In focus

FST speaks with Stuart Wells, Executive Vice President at Sun Microsystems, Inc., to look at the company’s focus on financial services customers.

Since joining Sun Microsystems 24 years ago, Stuart C. Wells has served in a number of key management and executive positions. As Executive Vice President reporting directly to Sun’s president and COO Jonathan Schwartz, Wells is tasked with driving the Utility Grid Computing initiative, Managed Services, Sun Financing and the Remanufactured Sales program. In addition, Wells also leads Sun’s Worldwide Financial Services Marketing and Sales. In this role, he helps financial services customers gain a competitive edge with Sun’s products, services and solutions.

The financial services industry is a strategic priority for Sun and is comprised of some of the most innovative and technologically advanced customers in the world. In this interview, Wells gives his insights on how Sun is providing choice, flexibility and performance to their customer base.

FST. Over the last 15 years, Sun has been a leading technology provider to Wall Street customers; recently, however, many key Wall Street customers have been adopting Linux-based systems. How does Sun position itself in this marketplace today against Linux?
SW. Sun is not against Linux. We compete against Red Hat. We are strong supporters of the open source movement. But with the introduction of Solaris 10, we believe our customers have a better choice than Red Hat or IBM. The new Solaris includes performance improvements for smaller low cost systems. The goal was to make Solaris speedier on lower-end platforms. Solaris 10 is a better alternative because there is an ecosystem of Sun engineers working on the operating system and hundreds of developers working with independent software vendors to optimize their applications on Solaris 10 – you don’t have that with Linux. Further, with Open Solaris we have taken the best part of the Linux movement and released more code from our middleware stack, including elements of the integration standard built for service-oriented architectures.

FST. What do you see as the key business challenges that your financial services institutions (FSI) customers are facing today?
SW. Business flexibility is a key requirement for financial services clients today. FSIs need their systems to adapt quickly for a variety of reasons: responding to regulatory issues, deploying new services to their customers and maintaining high security requirements are just a few examples. Increasingly, our customers are seeking to reduce duplication, cost and risk through the development of group-wide approaches to major areas of their business such as payments, lending and product pricing. In order to do this, flexibility needs to be built into their technology infrastructure and this is where we see FSI customers turning to Sun for guidance.

Sun has done a tremendous amount of innovation and development in building a highly integrated and open Java based middleware stack that provides the software framework needed for services-driven architectures, aka SOA. The integration of the Sun products – which include an application server, identity management and business integration software – can save both time and resources required for companies to reap the business rewards of a more flexible IT model. We see financial services customers using this software framework to improve how they manage their payments and credit card businesses, their retail banking customer information and their regulatory issues by allowing them to have an enterprise view of compliance across their organization.

By creating a more dynamic infrastructure with loosely coupled components, organizations can react to changes and introduce new products to market more rapidly; this will become the business differentiator for the future. However, there is a world of difference between concept and implementation; Sun’s pragmatic approach to SOA implementation is aimed at tackling these issues.

Another key challenge for our customers is how do they get the most out of their data center investments. To address the needs of customers that are grappling with space and power consumption issues, we just announced a new microprocessor, UltraSPARC T1, which uses less power and creates less heat than a household lightbulb. It is the first eco-responsible microprocessor and you don’t even need a fan in the system, allowing customers to save millions of dollars in energy and cooling costs.

The Sun Fire servers are based on the ‘rack-on-a-chip’ technology. We also have 1U and 2U servers, which are energy-efficient, space-saving platforms for web and application-tier processing. The lower-end Sun Fire servers, powered by AMD Opteron processors, provide over 52 percent power and cooling savings compared with our competitors’ products.

FST. Security is a key concern for financial institutions today. How does Sun help FSI customers deal with the need for improved security measures?
SW. Security is a primary design point in all of Sun’s products. For example, many organizations are beginning to deploy our thin client Sun Ray workstations remotely for secure access to sensitive data. Since the Sun Ray has no local operating system or storage, all of the data stays centralized, where it can be professionally managed. There is no data stored on local hard drives that can be lost or mismanaged. On our newest line of Niagara servers, we have put the crypto algorithms directly on the chip, so you can chose to encrypt all of your internet traffic with less than a five percent performance penalty. Another example is Java. When was the last time you heard of a Java virus?

Sun provides the market leading set of identity management and provisioning tools. These tools allow an organization to manage identities and privileges from one central location. If fraud occurs or employees are transitioned, access to all systems can be immediately shut off from one location. Within our suite of tools, the Identity Auditor tools allows an organization to monitor access to back-end systems from one place. This system can help banks identify and track fraud from both internal and external sources. When combined with new regulatory requirements around multi-factor identification, Identity provides a secure framework for managing identity and access.