To hear Sun CIO Bill Vass explain it, you'd be wrong.

'For an IT company, my budget is really lean,' Vass said in an interview earlier this week. 'It doesn't compare to Oracle or Dell or IBM or HP.'

Vass expects to spend about US$300 million this year on Sun's IT needs, a figure that represents about 2 percent of the company's expected revenues this year. The average company spends between 3 percent and 4 percent of its revenues, most figures show -- and most of Sun's direct competitors spend far more.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Sun is in the midst of two ambitious multi-year IT consolidation projects that are creating major short-term costs and is integrating five companies bought last year, including Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) for $4.1 billion.

'We're building middleware connectors between StorageTek's systems and Sun and running it in parallel,' he said. 'There won't be a lot of savings for at least a few quarters, until we shut the StorageTek systems down.' Vass expects to do that in late 2007.