sun is working on an update that will let people download their corporate credit card statements and flow the information into their electronic expense reports. <P> SunTEA cost $1 million to implement in 1993, Sun officials say. It costs $400,000 yearly to maintain, resulting in an estimated $2 million annual savings over previous paper-oriented methods. <P> Finance Web, launched almost a year ago, relies heavily on Web technology. It is the source and workspace for the quarterly reports, projections and competitive analyses that Reyes prepares for corporate officers. The figures are current because they come directly from Sun's financial databases, which run on Oracle Corp.'s Oracle and Oracle Financials. <P> Sun programmers wrote custom code to manage data transfer and translation between the Oracle database and Web pages written in HTML. Oracle has since announced a Web Broker that does the same job, and Sun may implement that middleware in an update. <P> Users access Finance Web by the HotJava or Navigator browsers. They can retrieve and view cash flow statements, quarterly reports, head counts and extensive competitive analysis reports on Web pages. <P> The information is accessible in varying degrees to employees ranging from the rank and file to corporate officers. Sun deploys its own SunScreen firewall to secure the data from internal users who do not have authorized views, as well as from external sources. <P> Little more than six months ago everything was on paper, Reyes says. ''I'm trying to eliminate as much of that stuff as possible,'' he adds. ''You're never quite sure what it really costs you.'' Another component of Finance Web is the Asset Managers Workbench, which automates the processing of 1,600 capital equipment requests weekly. By using the internal Web, requests are handled by each cost center. Previously, everything went through accounting. <P> But Sun's intranet will really earn its keep when Reyes can open it - selectively - to outsiders. The goal is to give top suppliers home pages on SunWeb. ''We probably buy $3 billion in goods from suppliers, and I want to put all that online,'' Reyes says. <P> Each vendor's page will show records of order status and payment. The pages will draw up-to-date information by linking the Oracle database to other internal databases, such as inventory tracking and accounts payable. Suppliers and the Sun departments doing business with them will be able to check order status online. <P> Sun does about 20% of its outside business electronically now; Reyes wants to reach 80% within 18 months. He estimates the financial services group operates at about 30% of the intranet's potential productivity. But, he says, ''Already, I can't imagine life without it.'' <H3>Human resources</H3> Personnel services are often among the first applications on a corporate intranet, but they can offer much more than simply an online version of the employee manual (although Sun did that three years ago). <P> In 1994, Sun began building Compass, a comprehensive online personnel services site accessible from SunWeb. It is going live a little at a time, with full deployment intended this fall. <P> Through Compass, Sun employees can check address and phone listings, manage their 401(K) plans and ESOPs, read electronic corporate newsletters, order corporate clothing from the SunWear catalog and review or register for internal training from Sun University. <P> ''We wanted to set up a system that worked the way people do business,'' says Patricia Baldwin, director of business simplification in Sun's human resources department. ''We moved toward making everything simpler, and then automating it.'' <P> The Website provides electronic tools supervisors can use for people management. For example, a manager awarding a promotion or bonus can check an employee's salary history (drawn from a secure database and converted to HTML for display on a Web page) and compare it to the range for similar staffers. The appropriate forms to process a status change are online, and wizards route them to the necessary recipients or department files. <P> <P> Baldwin's group is especially pleased with last summer's success in automating the tools used for annual salary evaluations. Human resources gave Sun managers access to SunSal online tools for a three-week period during salary review time. SunSal includes guidelines for salary ranges by level, salary histories and spreadsheet templates to help managers compare and determine salaries and proposed increases. <P> In fact, three weeks was half the usual time managers spent on salary reviews. Baldwin estimates the speed saved $325,000 in management time, paperwork and human resources research expenses when the reviews were handled on paper. <P> Another time- and energy-saver is SunDial, a human resources help center that provides Web access to a wide selection of employee information, including policies, legal notices and employee manuals. In fact, users who ask for help are hyperlinked to the policy reference that relates to the area they've been reviewing. Having such information readily available and easily searchable has cut the number of phone calls to human resources representatives, who can then concentrate on matters the Web can't handle. <P> Human resources staffers monitor and update the Web pages that offer information for which they are responsible. ''The idea is to put the responsibility for content input on the owner of that information, who is the one with the vested interest in the information being correct,'' Baldwin says. She extends that to employees: Users maintain their own address and phone listings, so they're more likely to be current. <P> Human resources is also putting its quarterly employee surveys online for distribution electronically as Java applets and HTML documents. <P> Even the comprehensive Compass system doesn't cover everything. Baldwin recalls a remote human resources manager who set up an internal Web page to track organizations and schools for recruiting. <P> Some of the savings are easy to identify - putting the corporate newsletter ''Illuminatis'' online shaved two-thirds of its cost. Other savings are less obvious, but Baldwin believes employees are taking advantage of information and resources more frequently because they are more accessible. <P> ''We've been successful because Scott [McNealy] committed to universal access early,'' Baldwin says. Online resources ''fit with Sun's culture, and help the bottom line besides.'' <P> The commercial value of Compass doesn't escape this technology company: Sun is taking its successful human resources intranet application outside the firewall. The basic Compass framework will be marketed as a commercial product this fall. <H3>Managing, or not?</H3> Despite its open gateway policy, Sun's intranet is not a free-for-all. The CIO oversees the Network Management committee, which comprises representatives from each division. In regular policy debate sessions, the group has discussed security, content guidelines and proposals for outside access. <P> But Raduchel insists on an arm's length approach. His department provides equipment and support, but is not heavy-handed about specific applications. <P> ''You've got to create a framework where people can solve their problems,'' Raduchel says. His watchword is decentralization, and he says the result is innovation. <P> Backing off from the traditional control also can be freeing for IT, Raduchel observes. <P> Because Web page creation and basic management are approachable for even nontechnical users, divisions or individuals can prepare content for their own pages. In the past, only IT could disseminate information. When users take more responsibility for the content of their own online resources, IT can focus on strictly technical issues such as system support, planning and training. <P> Sun, of course, has a key advantage in building its intranet. Most of the plumbing was already there, and the place is filled with engineers running high-powered, standard workstations. <P> Still, Sun is only in the adolescence of its intranet evolution. <P> Web pages increase daily. Product development teams fire up a Web site ''almost before they buy the T-shirts,'' which are the traditional inagural product of a high-tech team, Raduchel jokes. <P> Finance Web, the financial arm of SunWeb, is undergoing an upgrade to support videoconferencing. Reyes says that will enhance the already strong collaborative culture at Sun. <P> But Raduchel has another ambitious plan. Eighteen months from now, he wants everyone at Sun to be running ''Webtops'' instead of regular desktops. Webtops will let an employee log on from anywhere on SunWeb and get a customizable default home page. <P> For example, an engineer may have links to various programming projects and single-button access into a technical chat session. A sales representative may have calendars and contact-tracking appear first. Departments probably will issue default opening pages and employees will tailor them to their individual needs or interests. <P> ''You, the employee, will have some ability to administer content yourself, but there will also be a lot of central administration,'' Raduchel says. ''The advantage is you can have a consistent environment, no matter where you log on from.'' <P> However, he expects users will still log on from powerful workstations in use today. His vision calls not for thin clients, but what he calls ''trim'' clients, perhaps running JavaOS instead of Solaris. <P> ''It's a huge IS win,'' Raduchel adds. ''We only manage one interface at each side, client and server, so it's much easier. It turns the intranet into the equivalent of the phone system.'' That is, until Sun wires the phone into the Web as well. <P><INCLUDE="/footers/footerthis.html"> </td><td width=7> </td> </tr></table> </body> </html>