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Sun and Web services
Of all the companies looking to dominate Web services, Sun should be at the top of the heap. Before almost any other company, it saw that PCs and networks would merge into a whole, as its slogan, "The Network Is the Computer," implies — and that concept is central to how Web services work. Additionally, Java is also at the core of Web services, yet one more reason why Sun should rule the roost.
But along the way, Sun lost its focus, and so now, the company is playing catch-up. In this column and the next, we'll take a look at Sun's strategy for becoming relevant again in Web services, and we'll examine the company's technology roadmap.
How bad is it for Sun?
Analysts warn that Sun has fallen so far when it comes to Web services that it may never be able to become a major Web services player. For example, a Gartner survey of system integrators and consultants found that Microsoft's .NET, IBM's WebSphere, and Oracle technology are the leading three Web services products they will support — and Sun was not among the top three. And according to the VNUnet.com news site, at the recent annual forum of the Meta analyst group, Meta analysts said that while Sun was a market visionary, it has executed its Web services strategies poorly, and "we don't see it changing," in the words of Val Sribar, Meta's vice president of executive directions,
As I've reported in previous columns, in the past Sun has also been involved in a variety of squabbles with Microsoft and standards committees, which has taken its toll on the company as well.
The Sun Web services roadmap
Sun says that it has gotten religion, and has taken a number of steps to get serious about Web services. One of the most visible is making up with the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), the organization that promotes Web services interoperability and develops Web services standards. After a series of public spats, Sun joined the WS-I as a contributing member in October of 2002 and this month will be running to become a member of the groups policy-setting board. Sun has been active in other standards-setting bodies as well, including the W3C and OASIS.
More importantly, Sun has focused internally on Web services and revamped its product line and strategy. According to Drew Engstrom, Web Services Strategist for Sun, the core of its new thinking is that "we look at Web services from a deployment perspective, from what it looks like from inside the data center rather than just from a developer's perspective – we're focusing on the people who need to deploy the technology, not just those who develop it."
Engstrom says that Web services will force a change to the way that data centers operate. Rather than having a limited number of large central servers in a data center, "There will be an explosion in the data center with small edge servers serving up http and SOAP messages at the edge of the firewall. That means a great deal of increased complexity. But as the network grows in complexity, you can't have network management grow in complexity as well."
Sun's answer, he says, "is to virtualize the network and be able to provision where and how services run." To do that, the company has developed the N1 architecture for managing the data center and Web services. (We'll look at N1 in more detail in the next column. For more information about N1, go to wwws.sun.com/software/solutions/n1/.)
Additionally, Engstrom says, grid computing is also at the core of Sun's Web services strategy. In Sun's grid technology, every computing resource on the network registers with the grid and can be assigned to do certain tasks when idle that they otherwise might not perform. For example, he says, "if a server is used for payroll once a month, it can be told to provide other services at other times, when it's not normally being used."
This means that in theory it will be easier for IT professionals at data centers to manage their computing resources and be able to provide Web services more effectively – as long as they have software to manage it all, which in Sun's world, is N1.
Hardware changes as well
Sun says that in response to its focus on Web services, it is changing its hardware strategy as well. In the Sun vision, there will be many small servers delivering Web services at the edge of the network, rather than a few very large application servers in the middle of the data center. So Sun is changing its server hardware and economic model in response to that, Engstrom says.
"We've re-architected the application server and broken the economic model so that you can buy one for only two thousand dollars a CPU," rather than having to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a single large application server. That way, it makes economic sense to deploy many small Web service servers at the edge of the network.
As for development tools, the Sun ONE platform is currently being used for deploying Web services, and Engstrom says that Sun is continuing the develop it, for example by adding a wizard-like interface to allow developers to use it to create Web services.
Looking toward the future
Engstrom says that ultimately, Sun is aiming its resources towards "a different constituent of developer than today. Today what we do is give developers the ability to build Web services. But as I look out a couple of years, developers will have more of an assembler's role. They'll use a new class of tools like workflow tools, and they'll take the building block of different Web services components, and drag and drop them in sequential logic," to build completed Web services from individual components.
But that's far on the horizon. In the shorter term, Sun's success in Web services hinges largely on its N1 and grid computing initiatives. But what are they, how do they work, and are they likely to succeed? That's what we'll look at in the next column.
Part Two >>
About the Author
Preston Gralla, a well-known technology expert, is the author of more than 20 books, including "How the Internet Works," which has been translated into 14 languages and sold several hundred thousand copies worldwide. He is an expert on Web services and the author of a major research and white paper for the Software and Information Industry Association on the topic. Gralla was the founding managing editor of PC Week, a founding editor and then editor and editorial director of PC/Computing, and an executive editor for ZDNet and CNet. He has written about technology for more than 15 years for many major magazines and newspapers, including PC Magazine, Computerworld, CIO Magazine, eWeek and its forerunner PC Week, PC/Computing, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Dallas Morning News among others. As a well-known technology guru, he appears frequently on TV and radio shows and networks, including CNN, MSNBC, ABC World News Now, the CBS Early Show, PBS's All Things Considered and others. He has won a number of awards for his writing, including from the Computer Press Association for the Best Feature in a Computer Publication. He can be reached at preston@gralla.com.
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