The true meaning of mobility
Commentary: Access from everywhere is key
By Scott McNealy
(Co-founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems.) Sept. 4, 2003
PALO ALTO, California -- The mobile
work force is very real; the popular image of the mobile
worker is not. If it were, companies would have to devote
a huge portion of their technology budgets to removing sand
from laptops.
At any given moment, roughly a third
of our workers are not in their offices, but they're not
at the beach, either. They're engaged in classes, conferences,
customer visits, and team meetings at disparate locations
The key is making information as mobile
as they are -- delivering it securely to mobile phones,
pagers, PDAs, laptops and, often overlooked in discussions
of mobility, stationary systems.
Imagine being able to insert your
personal identification card into a Simple desktop -- really
just a monitor, mouse, and keyboard -- and having your personal
workspace instantly appear. That's what I do every day,
not just in my own office at Sun Microsystems, but in any
of our San Francisco Bay Area locations.
As I move around, I know the connection
and all the data is encrypted and secure. Plus, the device
is so simple (no operating system, no local storage) it
can't collect viruses or loose critical data -- yet the
user interface is just as advanced as any PC's and just
as easy to use.
Later this year, my roaming area will
expand to include the rest of North America, Europe and
Asia.
Travel happens to be a big part of
my job, so I'm thrilled about having the ability to travel
light and still have access to all my personal files and
productivity tools -- exactly as I left them the last time
I removed my smart card.
This type of mobility shatters the
old economics of personal computing. Suddenly businesses
no longer need a microprocessor for each employee. Usinglow-cost
desktop appliances powered by servers in the back room,
we're able to operate at 25 users per microprocessor, doing
some pretty heavy-duty workloads -- and saving millions
of dollars on electricity alone.
With such appliances, the only reason
you'd ever replace the hardware is if it breaks. Software
upgrades (and hardware upgrades for that matter) are all
handled the easy way - on a centralized server. That also
means that a single administrator can manage as many as
2000 desktops -- unheard of in the PC world.
Now think about another kind of mobility,
a kind that has been with us forever: the need to move an
employee from one office to another. Customers I've talked
to say such moves cost them anywhere from $800 to $1500
each. We have employees who change offices practically every
day and it costs us nothing.
Moving is as easy as sliding a smart
card out of one machine and into another, so people can
easily reorganize themselves into new teams – and for a
large, dynamic company, that can add up to millions of dollars
a year in savings.
With this approach, we've also discovered
that the company no longer needs to supply an office for
every employee. In sales, for example, we average 1.8 users
per office, since reps tend to be out on sales calls much
of the time.
Though the ratio may vary, the same
principle applies to most groups in the company, so we've
set up "flexible zones," where some offices are
available on a first-come, first served basis and others
can be reserved the way you would a conference room. Yet
every person's personal digital workspace meets up with
them wherever they go.
When you really stop and think about
it, the best place for data is not on a desktop or a laptop
but on the network, just as the best place for money is
not in your home but in a bank. It's safer there, and more
accessible – all you need is your bank card.
