THE BUSINESS RATIONALE DRIVING JAVA PROCESSORS IN CORPORATIONS

Raj Parekh, vice president of marketing, Sun Microelectronics Systems Corp. in Mountain View, Calif. is a man on a mission. He aims to change the computing paradigm in business. Parekh’s group designs microprocessors optimized to execute the Java language. He believes the CPUs will outperform general purpose embedded processors.

The computing paradigm in most large corporations has gone through significant changes in the past 10 to 15 years. Before the personal computer, corporations ran on large mainframe computers in centralized facilities. Networked to the mainframe were dumb terminals that initiated jobs on the central computer or accessed data contained in the mainframe’s large information store.

With the advent of the personal computer, users in large corporations took control of the computing resource from the large central computer. The users also took power away from the management information system (MIS) manager in the process. No longer was the MIS manager in control of all the company’s data.

Furthermore, because users purchased hardware and software out of their own department’s budgets, the MIS manager lost control of the maintenance and service of these computing resources.

MIS managers regained some control as he began making hardware and software purchases to take advantage of volume discounts. Furthermore, the proliferation of local area networks created the need for a network manager to maintain the LAN. The task fell to the MIS manager. He was also given responsibility for connecting these local area networks into the corporate mainframe resources via the company-wide network.

However, as LANs proliferated in large corporations, so did lower-cost, open, Unix-based client-server computing. It began surrounding the larger mainframes and relegating the mainframe to being a large data base server.

As corporations analyzed the cost of providing PCs to each of its employees, they became aware of significant hidden costs. Though the individual PC was relatively low cost, maintaining the PC could run several times the cost of the original hardware and software over the life of the system.

Cost included updating software on each system individually, backing up data from each system to ensure corporate assets are not lost. Then there is the cost of adding capability to the PC during its life.

Enter the Java Language and the embedded processors that execute the language, both from Sun Microelectronics, a division of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif. With Java, MIS managers create their own intra-company Internet with all applications software residing on servers throughout the company.

Now, instead of updating software on every PC, the software is updated company-wide on each server. Data is no longer decentralized on desktop, but now resident on servers. In this new paradigm, the network has replaced the mainframe and low cost Java-based embedded processors on each desktop have replaced the dumb terminal.

Parekh believes the Java strategy will win with MIS managers and corporate heads because of its cost benefit over the PC. “The cost per seat for maintenance goes down to nearly zero,” Parikh says. Thus, it isn’t a matter of if, but when Java will win.

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