News

Despite Meltdown, Internet Remains a Strategic Business Tool

• By Rich Seeley
• April 23, 2001

Now that the Internet bubble has finally burst and expectations have come back down to Earth, Sun's technology evangelist expects the Internet will soon emerge as a strategic business tool—and now, like other tools, it will now be measured by traditional metrics.

In an interview at last month's Internet World, George Paolini, vice president, technology evangelism at Sun told ADT, "The bottom falling out of the entire dot.com movement doesn't mean that using the Internet as a strategic tool is by any means invalid. What we've learned is that all of these vaporous new measurements that we came up with for determining whether we were successful or not were invalid. It's not about eyeballs, it's still about revenue, it's still about profit, it's still about the bottom line and it's still about traditional metrics for measuring success for a company."

"I think in some ways the economy being where it's at could actually expedite this," Paolini said. "Because a lot of what we're talking about is really trying to leverage current investments that enterprises have made, to extend that out through the Web."

To this end, Sun announced a new product initiative aimed at the more pragmatic e-business customer seeking ways to use the Internet to reduce costs and boost productivity. Its first customer shipment of Java Web Start (JWS) software, which launches Java applications through any standard web browser when the end user clicks on a link, has become available. More information on these products is available at: http://java.sun.com/products/javawebstart.