Standards as "strategic weapon" for Sun Microsystems

Michelle Aden’s title is “Standards Strategy Ambassador” for the Chief Technologists’s Office of Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s leading information technology companies that makes both software and hardware. One of the most energetic people you’ll ever meet, Aden has no doubt about the economic value of standards to the company. She cites with enthusiasm the advantages to using standards: cost reduction in developing new products, improved interoperability and shortened time to market.

But she adds something more when she calls them a “strategic weapon” in her company’s arsenal. “Those who prepare standards,” she explains, “have a competitive advantage because their ideas are being standardized.”

Sun Microsystems helps to write standards for things such as indicator lights for boards, among other technologies. The company participates in IEC work though the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee for Information Technology (JTC1). Aden says open standards are better than proprietary ones because anyone can participate, it’s transparent and the resulting specifications are either free or inexpensive.

Free the hostages
Above all, open standards lead to greater innovation, which royalties would stifle. “Who owns Office12?” she asks rhetorically. “Microsoft. Who owns Linux? A community. When it’s all proprietary, the consumer is held hostage. Standards organizations remove the proprietary question.”

Aden insists that having a standard “does not mean the implementation is homogeneous for everyone. Take Sun’s OpenOffice for example: all kinds of people can create products based on it, but they’re not all the same product on the market.” Reading between the lines, her words suggest that the IEC sets the foundation for technical innovation.

Sun’s Compliance Manager, Dennis Symanski, knows about IEC standards and champions them as well: “ Sun uses the IEC’s standards as our preferred method of proving compliance with worldwide regulations," he says.

Like many companies in the IT field, Sun Microsystems assembles instead of making all of its own parts and that means buying from vendors. By specifying IEC standards to them the company ensures that it doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel to guarantee the quality of its products, leaving it more time to focus on innovation.

Speed of light

However, when it comes to software, Aden says consortia have an advantage over international standards organizations. “I’m astounded by the blazing speed of software development,” she says. In software, development moves near the speed of light: the industry is amorphous, fast and changes daily. So consortia work well here because they respond quickly to industry needs for standards. As a result, Aden says the PAS process (bringing publicly available specifications as completed documents into the standards development process) is a good compromise because they come into ISO/IEC JTC1 and become international standards very quickly.