What steps have you taken to ensure that Suns businesses get augmented and its technology deployment strategy is in sync with its business strategy?
There are a couple of keys to keeping in sync. First and foremost is having an engaged senior executive team. For our largest business and IT initiatives, our senior executives are engaged, and drive the companys direction with IT as a partner. From an IT perspective, we have assigned engagement managers to each business unit. Their primary function is to keep IT-driven initiatives aligned with business goals on a daily basis. And, finally, we have developed an IT vision and strategy that is shared across the business to further ensure our long-term alignment.

Sun has been famous for deploying its products internally before unfurling it for its customers. What advantages does this provide your company?
Early deployment gives us several advantages. It allows us the ability to help shape products that we use internally for our own IT functions and thus, helps anticipate our external customer needs. Our IT organization contributes requirements to various product R&D teams within Sun, which enables them to design products that are specifically tailored to our internal customer needs as well as our external customers. We then work with the product groups to do early testing of the product as it is developed.

How challenging is it for Sun to keep its developers happy in terms of offering newer and innovative applications at their disposal?
Sun has geared itself to not only embrace but also support the Open Source environment. As the largest provider of Open Source in the world, our focus has been and continues to be on supporting not only the product but more importantly the developer communities. A key to success is collaborating with the developers and delivering to Suns strength while leveraging the overall community.

How is Sun coping up with the consolidation of large business applications on a single frame within the given time frame?
Within Sun we are driving very hard at application consolidation. Like most large enterprises, we have a much larger inventory of business applications than we need, to effectively run our business. At the moment we are supporting the business in driving significant process change within Sun, implementing a global ERP application that will enable the business to EOL in excess of 500 applications. To this end, senior business executives are actively working as a team to set the direction and manage the project.

Prasad Ramasubramanian/CyberMedia News
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