Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz shares his vision on the future of outsourced, networked services.
The day when the extended enterprise becomes a giant interconnected global trading marketplace is also the day no perimeter exists. During the interim, the perimeter will be moving steadily inward, so that network executives will begin viewing less technology as being mission critical to their business, envisions Jonathan Schwartz, COO of Sun.
Schwartz points to the success of application service provider (ASP) vendors such as Salesforce.com and human resource outsourcers such as Exult (purchased by Hewitt Associates last month). These model how businesses can gain huge efficiencies by changing their processes to adapt to that of the outsourcer and thereby sharing the cost among many users. Schwartz contends that most of today’s businesses already have nearly identical requirements for much of their IT infrastructures and applications, be it a Linux grid cluster or a salesforce automation package. With nearly identical needs, outsourcing the grid to a service provider (which Sun aims to be, charging $1/CPU hour) or an ASP makes economical sense, he says.
Schwartz views outsourcing as a method of pushing an increasing variety of IT services “into the network,” he says, meaning they are conducted elsewhere and served to the enterprise via a network link. Businesses will always hold some IT close to their chests labeled as strategic. However, he contends that line of inside/outside will move so that most IT services are considered outside (and therefore eligible to be outsourced) as more networked services become available.
Obviously, vendors like SAP and Oracle evangelize the opposing viewpoint that businesses want more internal customization as long as they can wrap their processes with standardized interfaces such as Web services.
