In this podcast, Vass talks about technology trends in the federal government and the way Sun helps businesses market to the federal government.

Many IT leaders talk about the challenges of going from the private sector to the public sector. Bill Vass would prefer to dispute this. He has successfully fused experiences in both areas to become a key technology driver at Sun Microsystems. He joined Sun after holding several key IT positions in the Office of the CIO for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. At Sun, Vass quickly moved up the ranks to become the company’s CIO. In 2007, Vass became president and chief operating office of Sun Microsystems Federal. It is one of Sun’s fastest growing business units.

Vass consistently works with CIOs at the largest federal agencies to implement a wide variety of information technologies that will reduce costs and increase productivity.  His staff of 800 works primarily with private sector systems integrators to provide the appropriate solutions. He says, “These people make a lot of the technical, product, and architectural decisions. Sun doesn’t compete with systems integrators such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Our federal business is based on partnerships. We partner with channel partners. We partner with all major systems integrators, as well as small systems integrators. We help everyone we work with to become successful.”

Under pressure to keep IT costs down, most federal government agencies have begun to focus on open source technologies. In fact, Sun Microsystems Federal has the goal of becoming the best highly scalable, low-cost open source software and hardware provider. Vass says, “We know we can support the federal government’s Web 2.0 deployments and the consolidations happening in the federal government.”

Because Sun is one of the largest contributors to the open source community, Vass and his team have worked hard to get that message out to the federal government. He says, “Everything we have is either open source or is in the process of going in that direction. Our products have the lowest power cost per thread. Our operating systems are the least expense to deploy and maintain. We even support and sell Windows and Linux products. We have enabled all of our development tools to support Web 2.0. Our role-based, visual Web services enable you to use open source technology to put together role-based portals, such as MySpace. We also provide delivery to mobile devices and centralized messaging. Sun gives the user the security of open source and the stability of knowing that they can get support from anyone.”

Bio
William (Bill) Vass is president and chief operating office for Sun Microsystems Federal. He formerly was chief information officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he was responsible for all aspects of Sun's global IT infrastructure and line-of-business application development, support, and maintenance, including information service delivery and security. While at Sun, Vass also has served as chief security officer and vice president of corporate software services.

Before joining Sun, Vass worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of the CIO, where he directed three large sectors of the Department of Defense's (DoD) IT infrastructure and represented DoD to Congress, the White House, and other nations. Before joining the Office of the CIO, Vass was chief technology officer and technical lead fir Army personnel systems.

Resources
Bill Vass on the Sun Microsystems You Thought You Knew - ExecutiveBiz
Top IT Issues - Bill Vass, President of Sun Microsystems Federal - Government Computer News
Bill Vass – Different Tasks, Different Chips - Government Computer News
Sun CIO Backs Blog Despite Lawyers’ Worries - ZDnet

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis