Sun Microsystems Inc. has seen the future of technology and it is a commodity market, according to its president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz. Acquisitions and opening up its source code are among the ways Sun plans to push to the top of that commodity market, with Schwartz saying he would be interested if IBM Corp. put its server group up for sale as it did with its PC group late last year. "We will be more acquisitive in the next 12 months, and will position ourselves to be a consolidator in the industry," Schwartz said.

Sun recently acquired Storage Technology Corp. for $4.1 billion. Schwartz said he would be willing to talk to other hardware vendors about their server divisions either, because for him, the future of technology will depend less on services and more on standardization.

In his speech at the Securities Industry Association's technology management conference in New York on Wednesday, Schwartz put forth Sun's idea of "utility computing," the concept of computing power as a utility that's paid for by the hour akin to electricity and water utilities. He said the time is closer than ever for the concept to work as the industry begins to standardize on a few chips, a few operating systems and software architectures such as Java and Microsoft Corp.'s .Net platforms. Once technology has become standardized, people will no longer have to own and manage their own data centers much like few people have to own and manage their own generators. Clearly not everyone would fall into this category of utility users, but IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. all also have their own initiatives in this field.

For more on Schwartz's views on utility computing, the StorageTek acquisition or anything else regarding technology and Sun, check out his blog. — Stacey Higginbotham

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