UC: Could you tell something about Sun’s position on Utility Computing? In contrast firms such as IBM or HP, it’s not something that you’ve made a lot of noise about so far.

Littlepage: We offer a number of strong product lines in this area but are also very clear that Sun will only approach the market from our core strengths. Sun is a technology networking company, not an outsourcing provider. Our role is to provide infrastructure for our partners who do specialise in outsourcing. Ultimately, of course, we serve CIO’s who want to become a utility for their company.

Right now, Utility Computing offers early adopters incremental improvements. Whilst predictions such as Utility Computing developing into a $50bn industry are probably correct, the market will take time to develop to full maturity. In this area, Sun is not rushing to market or to marketing right now.

UC: Are their any immediate benefits that you believe Utility Computing offers? Does your own position within Sun bring any unique insights?

Littlepage: One of my key responsibilities at Sun is to run our IT infrastructure – from the Sun employee’s desktops, the WAN and our web services tier. That leaves me with a fairly large IT operation to manage and I see myself as facing many of the same challenges as a CIO who might be a typical Sun customer or target client.

For example, there is the question of how to make optimal use of excess capacity. A recent IDC survey corroborated the view that many CIOs are currently unable to make full use of their technical resources. There’s a huge amount of superfluous kit lying around many organisations. Businesses either don’t know it’s there or only require a fraction of what is actually available to them.

Unsurprisingly CIOs would like to pay providers only for what they are actually using, which, of course is the basic principle of utility computing. There is an increasingly capability for businesses to audit and understand the resources they own. The next stage from that is to build up a clear understanding of their user’s demand profile and more sophisticated solutions are enabled.

It’s then possible for Utility Computing to be used either externally, in your relationship with an outsourcing partner, or internally, between the IT department and the business units that it supports. With an accurate picture of application usage, corporations can benefit from much more accurate internal billing and business units will have a much clearer understanding of their overheads.

UC: .... are you able to tell us a little more about the Sun approach to building up a user demand profile? How are you approaching that task?

Littlepage: We are running several pilots right now, with results expected in September this year. One of these is aimed at defining the key attributes that should be used to determine user demand profile. Being able to accurately measure consumption of a particular consumption is vital. If Utility Computing is to fully take off, the measurement (and thus billing) aspects of it will have to unassailable.

In the area of our technical resource utilisation, I have very clear stages in mind for progressing to a utility computing model. We will pilot and run Sun on this system before we fully take it to the market.

Our first step is to understand exactly what the load on our servers is. From there we will move to dynamic provisioning – an operator will shift around resources according to pre-defined rules. In the following year from that, we plan to use automated policies which will replace the human who manually made re-provisioning changes.

In closely monitoring all of that process we are building up increasingly precise information. Whilst the necessary granulairty is not there at the moment, it will come and at that point true Utility Computing can become a reality.

At that point, the applications are myriad. Take, for example, storage. It’s not what you would call a sexy issue, but it is a problem that all CIOs face. Accurately billed utility computing does give us the means to control that: When CIOs are able to present departments with an accurate report of their usage, together with the tools to manage their own storage, they will be able to bill accordingly. It will be possible to ensure that users are aware of the commercial cost of their storage. Although storage will never be denied to people, it will become like a mobile phone – “use as much as you like,” but sign up to a set deal – a 200mb flat rate, for example. Suddenly, it will be in a department’s commercial interest to manage their storage correctly and to not store unneeded files.

UC: Have you found that particular industries are more suited to utility computing so far?

Littlepage: In one sense, that is reasonably easy to answer: If you are looking at this from an outsourcing provider’s perspective – then probably the financial services industry will continue to be a major area of activity for utility computing vendors.

On the other hand, the answer really depends on the management of individual companies; those whose senior executives have vision and those who do not. Regardless of what industry they are in, they are companies who take the view that IT is a strategic resource. They, of course, are the companies who are most likely to gain a utility computing advantage.