Sun's centres for enabling net business

By N. N. Sachitanand

BANGALORE, APRIL 10. What are the primary concerns of a web-based startup or an established company extending its business to the web? A quick start, smooth running, easy scalability and minimum cost to performance ratio - for starters.

The practice till now has been for the company's consultant and system integrator to painstakingly design the system from scratch, get it running, pray that it holds and, when the problems come, start fire fighting. For their client company it could mean the end of a promising venture or, in the case of established businesses, a bout of painful destabilisation.

Now the California-based Sun Microsystems, which has been a flag- bearer of the Internet revolution, has come up with a facility to both hasten and smoothen the entry of businesses into the Internet world. Briefing this correspondent in Bangalore Mr. Al Foley, SI Alliance Director of Sun Microsystems, informed that during the last two years, Sun has set up three dotcom/ready competency centres at Menlo Park (California), Paris and Tokyo to help develop, test and evaluate e-business solutions.

An investment of around $15 to 20 million has gone into each one of these centres, equipped with market-leading business software and all sorts of hardware. In any one of these centres, consultants and system integrators can, with the assistance of the Sun technologists, quickly prepare solution blueprints encompassing architecture building blocks, template, hardware and software configurations, integration testing plan and roll-out strategy.

According to Mr. Foley, these centres can help cut down the ``time to market'' for dotcom startups from the usual six months to one year to just around four to six weeks. And that is a big gain in a market which distinctly blesses the early birds. Mr. Foley hinted that the next two such dotcom competency centres of Sun might come up in Australia and Singapore within a year, with India getting one later on. Sun is also putting up, along similar lines a wireless.com laboratory at Menlo Park (California), for developing and testing mobile commerce business models and solutions, which should be in operation in another three months.

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Section  : Business
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