The UK has been one of Sun Microsystems' most successful regions during its difficult post-dot com years.

When UK managing director Leslie Stretch was promoted earlier this year to a global role based at the company's California head office, Trudy Norris-Grey was appointed as head of the UK operation.

Previously a vice president at Oracle UK, Norris-Grey takes over at a time of transition for Sun.

The vendor was once best known for its rigid focus on in-house developed Sparc servers and the Solaris operating system. But in recent years, it has diversified into low-end x86-based systems, more strongly promoted its Java development environment, and is trying to become a major player in grid computing and open source software.

Computing talked to Norris-Grey, in her first interview in her new job, to find out the challenges of taking over a supplier at a critical stage in its development.

What are your first impressions of Sun?

Because Sun grew so strongly in the dot com era and then lost revenue, it was not written about as a 'darling' of the industry.

Oracle benefited from dot com, too, but the good thing about software licensing is that if your customer goes out of business, the licence lapses - it's gone. It wasn't the same for Sun. When the bubble burst, all these huge pieces of equipment were out there flooding the market.

So my expectations were set by perceptions, but the reality has been very different. I'm an accountant by trade, and if I put my financial hat on, what has been achieved in the years after dot com is actually phenomenal.

And what are your immediate priorities in your new role?

It's about clarity of what Sun is, what we stand for, where we're taking the company. We need to get out there and spread the message and give evidence of it. There's a good story but it's not widely known, and we probably haven't done enough of it.

The ingredients are there; it's the recipe we have to put together.

The company has been changing its product focus at the same time as recovering from the dot com boom. What are the challenges of that transition?

In a way it is transition, and in a way it isn't. Sun has always been known to be innovative, and all it is doing is continuing that innovation, but on a different curve.

Sun was innovative in product terms, now we're saying: let's think of this from the customer point of view, and step back and think what they really need, not what they think they need. That's where the transition comes in.

So what do you think customers need?

When you engage with a customer you have a responsibility to make them successful. If I make them successful, it comes back the other way, it's iterative: I do it for you, then you do it for me. Chief executives get great benefit from IT. We should all be proud of that. But the industry is still not always giving value for money to customers. If I have a PC on my desk, why do I have more computing power than was needed to land Apollo on the moon? I don't use it. The statistics say we only use 10 per cent of the power of a PC; it sits idle 90 per cent of the time.

The US will spend $100bn (£53bn) on PCs this year. If 90 per cent of that is idling, that tells me that $90bn ($48bn) is sitting idle and chief executives are not getting value for money.

It's about taking a different look at things. It's not about extracting revenue, it's about giving value.

You've been introduced recently to Sun's biggest customers in the UK. What do they say are their major issues?

For the government it is identity - not ID cards, but identity management andidentity sharing. If my Inland Revenue details are already in this form, in this computer, how can we share it securely with another department?

It's also identity in terms of controlling borders and felons; it's about individuals and the information about them.

Integration - how does it all work together - is a big issue for customers. I think we already have a digitised home: we all have TVs, DVDs, Playstations, electronic heating controls, and so on. The problem is that there are wires everywhere; it's not easily controlled or integrated. I think that's true for industry, for government and for schools, too.

Archiving and compliance is another area. IT has been used by auditors for years to verify the true and fair nature of financial statements, but it's upped the ante. It's now about ensuring and authenticating compliance. These days an email is for life, and it's the same with voicemail. How do we store and manage it in case it is needed for compliance?

Generally, what people want is an alternative. It's about healthy competition - it raises the stakes, it makes you increase the value, and that's what they're looking for. It's about growing the top line; how IT can generate information that helps grow customer satisfaction and revenue.

Sun is investing heavily in grid computing, an emerging technology that many organisations don't yet fully understand. What do your customers think about it?

If you compare grid with the PC, PCs are ubiquitous, and people understand them. So customers are asking us to help bridge the gap into grid computing.

I was speaking to somebody from Cern [the European particle physics laboratory], which is a big user of grid computing. They understand the technology and are collaborative in nature. They don't care where a task is processed. They press the send button, off it goes, and the answer comes back.

People have to see it, feel it, experience it, understand that it's secure and robust, there are no viruses and it can't be hacked. We need that proof. People are frightened of letting go of what they know, so we have to give them confidence and evidence to see it happen.