Sun is a company based on innovation

Anil Valluri recently took over as Sun Microsystem's VP and MD for India
operations. Valluri joined Sun Microsystems India in 1999 as its
Director-Systems Engineering and CTO, responsible for all technology, product
and solution consulting.

Before being appointed VP, Valluri was heading Sun India's Services Business,
which spans Support Services, Professional Services, Learning Services and
Managed Services.

In his first interview after taking over the new responsibilities, he shared
his priorities and discussed various Sun technologies and its future in a talk
with Srinivas R of CyberMedia News. Excerpts:

You recently took over the Sun India responsibilities. What are your
priorities for Sun India and what changes you would like to bring?

We don't have to bring any changes. The idea is to continue with a lot of the
good stuff we have done all these years. We are only going to fine-tune and
tweak some of those things, which we always wanted to fine tune. The market is
always changing and dynamic and you have to continuously adapt to it.

So the changes that we will be making would be to serve customers better, to
have a lot more partnerships aligned to add to the customer requirements and
also look at how we are developing our employees.

We will be focusing on the government, telecom, financial services and retail
markets.

How is Sun planning to balance environmental issues with scaling computing
like power consummation and so on?

Sun is very much at the fore of green computing. Sometime back we did a
campaign around eco-computing, green computing, using our black box and all that
stuff. We are not promoting green computing because it is fashionable and it is
the right thing to do. Our products are actually very, very green.

We also are looking at designs of data centers, which use very innovative
cooling methodologies; we are using very high efficiency power supplies in all
our systems and something like 98 percent deficiency in power supply designs. We
use very innovative cooling methodologies for all our fans and air turbulence
and so on.

Anil Valluri

What would be your offerings apart from MySQL servers and Java?

Sun is a company based on innovation. Developing IP is our differentiator.
We have to differentiate ourselves in the market using an IP.

We are very strong on Solaris and it is our flagship technology. We have
offered a new set of technologies, MySQL, which we have acquired and are
offering to the market place. Then we have another big differentiator-the
chip-based multi-threading designs-where we have innovatively used
microprocessor design to get deficiencies to an order of magnitude higher than
what it normally is by effectively making use of the CPU during idle time.

We have also come out with SPARK version 7 chip, which is again a quad-core
chip, a very high performance chip for the large scale computing requirements
for banks, telecom companies and so on.

How many open office users are there in India?

Actually we don't track it because there are millions of users. That is the
level of true open sourcing that we have done. What we are looking at is how do
we get them to buy service contracts from us. And we are also not targeting the
non-mission critical users. Mission critical users are the ones who we will be
approaching. And it just starts open office, the open Solaris downloads. It's
big for us. Over 11 million downloads and more than 70 percent are non-Sun
downloads. So we have a good opportunity to go and sell service contracts on
open Solaris with HP and IBM systems running.

Our attempt is to go to those people who have downloaded open Solaris and
give them a good value proposition. Those who need it will buy it. We are not
expecting large numbers, but will focus more on the student community; because
large clients like education institute may not need it.

What is happening at Sun India R&D?

We have talked about optic fibers as back planes for communications within
the system. We have used the proximity computing that we are talking of user's
capacitance as a means of communicating between two chips placed next to each
other without any wire; just the air is the medium, lot of innovative stuff.

We are also doing a lot of work around chip-based multi-threading, the next
generation chip-based multi-threading systems. Coming back to the Bangalore
site, which is a part of our global engineering organization, they work on basis
of collaborative engineering. That means that some pieces will be made in
Bangalore, some in California, some in China and so on, based on where the
engineering centers are. India as a center has been working on Solaris, on Java,
on the application servers, all of these on the Java enterprise stack.

Sun India has grown 30 percent last year.

We would like to do more than that. The point is, we would always look at the
market, what it is in a year and whether we going faster than the market or not.
The idea is always to gain marketshare points by growing faster than the market.
That is the idea. Current IDC figures talk of 20 percent as market growth. So,
we want to grow more than that. That is something, which we have been achieving
for nine years now.