Speech Summaries

Greg Papadopoulos Senior Vice President and CTO Sun Microsystems

Beyond Web Services

Greg Papadopoulos, Senior Vice President and CTO, Sun Microsystems, talked about the evolution of network computing and how Web services fit into that process. He explained that this evolution includes an Internet of computers, which evolves to an Internet of things that embed computers, which, in turn, transforms into an Internet of things. We are moving towards a scale of tens of trillions of networked components.

Over time software functions are breaking apart into smaller components and being distributed across the network. Each piece is more specialized, but all of these distributed components must also be reintegrated back into the whole. This process is happening on an ever larger scale -- starting with client server and moving to Web services.

The impact on developers is palpable. Currently, developers work with shrink-wrapped applications that they know how to write and install. But we need to achieve a common understanding about what it means to develop and deliver a network service. Mr. Papadopoulos believes that the monster issues facing Web services are identity and context, privacy and trust, accounting, peering and settlement, photons versus electrons, and scale. We need to develop communities of self-organizing networks that deliver services to a single household and also at a grid level.

Questions And Answers

Q: What is Sun doing about security and Web services?
A: There are many technical solutions to these security problems. But we need to figure out how to manage security, deal with authenticity, and make progress in identity so that we can build a public key infrastructure that is easy to use.

Q: How will we manage the billions of devices that are part of Web services?
A: In order to manage these components, we need identity-driven applications. The only thing that has an identity on the Internet right now is the network interface. We will have to confront the identity of people, then the identity of devices.

Q: How will we manage the world of decentralized technology components?
A: In two days Sun will announce a big step forward in how companies manage decentralized technology. There will be great value in solutions to this problem that do not require companies to centralize control.

Q: What Web services standards will endure? Is Sun committed to those standards?
A: Sun is absolutely committed to Web services. Some of the standards, like SOAP, will be useful to B2C, but they will need more power to support B2B transactions across service boundaries. We are in the process of discovery as a developer community.