To study the benefits of downsizing a corporate information system, Sun Microsystems France has set up a club de reflexion of approximately 40 French directors of information technology, says Eric Saillard, manager of rightsizing marketing at Sun’s French subsidiary. The club is an outgrowth of a downsizing market study undertaken for Sun France last November by Paris-based market research specialist Whatever. The study of 90 French enterprises, of which 70% were not Sun clients, determined that the majority, 79%m, of the respondents see a major evolution in their computing architecture. Of those that responded oui, the top three evolutive choices were, in order of preference: establishing a new client-server architecture; converting applications for dedicated servers; and interconnecting networks.
Economies
The idea is to bring these management information systems directors together and have them discuss how they judge the profitability of a new computing architecture and to talk about the results they may have had from rightsizing changes, Saillard says. We want to try to model the economies that can be realised from downsizing by studying particular cases. Only between 10% and 20% of the club’s participants are Sun clients, Saillard says. It is scheduled to meet on April 15, after which it will continue to meet either as a whole group or in subcommittees, according to the desires of the group, he said. Saillard says the results of the group’s study would be used first by the participants and then by Sun. It’s a collaboration between Sun and the directors, he said. Of the study, Saillard says the most important results were those that showed users’ preferences for client-server architecture, dedicated application servers and interconnected networks. It aligns exactly to our strategy. We are the defender of client-server architecture, and installing dedicated servers under Unix is our way of attacking the mainframe, he said. Sun France did not choose the survey subjects, he added. We wanted a realistic study. To have polled Sun clients would not have been realistic, Saillard commented – We gave Whatever a list of 500 names and they chose from that.
