Sun Microsystems Inc.'s executive vice president and chief technology officer, Greg Papadopoulos, fiercely defended his company's future, while speaking Wednesday morning, Oct. 26, in San Francisco at the Vortex conference.

Facing tough questions from chief information officers sitting in the audience skeptical whether the company can make money from its new strategy around utility computing and open-source software, Papadopoulos answered with an analogy. He said the company can prosper as computing becomes even more commoditized. Just as electricity is a commodity, General Electric Co. still earns a hefty profit from manufacturing more effective power plants.

He contrasted his company's efforts in open-source software with that of IBM Corp. by saying all of Sun's software is, or soon will be, made open source. That includes Sun's identity management and grid computing software. "I think IBM uses open source as a foil," he said, adding that if IBM's really serious about it, where are its plans to make WebSphere, DB2 or Tivoli open source?

Papadopoulos also elaborated on the company's recent alliance with Google Inc. "What are those pieces one has of a desktop experience that is rendered as a network service," he said pointing to e-mail and office productivity suites as examples. "We have pieces that can go into that."

In fewer words, he added that Google has a few weak areas that Sun could help it shore up. First, most of its users are anonymous, which sharply contrasts with rivals such as Yahoo! Inc. and eBay Inc. Second, Google lacks a large software distribution channel. He believes Sun can help since there are 25 million Java Runtime Environment downloads each month. Papadopoulos added that Sun's hardware competence might be able to help Google with an estimated 500,000 servers that support its popular online services. — Joshua Jaffe

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