IW: What's happening with SeeBeyond at this point?

RB: They're going to be releasing an update fairly soon. But most of the work is going on for what they call Java CAPS [Composite Application Platform Suite]. A lot of the work there is around building sort of the next-generation composite application suite with developer tools in an open source environment. So that's what's happening with SeeBeyond today. And then the third piece of that's related, and one of the reasons I'm going to Austin is trying to figure out how does identity and security work with that. Because I think the other piece that's missing in most of the current Web 2.0 artifacts out there is -- I want to make sure that my transactions are secure. How do I make sure that I am who I say I am?... And the other one is things like single sign-[on]. Think about a mash-up situation where I've got an application that's representing a number of different services which I may or may not have rights to. How can I just sign on once and have that federated across all of those service requests? Today, there's really no answer. I mean it's all sort of open and free and you're just using public services. But I can easily see where I'm going to create, let's say, a portal for me that I'm going to track my banking, my stock options, and all sorts of information that's private to me, in one federated portal using Web services. I'd like to be able to do that with a single password, single sign-on, and federate that across all the services. That's sort of missing today.

IW: What's been the difference in Sun since Jonathan Schwartz took over as CEO?

RB: Since Jonathan took over I think there's been a big change in terms of open source awareness and community. Having I think the only CEO that blogs is sort of an interesting position to be in. We have a CEO who is expressing his thoughts publicly in a forum, which is much broader than you see other people in his position [do]. The other interesting thing is if you see the kinds of things that he's talking about in his blogs, I think it encourages the rest of our organization to do a little bit more community outreach as well. So I think that's good. It also helps that he is the one who brought in Rich Green, who has also been a huge benefit so far.

IW: Sun has been increasingly moving toward offering hardware complying with the, for lack of a better word, Intel CPU standard. What does the future hold for Sun's own SPARC architecture?