The time has come for the enterprise to exit the datacenter

And here lies a tremendous opportunity: Instead of spending our energies on datacenters, why not concentrate on providing safe, secure, and reliable network-based services that run on the public Internet? Why not buy these services from trusted suppliers as opposed to building applications that are expensive to maintain? Do we really believe that each and every business is so unique that standard services like mail, calendaring, IM, HR, and even ERP can't be provisioned from a service provider? Over the next few years, Sun plans to provide its employees with more business applications and services this way.

But let's make it clear that we're not simply talking about datacenter outsourcing or outhosting. We're talking about turning off applications and shutting down network and datacenters and instead buying services from trusted partners.

I believe that in the future, CIOs will provision these services from a community of service providers who will run their own extremely large datacenters in much the same manner as power companies operate power plants today. These companies will provide safe, reliable service over the public Internet. With their scale, these service providers will be able to optimize what I call data plants by virtualizing applications and dynamically allocating compute and storage resources as needed — squeezing every nickel of efficiency out of their equipment in a way that today's CIOs simply can never hope to achieve.

The cost savings and efficiency gains will be significant. Instead of deployment times being measured in months for enterprise applications, it will take only a few days — or even hours — for companies to leverage standard services. In this model, it also reasonable to imagine these applications being as easy to purchase and download as your favorite music files.