Sun Offers OpenDocument Conversion
Sun on Tuesday added two new offerings to its Grid Utility service in an aim to attract more customers to company's fledgling computing-on-demand initiative. The service will now allow customers to convert proprietary productivity suite files -- like those from Microsoft Office -- to the OpenDocument format, and convert text files to audio.
The applications are part of Sun Grid, a $1 per CPU-hour utility from the company that it says puts affordable supercomputing power in front of more users.
The company admitted to The Register last Tuesday that its grid computing effort has fallen mostly on deaf ears. Aisling MacRunnels, Sun's senior director of utility computing, said that "the figure is in the tens" as far as how many customers are using the service.
A long-standing policy for using Sun's utility computing products is that companies must agree to be listed as a customer in Sun advertising. But many have balked at this requirement when it comes to the Grid Utility service.
The addition of an OpenDocument, or ODF, conversion utility to Sun's lineup is not that surprising as the company offers financial support to the OpenOffice.org project, in addition to selling a commercial version of the suite called StarOffice.
Sun will also hold a joint conference with IBM on Friday to push for broader adoption of the open standards format across more applications.
The other grid conversion application, which will be available later this month, will allow users to upload a text file to be converted into speech and be downloaded as an audio podcast. Both services will be accessible through a Web interface, Sun said.
"It is clear a second generation of the Web is emerging, with a broad array of on demand services available freely and ubiquitously, tied not simply to a web browser, but to any application or device that connects to the Internet," Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz said.