A new software age is dawning, says Sun

In the next few years, a "phase change" will take place as companies stop running their own customised computing infrastructure, Sun Microsystems chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos predicted on Thursday.

Naturally, Sun believes it has the answer - buying processing power from the company's standardised computing grid. But in San Francisco at an annual Sun meeting with analysts, Papadopoulos laid out his reasoning for why he believes the trend is more than just a Sun Grid sales pitch.

The basic reason is that innovations in software are beginning to arrive not in the form of a CD of digital bits that a customer installs but rather in the form of a service that a customer uses over the internet, Papadopoulos said: "Every business plan I've seen at software start-ups is, 'We want to be the Google of... '. It means they're going to create one of these services."

Selling software as a service rather than as bits means swifter innovation, he added, because deploying improvements within a single service is faster than distributing it to innumerable customers who must then install and test it: "You eliminate a tremendous amount of time and complexity."

The result: IT executives realise that designing and operating their own equipment costs more than paying a company that specialises in doing so, Papadopoulos said. And computing infrastructure will become a financial liability.

According to Papadopoulos: "In 2010, if you're a big custom IT shop with thousands of employees, that's going to look like as differentiating a value as showing how big your pension plan is today."

Sun CEO Scott McNealy disparaged companies that assemble computing systems out of a hodgepodge of components.

McNealy said: "'Best of breed' is now code for Frankenstein. I've walked into more than a few data centres where I said, 'Whoa, where did you get that thing?'. They've got body parts from every supplier you can imagine. There are big bolts sticking out everywhere and stitch marks."

Sun's goal is to sell the hardware and software that companies use to supply such services - and it's succeeded with some, such as eBay, which hosts auctions, and SalesForce.com, which hosts customer relationship (CRM) software. Although adoption of the idea so far hasn't been enough to stem Sun's market share losses or consistent profitability.

However, McNealy acknowledged there are major impediments to the change: "We want to be a provider of computing or infrastructure supplier to service providers. One of our frustrations is that service providers have been 'dinosaur-ically' slow."

Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com