SUN MICROSYSTEMS COMMENTARY: **IT TRENDS FOR 2009**

CP Loo, Managing Director, Sun Microsystems Malaysia

Overview
In 2008, Sun continued to achieve growth in emerging markets, steadily seeding countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China with tools, training and open source technology to support their success and innovation.

In 2009, Sun sees businesses and governments in emerging markets increasingly using the latest open source technologies to develop innovations with minimal costs and investments. Sun’s open source strategy and industry standard offerings complement the needs of customers in the emerging markets, who look to Sun’s solutions to heighten their business performance amid rising pressures to control IT costs in the current global financial environment. By enabling developers in these markets to create new solutions, Sun is cultivating its long term growth in these markets while making a strong contribution to the local IT industry’s development and competitiveness.

IT Trends for 2009

**GREEN IT**

Eco
Energy efficiency to reduce watts/compute workload will continue to be a priority in 2009, given high ROI and overall energy limitations. Datacenter blueprints will continue to evolve with aggressive virtualization saving potentially 2X-10X the savings of facility efficiency measures. Power management will be used to throttle down servers (and other IT equipment) when not in use, something not done effectively today.

High temperature data centers, some without any mechanical cooling systems, will be discussed more in 2009 (but very few will be implemented). And collaboration will continue to drive progress forward through new standards (The Green Grid), best practices and open tools (OpenEco.org), as we scramble to meet energy and climate goals. Sun will continue to innovate on eco in hardware (servers and network), software (inc. efficient coding), services (datacenter design) and partnerships.

**THE CLOUD**

Cloud Computing
For 25 years, Sun has been guided by the vision that "the network is the computer." With the explosion of cloud computing in 2008, that vision is truer than ever. We are just at the beginning of this next evolution of the Internet. Sun expects to see cloud computing continue to impact the way IT infrastructure is designed and delivered to meet the varied needs of Web, business and HPC users. As enterprises and developers weed through the hype and figure out how to take advantage of the efficiencies of the cloud model, security, open standards and data portability will become increasingly important.

**HARDWARE**

Mid-range Computing
IDC estimates midrange server spend at US$15B in 2009, accounting for nearly 1/4 of the overall server spend. Customers have traditionally relied on midrange servers to deliver the scalability and reliability to handle business critical applications like OLTP and CRM, without much regard for energy efficiency.

The industry is beginning to see a shift in midrange capabilities -- instead of just being miniaturized versions of big iron -- the new midrange like Sun's SPARC Enterprise T5440 server will pack a lot more performance in a midrange package.

There are also the added benefits of reduced operating costs and space and energy savings -- a huge value in today's economy. These new platforms are redefining the midrange. In 2009 businesses will continue to demand a right-sized solution for consolidation and virtualization with the ability to scale. Expect to see Sun challenge the competition as the redefinition of the midrange extends into the storage market, offering customers peak performance and energy efficiency.

High Performance Computing (HPC)
In recent years, HPC has become a hot topic within IT, and businesses worldwide have begun to look towards tangible HPC solutions for their customers’ needs. Data-intensive industries like oil & gas and manufacturing are seeing the solid benefits to not only HPC processing, but also storage.

Open Storage
Open Storage will continue to grow as one of the most innovative and relevant topics affecting the storage community in 2009. Storage, currently a US$40BN dollar industry, is today going through a shift similar to that of the server market that occurred in the mid-90's. Customer demand for state-of-the-art storage systems with open architectures and easy deployment will dramatically increase.

Given the nature of the financial markets, cost economics have never been so important and will continue to be an important part of the buying decision in the coming year. Sun is spearheading the open storage revolution by combining open-source software with industry-standard system components to reduce storage costs by up to 75% over traditional market solutions.

**SOFTWARE**

Open Source
Open Source is definitely the top technology trend that has and will continue to have an impact on Sun and our customers. In companies across India, China, Eastern Europe, South and Central America, companies are dominantly using open source to create enormous wealth.

In China and India alone, there are more than a million software developers, many of whom cannot afford punitive technology license fees, so they default to open source software, like MySQL, Ubuntu Linux, OpenSolaris, Java or OpenOffice.org. Armed with these and the zeal to succeed and overcome adversity, the global market is open to them. Likewise, it is also open to businesses that want to leverage these same technologies that power some of the world’s most innovative companies such as Amazon, Google, Nokia and Sun Microsystems.

Many governments worldwide, including Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and South Africa now embrace the open document formats to help bring costs down and ensure all citizens have equal access to important material years from now. Research firm Gartner projects that by 2012, 90% of the world's companies will be using open source software – globally. Companies are realizing now that progress rests with their willingness to take a position on open source technology.

Virtualization Management
In 2008, virtualization became widely accepted as the premier consolidation tool to increase hardware utilization and decrease power and cooling costs. Gartner recently identified virtualization as the top strategic technology for organizations in 2009, and – in the current tough economic climate - businesses will continue to rely on virtualization coupled with effective management as the simplest and most cost-effective strategy for dealing with consolidation. Sun’s xVM virtualization management portfolio, introduced in September, provides open source virtualization software to help customers virtualize from the desktop to the datacenter at half the cost of the competition.