What's on your internal IT agenda this year? We have two big projects. For the first one, imagine a grid that delivers traditional high-performance computing that people are used to, along with stateful computing a la ERP, along with desktops being imaged out to thin-client computers, all in the same architecture.
We have more than 42,000 desktops. With desktops, most of the time you're not using your CPU cycles. So we're taking those CPUs and putting them back into the grid. We're probably the first to attempt to do this with our desktops.
For things like big table joins in a database, we move that to big [symmetrical multiprocessing] boxes. Anything that requires very high performance, we move to our Opteron [server] environment. If we set up the grid properly, we'll have a data center in the future that will always be 80 percent to 90 percent utilized, versus 10 percent to 20 percent.
Our other big project is related to our recent acquisitions. We currently are running three ERP systems: Oracle, SAP via our acquisition of StorageTek last year, and Onyx from another acquisition. My goal is to consolidate them into a single Oracle "vanilla" instance.
Did you consider going with SAP instead of Oracle? We did do a bake-off between Oracle and SAP. We chose Oracle because their business processes were very close to ours; they now own Siebel, which we also use, and they have good support for x86 Solaris. SAP has a very clean multitiered architecture and is database-independent, which we liked. But SAP was not quite as ready to go on the grid as Oracle was.
Before joining Sun, you worked in IT at the Department of Defense. How is working at Sun different from working for the military? At the DOD, there were 16 million users. I was one of 70 CIOs across the DOD, which had more than 300,000 IT employees. There's no corporation in the world that is even close. Our IT annual budget was about 9 percent, or more than $30 billion, of the DOD's total budget. A lot of money is spent on life-critical systems. If a ballistic missile system goes down, people can die. That's a much higher bar than what we think of as mission-critical, like keeping eBay from going down for several hours.
How has Sun's IT organization changed in six years? When I first got here, we had nine business units [in IT], each of which operated independently in one of three geographic regions. We effectively had 27 CIOs. We don't have that today. Also, there were 3,000 IT people. Today, there are 800. We've done a lot of outsourcing and consolidation. We also supported 1,200 applications [then]. I helped cut that down to 500, though with our recent StorageTek acquisition, we are back up to 1,000.
My budget, for an IT company, is really lean.