Sun Microsystems Malaysia appointed Loo Chong Peng (CP Loo) as its managing director in early July. Loo replaces Gan Boon San who was promoted president of Sun Asia South, replacing Lionel Lim, who was promoted senior vice-president, Asia Pacific region. Its former country sales director, Loo will now oversee Sun’s operations in Malaysia, drive Sun Malaysia’s business opportunities, increase its revenue and grow its market share.

Gan became managing director of Sun Malaysia in August 2006 and while there, he was also in charge of Sun in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Brunei and Bangladesh, while also being chief of operations of Asia South. Gan’s is now in charge of strategy and must ensure a consistent, integrated and responsive customer experience to deliver growth and profitability across Asia South. As Sun was in a quite period, Gan could not divulge its overall worldwide revenue, except to say that it had “announced a slew of software and hardware” and that “everybody is smiling.”

The network as the computer

Sun vision over the past 25 years has been that the network is the computer – ie. where a myriad of interconnected computing devices – from backend servers in data centres to desktop and notebook PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, cars, fridges, air conditioners, microwave ovens, music players and so on all  interact, communicate, share processing tasks, exchange information and content with each other – with the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

“The over one billion people on the Internet generate 390 GB of data per second and the volume is growing at 50%,” said Gan. A hardware company as well, Sun makes its own Sparc processors, Sun servers and workstations and StorageTek tape storage systems, which perhaps explains why it can afford to give away its software for free, unlike some software-only companies, even though hardware prices have been coming down. It’s also opened up the architecture of its Sparc processors under the name OpenSparc for anyone wanting to build their own version of the chip or an improved or enhanced version.

Sun servers, running its Solaris flavour of the Unix operating systems and its open source variant OpenSolaris power many web, e-mail and many other backend Internet functions. OpenSolaris is downloadable for free from http://www.opensolaris.com/.

Sun’s other open sourced software include its 128-bits Solaris ZFS (zetabyte file system), Java programming language and virtual machine, the GlassFish enterprise server, NetBeans integrated development environment, Open xVM Linux and Solaris lifecycle management tool among others.

In particular the ubiquitous Java runs on a host of end user platforms and devices, including mobile phones, MP3 players, BlueRay disks, as well as in web browsers and applications on PCs. The company recently acquired the open source mySQL database for Web2.0 applications and it supports various developer communities dedicated to the developing the OpenSparc architecture and chips; OpenSolaris, Java and its other tools, software development environment; and it provides developers with the raw materials and code to build their applications with. Sun’s developer network is altogether over three million strong worldwide and growing.

The Java Technopreneur Development Centre (JTrend) in Cyberjaya, south of Kuala Lumpur, is a collaboration between Sun Malaysia, Multimedia University and the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) to provide research & development lab facilities, consultancy and services for aspiring Java developers to develop, build, commercialise market their Java-based products both domestically and internationally.

Independent software vendors shipped 5,495 applications for Solaris on Sparc platforms worldwide in December 2007, followed by 3,585 for Solaris on 64 and 32-bit Intel platforms, 2,611 for Hewlett-Packard HP-UX Unix platforms, 2,426 for Red Hat Enterprise – Release 3 for 32-bit Intel platforms and 1,775 for IBM AIX 5L Unix platforms.

“Intel, AMD, IBM, Dell and Microsoft are our key partners and Microsoft is looking into interoperability with Solaris,” said Sun Asia South director of marketing, Chong Soon Cheong.