Sun chief knocks mix-and-match systems

The computing industry must learn from the telecoms model and discard multiple software components if systems are ever to be reliable, according to Sun Microsystems' chief executive, Scott McNealy.

In his keynote address at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Florida this week, McNealy said that the integration of multiple discrete applications, middleware, directory, management, storage and security components within computer systems no longer made sense.

He said this left users having to act as system integrators, and was not a good way to move forward.

Referring to how highly-available systems could be built, he said: "You can't create five-nines web tone by using that kind of mix-and-match environment. You need an integrated system and an integrated stack."

Controversially, McNealy predicted that the application software industry would "fade away" because software would become a feature of systems, and not an industry in itself.

He questioned the industry's focus on software, which he said was not a factor in the telecoms market, nor in, for example, the car market. "When is the last time you bought left blinker software?" he joked.

He also explained that Sun's strategy would focus on building "big frigging web tone switches" or servers that worked like telecoms switches.

During a 'take no prisoners' performance, McNealy peppered his responses to questions posed by Gartner analysts with barbs at competitors, most notably Hewlett Packard (HP).

He suggested that HP's move into services through the proposed acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers' consulting business would place it at a disadvantage and offered to help finance the purchase with $2bn of his own company's money.

Perhaps responding to HP's implied criticism of Sun's open source strategy, McNealy claimed that through its acquisition of appliance vendor Cobalt, Sun would become the "world's number one Linux engineering company by a lot".

He also highlighted how Sun had released its Star Office productivity suite to the open source community.

However, he side-stepped questions about whether Cobalt's devices might eventually be migrated to Sun's Solaris operating system by saying that such issues were secondary to the capability of systems.