The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

ventures, marketing, software development, planning and his current role as president
& COO.
Life outside the US is not new to him; more than half of Sun’s revenue comes from
outside North America, and in the late 80s he lived in Scandinavia working for
McKinsey. The statute of limitations has still not expired and he cannot name the
clients, but he gained a certain familiarity with Europe and its incipient cell-phone
culture. At Sun, he started out in 1996 reporting to (then) CTO Eric Schmidt and
making acquisitions. One of those was NetBeans, based in Prague (we were an
investor), which now lives on as Sun’s Czech development center. It is one of just a
few growth locations at Sun these days; others include R&D and engineering facilities
in St. Petersburg, Beijing and Bangalore, along with Austin, TX, and Burlington, MA.
Indeed, Sun is a leader in dispersed development. “We’ve been at this now for a
decade,” says Schwartz. “We have a developed a set of best practices for a development
center. The first question is finding a leader who’ll be there for ten years. It has
to be a known exec from within Sun. Nationality isn’t the issue, but we want to make
sure to extend our culture....We’re not looking for a random offshoot in an offshore
location. For example, the new head of development efforts in China is a Bay
Area industry veteran with deep contacts in Asia. In fact,” he muses, “that term ‘offshore’
is anachronistic. Offshore to what?”
Second, he says, “You have to give any location a serious charter. If you just want a
job shop, you should talk to Satyam, Infosys or Wipro. But otherwise, you have to
move the charter: Which of your product lines are you going to move to France? On
the receiving end, if you make good people work on pieces and parts, they get
tremendously dissatisfied and then they quit.”
For each “charter,” he adds, you shouldn’t span too many time zones. “There’s this
myth, especially in open source, that you can do development across 50 locations. If
you want something coherent, then you have to have a coherent organization and
look at each other across the table. [SEE PAGE 40 ON OPEN SOURCE.] For example,
Bangalore does Web services infrastructure; Austin does microprocessor design and
identity management [based around Waveset, acquired in 2004]. Austin also benefits
from the presence of the University of Texas. If you’re on the faculty you get to pick
out the best students and recruit – hence our tight relationship with Beijing
Tsinghua University.”
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