Sun Plans to Have No In-House Data Centers by 2015

1sockchuck writes "Sun Microsystems wants to cut its IT department's data center footprint in half within five years, and then eliminate in-house data centers completely shortly afterward. 'Our goal is to reduce our entire data center presence by 2015,' writes Sun data center architect Brian Cinque, who says Sun hopes to shift its in-house IT to a software-as-a-service model. Sun will use virtualization and consolidation to reduce its data center space and energy usage by 50 percent by 2013, with a goal of moving it all online two years later. Sun's plan reflects the shift to utility computing discussed in Nicholas Carr's new book, which we debated earlier this week."

Re:Eat your own dog food.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun already outsources their help desk (and has for a few years) and that has caused lengthy delays in productivity. I have seen new hires who didn't have access to necessary services for many weeks because the help desk person didn't understand English well enough to comprehend what was being asked of them, even though they gave the impression that they understood.

Sun has also been outsourcing many of their services for years, such as email. That is handled by an external company that uses Sun's servers and hardware to run and manage their services for them.

Sun also outsources a massive amount of technical support, engineering and developer resources from HCL in India.

For many years Sun has been pushing a "sun on sun" philosophy where everything at Sun that could possibly run Sun products should do so. There isn't much left to run since everything is being outsourced. Take a guess as to how long before Sun is just one building with a bunch of executives overseeing everything from middle management downward overseas and in outsourced domestic services.

Re:Sun does...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. StarOffice was a closed source product back then. Sun made it Open Source. Sun created the standard ODF and got it through ISO. So basically all the things that define OpenOffice.org where done by Sun. It was cross-plattform before, but Sun made it OpenSource and an international standard.