Sun Labs Will Step Up Innovation for Commercialization

Published: June 8, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in the early 1990s, when Big Blue was reeling from a sharp revenue decline in its core mainframe and proprietary server markets, then-new chairman and chief executive officer, Louis Gerstner, walked into the legendary IBM Research laboratories and gave the scientists there an ultimatum: Do great research, but solve real customer problems, not theoretical ones. To his credit, Gerstner saw that a company that wanted to have a future could not stop investing in research and development, and many of the ensuing hardware and software technologies that came out of IBM Research have saved IBM's financial cookies.

Flash forward a decade and a half, which is precisely 15 years after Sun Microsystems established its Sun Labs research institution and when Sun itself has been the victim of years of sustained financial woes, and new chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz is taking a similar tack even as he announces layoffs. Schwartz, like founder Scott McNealy before him (still Sun's chairman), is a staunch believer in R&D as a differentiator and a means to secure future sales and profits.

At a birthday party for Sun Labs this week, Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development at Sun, said that the company has spent $8 billion on R&D in the past four years alone and made the commitment to create disruptive technologies like Java. Sun had a dozen Sun Fellows on hand to walk people through some 40 different research projects underway at the company. One of those Fellows is Bob Sproull, one of the original founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center lab that created graphical user interfaces, laser printers, and Ethernet networking, among other key technologies, who is also the director of Sun Labs.

"Fifteen years ago, we founded Sun Labs with two main missions--solving our customers' most technical problems and asking a few hard, unthinkable questions," explained Sproull. "The way we've been able to do this is by having some of the best researchers in the world and by having a constant influx of new ideas. Our most effective technology transfers involve engineers from the business units throughout our research, and culminate in transferring our researchers to the business unit, along with their ideas and artifacts. Ultimately, this model has proven extremely effective and has been critical in helping Sun maintain its innovative edge."

Sun was showing off Project Sun SPOT, which is a small Java-based computer that links into a wireless mesh network; the Fortress programming language, which is being developed for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for supercomputers that seeks to bring Fortran capabilities to Java; Project Neuromancer, which is creating a large-scale telemetry network for coping with pandemics; and Project Darkstar, which is a distributed gaming system for developers who create multiplayer games and for companies that host them.