Sun Creates VP of Eco-Responsibility Position

Published: May 18, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of its executive reorganizations in the past month, Sun Microsystems and its new chief executive officer, Jonathan Schwartz, have been busy rejiggering the executive chairs in an effort to get everyone at the company focused on boosting revenues and cutting costs. But Sun is also interesting in trumpeting its increasing emphasis on another kind of efficiency: energy efficiency.

And to make this clear, Sun has brought back David Douglas, a former senior engineer and technology manager who worked at the company for eight years, to become its first vice president of eco-responsibility. Douglas will report to Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's chief technology officer, and will be responsible for coordinating all of Sun's efforts to make its machines and software energy efficient and to help establish industry standards for measuring the efficiency of IT gear. Within a month, Sun is expected to formally announce a more refined version of its SWaP metric--short for Space, Watts and Performance--which it has been using to show off its Opteron and T1 servers in recent months. Douglas will also be responsible for recycling and clean manufacturing efforts, interface with environmental organizations and governmental agencies focused on environmental issues, and push the use of the Sun Grid as the most ecologically efficient kind of computing.

Douglas left Sun to co-found ConnecTerra, a maker of RFID middleware based in Silicon Valley, which was acquired by BEA Systems in October 2005. At that time, Douglas was named chief architect for BEA's WebLogic Web application server stack.