A new dawn

EMEA, APAC & the Americas Chairman Crawford Beveridge shines Sun's focus on free software onto the Middle East, and tells Edward Poultney why, unlike for Microsoft, piracy holds no fears.

Crawford Beveridge looks tired. Little wonder, the Sun Microsystems Inc Executive Vice President and Chairman, EMEA, APAC and the Americas seems to spend his life in two week bursts, on a whistle-stop global tour, hopping endlessly from one destination to the next in a massive lobbying and education exercise.

 

"I'm travelling the GCC for two weeks - I leave for Bahrain tonight - then I'll be back in Brussels for two weeks, then California for two weeks, then India, China, South Africa and then back to the UK," says the big Scot, in his slight Edinburgh burr. "It doesn't really feel stressful though, as the guys in each place get the groundwork done before I get there," he grins.

His mission: To spread the word about Open Source, software that is free to use, aimed at both the private and public market. Think Linux and Solaris, Firefox web browsers, Java programming and the like. Not the easiest of tasks in a market where the competition is already an integral part of the landscape.

"To be fair, I think our colleagues in Microsoft have done a superb job of marketing here," Beveridge admits. "So people haven't really thought about the alternative because they've had this aggressive and confident group of people supplying them with this kind of software.

In a bid to overcome this, the Middle East is one of the key emerging markets being targeted by Sun over the next six months, along with Russia and South-East Asia. Increased investment is being poured in and Beveridge plans to spend much more time on the ground pushing the product.

You see, interestingly, I'd spent a lot of time in both of those other areas in the past but, for reasons I can't quite explain, I'd never actually spent that much here," he explains.

Now, for the last six months I'd also been directly running the region, and I committed that I would try and spend at least a week here to try and understand the lay of the land, because I'd fought hard to get the extra investment here.

Although Beveridge has visited the UAE before, his recent tour of the Gulf has been something of an eye opener: "I had no notion of what Riyadh or Qatar would be like for example. It's fair to say that I was really stunned by the sheer volume of development going on.

What I've noticed that's most interesting is that in most parts of the US or Europe in what you might call our traditional areas of business - like enterprise or banking - there's huge change towards consolidation that is narrowing the size of data centres for example.

Here the opposite is true, businesses are busy diversifying out and still building, especially telco companies. That was a big thing for me.

The other big realisation has been just how much groundwork needs to be done in order to raise product awareness.

The first step of the campaign, Beveridge believes, is to begin with the campuses. "Jonathan [Schwartz], our President, has been very keen that we try and move the universities to teach things like Java and Solaris and other Open Source courses.

I want to try and see if I can come back here and spend some time specifically with the universities to see if we can help with curriculum building and things like that.

At one institution I visited, the university president didn't really understand Open Source at all and the thing is that if there are alternatives, we really need to be teaching them to our kids, giving them sensible choices.

Open Source software, as the name suggests, is all about giving people free access to various computer programs and Beveridge and his team work in a variety of ways to achieve this.

Sun is currently working with the US and EU governments on open standards, trying to ensure that, where possible, programs come without propriatory licences and also trying to get them to agree to axe anti-IP (intellectual property) licences.