The agreement by Sun Microsystems and Intel to work together on product development, announced Monday, will bring improvements in how Solaris operates on Intel's chips, according to John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president for systems. Those improvements will arrive in OpenSolaris, the open source version of the company's operating system. Under the new agreement, Sun will begin selling Intel-based systems while the two companies work to optimize Solaris on Intel's platforms. Fowler talked about the agreement and what it means after the deal was unveiled. Excerpts from that interview follow: