Sutor was a member of IBM Research for 15 years before joining its software group in 1999. Today, he's IBM's director of WebSphere infrastructure software, which basically means that he tries to get all the stuff to work together that's needed for Web services.
The IBM veteran is also a proponent of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) terminology, which is a framework for incorporating Web services across enterprises and between them.
Recently, he has been involved in the effort to get Sun Microsystems to make its Java technology, which IBM has also embraced, open source. IBM has suggested that an open-source Java, particularly when combined with Linux, would make it more competitive against Microsoft.
As a member of several standards groups related to Web services, Sutor would be in a key position to help drive a Java open-source initiative, though Sun is reluctant to go along with the plan. He spoke recently to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com.
Q: The theme that seems to be emerging these days is software as a service, as opposed to that of a few years ago, when you were supposed to rip out everything you had and build a whole new infrastructure.
A: When you look at enterprise software, it may have sounded exciting in 1999 to rip everything out, but everyone was a little crazy back then. Right now, people are very much saying, "look, I want to make all the stuff I have -- all the facilities and information -- available to the right people. But I've got to keep my critical business processes going. I cannot bring them down, so you have to show me how to extend what I have already."
It seems like IBM would be very well positioned in this "software as service" world. When services are outsourced, there are basically two things that you want to do. You have to understand how you talk to [the service], so you have to understand the interface, how to tell it to do things. And then you have to understand the quality of that service.
For example, it is fine to say, "give me a list of all the customers who have bought more than $100,000 worth of product last month." But then, you have to decide how quickly you want that response and who will get that information. Making it available reliably with the right performance and the right security is very, very important.
