"In addition, Sun's solutions are proving useful in open storage as well as integrating electronic medical records (EMR). In this region, projects are under way in India, where we are working with medical centres in Chennai as well as with Tata Communications, which is working on a rollout of patient management systems using our open-source software stack."

Hartley added that Sun was providing the software stack in a substantial healthcare project In Singapore that involves large-scale integration over a few years.

"In healthcare, storage is especially a big issue," he said. "There is rapid assimilation of patient data from CAT scans, for example, from different sources. An open storage architecture is especially useful in such a case."

Malaysian government drives open source

"The Malaysian government is smart in helping to raise awareness of alternatives to proprietary software," said Hartley. "People are beginning to realise that the actual client software they are using is not that important, it's just a tool, and that what you do with tools is important. The drive to develop innovation skills in people is perhaps one of the reasons behind the resurgence of Apple Macintosh tools."