Sun's managing director for South Asia, Lionel Lim, said two key foundation technologies needed to power future computers are CPU architecture and secure, multi-thread and multi-platform operating systems. Sun has developed both these technologies, represented by Sparc and Solaris.

The company's most recent venture is the Sun Fire CoolThreads server. With the UltraSparc T1 processor, it provides high throughput and efficient power usage but its affinity with the Java application server makes it ideal as a core platform for online systems, he said.

CoolThreads is a new technology which provides multi-threading for the next generation of network computing. It helps enterprises cut costs and energy use. UltraSparc T1 draws only about 80 watts.

"It's also a performance enhancer. It is the latest technology needed for chip multi-threading. It can handle millions of threads at the same time," said Lim.

The 64-bit multi-core, multi-threaded processor OpenSparc T1 design supports eight cores, with four threads per core, and is based on Sun's UltraSparc T1 processor, which was touted as a breakthrough in energy consumption.

"It's also an opportunity to expand the market for Sparc beyond Solaris. It offers customers an opportunity to reap the benefits of CoolThread's technology," he said.

As for Solaris 10, Lim said that since it hit the market in the first quarter of 2004 until the second quarter this year, four million downloads have been recorded. Solaris 10 is supported by 187 open-source applications worldwide.

"Besides architecture and OS, we also have the middleware stack - Java Enterprise System - working to develop Web-based applications and server queries. The adoption rate of JES is encouraging and has surpassed one million subscribers," said Lim.

He said Java will play the key role in the next era. Java is well recognised today with 2.8 billion Java devices, 1.07 billion Java phones, 700 million Java PCs, 1.25 billion Java cards, and 4.5 million Java developers worldwide.  In Thailand, Sun focuses on two areas in the software industry - service-oriented architecture and identity management - that will help Thailand leapfrog if adopted early.

"We advised the Thai government to consider architecture and technologies that will lead them to inter-agency systems, instead of being trapped into proprietary technology," said Lim. He said the company's top five industries are banking and financing, telecommunications, government, manufacturing, and education. The emerging areas are healthcare and retail. "The company is committed to continue to invest in Thailand. We have 60 per cent of the market share in Unix servers in Thailand and 40 per cent globally," said Lim.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

asina@nationgroup.com