2-3 years ago Sun escaped the containment list in these general purpose shops only to find itself sent to the containment lists at certain SaaS providers. Performance and innovation delivered Sun from the former containment lists. The operational course corrections required to escape the latter ought to be easy by comparison.

To clarify, my post was not only about the vendor portion of the procurement cycle. Procurement and provisioning is time consuming and expensive in the most efficient organization, and the vendor portion of the time line is not generally where the greatest challenges are, despite the fact this piece is almost always on the critical path. That is, its best to avoid procurement cycles, period, whatever the vendor delivery capability.

For the general purpose IT shop, providing services to multiple business units for multiple applications, the current prevailing architecture and service models *compel* hardware procurement, even when ample excess capacity is available. This is primarily due to one machine one application deployments, inefficient business models and the lack of homogeneity and consistency in the service stack. There is no architectural or business governance or strategy to support higher utilization rates.

Ah, yes, procurement. This is the reason that the last two shops I’ve worked at switched off of Sun hardware. We couldn’t get the beautiful hardware fast enough.

Think what you like about Dell (and I don’t say much good about them), when you call your account rep and say, “I need 25 more servers”, they ask, “Would you like those shipped tomorrow?”

Procuring hardware from Sun, to my dismay, requires too much effort. I want to call someone and say, “Send me another 20 x4600s. I want them by Friday.” For whatever reason, that doesn’t ever seem possible.

As much great stuff Sun has been doing lately — and it’s a lot of neat things — procurement is horribly broken, and it’s leaving a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people.