McNealy: For e-gov, participation is the key

Just eight days into his new role at Sun Microsystems Inc., former CEO Scott McNealy used a hockey stick to launch spongy balls into a Washington crowd that included many of the people he will be courting to buy products from the Santa Clara, Calif., company.

Now the chairman of Sun Federal Inc., McNealy's new focus will be expanding Sun's market share in the federal government sector. Jonathan Schwartz was named the company's chief executive officer last week.

Wearing a San Jose Sharks hockey jersey, McNealy said the flying sponge balls were a metaphor for the increasing amounts of data flying at people these days. Much of that data crush can be attributed to the Internet. He spoke today at Sun's Network Computing Launch at the Washington Convention Center.

"We're moving into the participation age where everybody is getting on the Internet," McNealy said. "Everybody is a publisher, everybody is an editor. We're blogging, we're Pod casting, we're doing mash-ups, we're doing electronic commerce. And the biggest opportunity is with government?the e-government opportunity?because those are largest communities and that's the biggest participation effort."

All governments ought to be looking to get their constituents participating via the Web, he added.

Creating systems to help store, manage and access all that data is at the center of Sun's strategy.

Several new products announced at the event are focused on that effort. The new Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) systems, for example, are virtual tape solution for mainframe environments.

The Sun StorageTek VSM family provides the building blocks for Sun's mission to virtualize everything, and simplifies data management by storing data on a virtual disk buffer and migrating it to a tape device based on user-defined policies.

That allows customers to enhance data protection by automating data movement, increasing tape drive cartridge capacity usage to 100 percent, and reducing backup windows by as much as 50 percent, Sun officials said.