Many vendors that have started off their existence with a strong emphasis on hardware struggle to come to terms with the modern IT world where, for the majority of organisations, subtle differences in hardware architecture and performance are no longer the main drivers in their acquisition strategies. A clear trend over the last few years has seen hardware selection becoming less and less important except for the few organisations that require highly specific performance characteristics. The IT world is now, essentially, software driven and changing the culture of any large vendor to accept this difference is a challenge. Last week I attended the annual analyst conference held by Sun Microsystems and it was fascinating to note just how clearly the senior management of company now accepts the software mantra, albeit with yearnings still for hardware involvement somewhere along the line if at all possible.

The new understanding of the importance of software, especially of management software, is encouraging. From my point of view it is even better to hear the company setting out its stall in two key areas well away from the Java, Solaris and Star Office areas for which its software is best known. Now the company has made it clear that it is setting out its stall in one of the most dynamic sectors around at the moment, namely virtualisation, and is also ready to begin actively promoting its thin client solutions around its Sun Ray offerings. Both of these are areas in which Sun does not currently enjoy a high profile even though the company can trace back its virtualisation solutions to the mid nineteen eighties.

On the virtualisation side of things the company is ready to promote both its file based storage virtualisation solutions built on top of the Solaris ZFS file system. Now whilst one can argue that Sun has not set the world on fire with its storage profile it is clear that the company is getting together a strong suite of solutions comprising both its own offerings, including Thumper, and those that it OEMs. However, it is the Sun xVM Server family and especially the Sun xVM Ops Center management software that hold the potential to catch the eye. Sun xVM Server is a Hypervisor family based on XenSource and its own software to provide desirable qualities such as scalability, availability, manageability and security allowing the effective consolidation of Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms.

All well and good so far. But with Sun xVM Ops Center the company is actively targeting an area that recent research work carried out by Freeform Dynamics highlights as a major issue for many organisations. I am talking about the ongoing management and administration of physical and virtual systems using a single, coherent toolset—tasks that today pose a significant challenge. To this end xVM Ops Center provides capabilities to discover servers across the network, even when powered off, along with sophisticated provisioning of operating systems, firmware and other suitably packaged software, coupled with automatic updating and patching for Red Hat, SuSE and Solaris. In addition the software provides functionality to manage, in a secure fashion, users and a range of heterogeneous data centre systems. XVM Ops Center has been built with interoperability very much in mind to permit it to interact with other management tools. Finally, at least for now, Sun xVM Ops Center also supplies a reporting / auditing capability to simplify compliance reporting.

Many of these capabilities can be found in other tools, especially those available from specialist suppliers. Sun is one of the first of the large enterprise vendors to promote its heterogeneous management capabilities in the virtualisation arena and as such it could cause a stir if Sun can do an effective job communicating Ops Center to end user organisations and its channel community.

When it comes to the company's thin client offerings the Sun Ray software has really come of age and now allows Sun Ray clients to securely access applications of any type, including Microsoft Windows. Sun now also supplies desktop virtualisation solutions to allow thin client operations on PCs and laptops. Together these are more areas where Sun needs to increase its marketing efforts in order to sell solutions to new customers.

It is probably fair to say that Sun now has a much more substantial suite of software solutions than at any time in the past and, much more importantly, appears to be serious about expanding its market presence selling such solutions. It is also true that the company's senior management really has taken on board the importance of software to its future success. We shall have to see how quickly the culture of the rest of the organisation and its channel partners can take this to heart; it is difficult to modify entrenched behaviours. If it can get the message to sink in and if it can get effective marketing in place for the software solutions it will be interesting to watch the market reactions, and those of its potential competitors.