Sun vice president gets CBE for Scotland

Industry should be building a computing utility infrastructure, founded on broadband, to get the UK ahead of the game – both in engineering development and supply chain operations. So says Hugh Aitken, vice president world-wide customer fulfilment at Sun, and chair of the Electronics Scotland Forum, which provides advice to the Scottish Executive and the UK government – who last month was awarded the CBE for services to the Scottish electronics industry and charity. “It’s a major shift in computing: it’s a dream,” he concedes, “but there’s a lot of distributed computing work that could be farmed out.” He sees outsourced computing as working much as outsourced manufacturing, which dominates the high tech sector. Grid offerings will not just come from Sun, he says, but HP, Oracle, IBM and so on. “But first, the UK and Scotland need that broadband infrastructure.” Sun Microsystems is to acquire enterprise integration software specialist Seebeyond for around $387 million. Merging Sun’s Java Enterprise System and Solaris operating system with SeeBeyond’s EAI offerings will, says the company, provide “the industry’s most complete offering for the development, deployment and management of enterprise applications and service oriented architectures (SOA).