Innovation: 5 Tech CIOs Speak Out - ' Robert Worrall, Sun Microsystems '
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Sun Microsystems' Robert Worrall: Pushing a new model for I.T. organizations.
Worrell was appointed CIO of Sun in July, 2006. He says that although the job has given
him more gray hair than any previous job at Sun, where he has worked for 17
years, he's still having fun. Baseline's Debbie Gage spoke with Worrall.
Baseline: What's an example of how Sun uses technology to solve problems?
Worrall: We have a data center in the Netherlands, and because of investment deferrals,
service levels were declining. We looked at it earlier this year and said, the
world has changed, let's look at technology for driving down cost. This is a
shameless commercial for Sun, but with Sun's new product offerings we were able
to take the same applications and service levels, refresh the technology—and
machines are now faster and cheaper—and were able to close the data center and
move a smaller set of new servers into an existing facility in the U.K. So
there was a 70% to 75% reduction in footprint requirements in servers and an
80% power reduction.
As CIO of Sun, are you required to use Sun products?
We have a fairly rigorous program for using our own equipment. [We are doing an
Oracle enterprise resource planning deployment] on Sun hardware and middleware.
We try to showcase Sun's products and services. It's maybe a little harder on
me as an I.T. shop—I'm an early adopter, and I might be running alpha or beta
and there might be bugs—but it's better for customers. We get an early version
of hardware and software, kick the tires and do final QA (quality assurance). If there are challenges that customers run into, we have a
direct line back into the product team.
How important is innovation to you? How do you balance innovation against keeping
Sun running day to day?
Innovation is very important. It's an interesting time for us. Transformation is coming in
I.T., and I think at Sun we have a road map for how to steer the
transformation. It's a simple vision. Whereas an I.T. organization today is
building applications and running servers, that model is not sustainable. You
have spiraling energy costs, low utilization of servers, continuing complexity
of applications, and we say, stop the madness.
Our vision is that I.T. organizations will evolve into the role of an aggregator of
services to buy over the Internet. Most shops, take e-mail for example, they
run their own mail server like we do today. But if you go buy mail as a
service, I can run it over the public Internet. So do that for every business
application you do today. We're doing it today inside Sun—there are a handful
of services we buy today and run them over the public Internet. We continue to
push that model with Oracle and others. HR [human resources] services are
delivered that way—stock option management, 401K, and we're now in discussions
with our outsourcing partner to deliver HR transactions as a service over the
Internet, not an intranet. A big target will be ERP applications. We're working
closely with Oracle to demonstrate running their applications on a public grid
and what are the security concerns, so, as the industry matures, we at Sun are
right at the leading edge of adopting those service and evolving our own I.T.
shop.
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