The Hindu Business Line : Sun's McNealy coming next week

As the last of the co-founders left in the firm (the others being Mr Andy Bechtolsheim, Mr Bill Joy and Mr Vinod Khosla), Mr McNealy's visit acquires more significance as this year is the silver jubilee of the company's founding. The theme of his India tour is "Open Drives Progress", and this would drive his agenda in India.

Duplicating his previous visit in 2003, the Chairman and Co-founder of Sun Microsystems will stopover at New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore each for a day. Arriving at the capital on May 16, he will meet high-level Government executives and Sun's partners.

India speech

At Mumbai the next day, he will give a keynote speech at `Sun Technovate '07', a flagship event for CXOs where he will interact with top business leaders. This year, the 3-day forum is based on the theme `India — The Next Big Idea'. He will share his vision and business insights at the forum.

On his final day in the country, Mr McNealy will address developers at the tech capital of India, at the Sun Technology Summit held on May 18, and attend a NASSCOM meet.

Mr McNealy is now Chairman of Sun Microsystems and of Sun Federal, Sun's operation that works with the Federal Government. In his new role, he travels the world meeting with Sun's top customers and working to eliminate the digital divide.

Topic list

In 2003, he announced $300 million in free software and training to Indian universities and researchers. No announcements are expected this time around. Topics to be discussed at the annual summit in Bangalore include Java SE Language Features: Today and Tomorrow, Web services and service oriented applications (SOA) using Java EE, Ajax and Web 2.0 Frameworks, NetBeans Extreme and the relational database by Sun — Java DB.

Sun's Java platform commands over 40 developer communities in the country and the Java economy in India is estimated at $12 billion.