Play Podcast  (Right click to download)

It was a long road to travel, from writing software for geophysical exploration to heading up IT for Sun Microsystems. And along that road, you can bet that Bill Vass, Sun's visionary CIO, acquired a wealth of experiences; among them, working as CTO for the Army, and later, as a Pentagon CIO overseeing IT for the Department of Defense. What can a tech guy learn from heading up that $35 billion behemoth? If you are Bill Vass, you might learn that simplicity is a beautiful thing, and that consolidation can spur, not quash, exciting innovations.

Consolidating Sun's IT was not always easy, as Vass is the first to note. It required plenty of buy-in from all levels of the company to eliminate redundancy, put in place good standards and processes, and implement good architecture. But the efforts paid off handsomely in terms of cost savings and agility for Sun. Yet Vass's term as CIO has not just been about cost cutting; he has helped to bring about a number of initiatives that might elicit a lot of envy from other tech company employees.

He points to Sun's iWork program with pride, for example, and why shouldn't he? iWork, empowers Sun employees to work wherever there is a computer — at home, at a hotel, at a kiosk at an airport ... all they need is their employee badge. The program, says Vass, spurred greater employee mobility, realized savings in real estate costs, and enabled Sun to be able to put up a new system on thousands of desktops in a matter of a few hours, without deploying anything.

Grid technology is another topic that Vass discusses in this interview: The same thin-client technology behind iWork enables Sun to centralize processing power, utilize grid technology for a number of its applications, and move toward the future goal of buying cycles as it needs them. Vass comments on his travels in the blogosphere, and even weighs in on open source versus open systems.

Join host Tom Parish for a fascinating conversation covering a wide map of topics with one of Sun's brightest stars.

Resources

Bill Vass's Blog
"General" "Java" "Music" ... How cool is this?

IT's Top Ten
Vass's "Top Ten" rules for how to succeed with technology, or sometimes refer to them as IT Essentials.

Masters of the Virtual World
Financially strapped NW200 vendors find cost-cutting nirvana with large-scale telework deployments.

Unlease Mobility with Security
More about the Sun Ray.

Mobility with Security
From Sun: More about the Sun Ray and Sun's mobility devices, etc.

The End of Software Licensing
The success of open source software will, eventually, lead to the end of proprietary software licensing as we know it.

Bio

William (Bill) Vass is Chief Information Officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Vass is 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.

Vass has been with Sun for several years, serving as Chief Security Officer for Sun IT and Vice President of Corporate Software Services.

Before joining Sun, Vass worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of the CIO. There, he was director of three large sectors of the Department of Defense's (DoD) IT infrastructure and represented DoD to Congress, the White House, and other nations. Prior to joining the Office of the CIO, Vass was CTO and Technical Lead for Army personnel systems worldwide.

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development Manager