President and COO of Sun Federal Bill Vass' Weblog

Thursday Jun 26, 2008

Check Out Our New & Improved Partner Area of Sun.Com/Federal

As you can imagine, it's been rather busy these last couple of weeks of Q4 at Sun Federal. But I wanted to do a quick blog on our new and improved Current Sun Authorized Government Channel Partners listing on Sun.Com/Federal. It is located under the Get Started tab and has been receiving rave reviews from our partner community. It's a lot easier to read, more organized and has a cool feature where you just hold your cursor over the partners name and it provides you with the a link to their homepage, address, phone number, and a link to a contact's email and the Sun partner rep's name. Take a look and let us know what else we can do to improve it, as well as any suggestions to improve sun.com/federal.

Posted at 03:20PM Jun 26, 2008 by BVass in General | Permalink

Tuesday May 20, 2008

Sun Federal in Everywhere...

The last couple of months have been action packed at Sun Federal.

I often talk about the future of IT, the evolution of SaaS and cloud computing, and what the future of IT will hold...so I put it into a video that talks about how IT professionals need to be ready for the Evolution of IT Services. If you have time, take a look and let me know what you think.

Also, I feel that I need to do a brain dump blog on news from Sun Federal.

I think Sun Federal VP of Sales, Anthony Robbins, did an outstanding job of summarizing the current state of Sun Federal on Federal News Radio's Amtower Off Center. Hosted by Mark Amtower, a great guy with more than 30 years of federal experience, we had the opportunity to discuss a wide range of topics from eco to open source to SEWP.

Plus check out another great video interview with Scott McNealy evangelizing the need for more open source policies in the federal government on the homepage of Government Computer News. Scott kept rather busy in Washington, DC earlier this month, keynoting several events including an SRO crowd at The Potomac Officers' Club and a Who's Who of government technology at the first annual Sun Federal awards dinner.

But, we at Sun Federal are still focused on traditional print media too...I wanted to make sure that you saw two major stories in Washington Technology. One story featured the hunt for new talent and the other focused on our new partner programs.

Stay tuned for a feature story on thin clients in Federal Times.

Last but not least, I have also been meaning to steer folks to the new and improved Sun Fed homepage. Please make sure to stop by often, as we will be updating it with new PODCasts, opinion pieces and news.

That just about covers it...Bottom line, we are getting the word out there ... radio, net talks, pod casts, articles, award dinners...You name it, Sun Federal is out there...Now I need to get back to a Sun Federal Board of Directors meeting...one of the agenda items includes introducing them to Sun's Second Life Islands... =-O

Posted at 01:35PM May 20, 2008 by BVass in General | Permalink

Thursday Apr 17, 2008

Facts that Every IT Professional Should Know About Sun

The Information Technology environment is a complicated place with many messages about the future; and what CIOs, CTOs and business leaders should be investing in. As enterprises scale out to meet the demands of their mission, business, customers and employees; the need for open end-to-end IT solutions becomes more important every day to IT executives and business leaders.

People often ask me questions like "is Sun a hardware company or a software company?" or "Sun does too much, maybe you should focus on only one thing, and what would that be?" If you stand back and look at the forest rather than the trees, the reality is that Sun does only focus on one thing. In our view, it's many of our competitors that are trying to be everything to everyone. Sun's focus is on Enterprise and Web scale computing, we are not about printer ink, TVs or cameras. If you are a customer that is deploying Enterprise and Web scale computing that needs security, high availability, high performance, dynamic scaling, open architectures, at the best value....Sun is the company for you. We build Enterprise class, open source, hardware and software that is made to solve large scale problems at the most economic price point from the desktop to the datacenter.

To achieve this integrated solution, we focus our R&D in the following areas:

Sun is the #1 leader in Open Source. We have contributed more than any other company to the open source community. EVERYTHING we make is either already open source or going through indemnification to become open source. MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, Java, Glassfish, PostgreSQL, and many other products are all open source. Our software runs on ANYONE'S hardware. Since we started open sourcing our software, SunFed's software revenue has gone up over 300 percent. We open source to improve security, increase quality, reduce cost, lower barrier to entry/exit, and engage developers. In fact, Sun's software leads the industry in security, and has passed the most rigorous government security protection profiles in the industry.

Sun has three supported operating systems that we focus on, we believe that an OS needs to at least run on the x86 Intel and AMD platforms to be viable. We focus on these three enterprise class operating systems: Linux, Windows, and Open Source Solaris. All our enterprise class middleware runs on these three operating systems. These operating systems are supported across our hardware platforms, we even hold world record benchmarks on Windows. Here are the support prices on the GSA schedule for each OS: RedHat - $934.78, Windows - $713.36, Solaris - $599.00. BTW, here is a copy of the production version of open source Solaris, you can get the production version for free, as many copies as you want. Also, open source Solaris focuses heavily on massive threading, since that is the way Enterprise and Web scale computing is moving.

Our servers support three chip families: AMD/Intel x64, Ultra SPARC, and the 64-way CMT. Our Intel and AMD servers are leaders in space and power reduction, and will run your Windows applications in half the space, and with 25 percent less power than HP or Dell at the same price point.Our high-end SPARC servers provide massive scale and hold world record benchmarks for large ERP and database applications. We are the first to offer a 64-way processor that will allow you to consolidate as many 64 web servers onto one low power, low cost chip (one watt per thread). Our servers start at $675.

Sun is a leader in open source enterprise class middleware. Our SOA/ESB, Database, and Identity Management products are in Gartner's top quadrants as leaders in features, value, scalability, performance, and price. We can help you with HSPD12, with SSO, and in moving to a service oriented enterprise.

Sun is one of the top three storage vendors on the market. Thirty seven percent of all the world's enterprise and web scale storage is on Sun's StorageTek open platforms. We have a comprehensive portfolio of storage and data management products across the entire range of storage platforms.

If you are looking to reduce cost, reduce your power footprint, move to open source software, consolidate and virtualize your applications, or improve scale, performance, and security... you should be talking with Sun. All of our products are designed to integrate together through open systems interfaces to deliver Enterprise and Web scale computing, that is what Sun is all about.

Posted at 01:05PM Apr 17, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[3] | Permalink

Thursday Jan 17, 2008

SunFed Solution's Portfolios

Happy New Year! I can't begin to tell you how excited we are at SunFed about the MySQL news! What a way to start off the new year. My Open Source soapbox just got a lot bigger! We have also made some New Year's resolutions....In 2008, SunFed is going to focus on communicating specific solutions - how we help government customers solve their business problems. Technology does not exist for technology's sake, it's all about how to improve the mission or business of an organization. We have narrowed our top 12 solutions down to:

Security and Information Assurance - Help users to securely share information using state-less, multi-level security workstations while enforcing restricted and isolated security boundaries and Need to Know.

Identity Management - Manage user identities and access privileges to your most critical data with minimal impact to business processes while facilitating remote work options.

SOA/ESB - Create an IT strategy to support business transformation / best practice reuse while reducing development costs and streamlining systems management, monitoring and security.

Datacenter Optimization - Improve business flexibility, competitive agility, resource usage and reduce O&M costs.

Enterprise Messaging - Improve productivity by enhancing and streamlining business critical applications (mail, calendar, collaboration) while reducing TCO and enhancing scalability.

High Performance Computing - Massively scalable, petascale integrated, open systems solutions to reduce complexity taking advantage of Sun's radical efficiency, industrial robustness and production ready capabilities.

Managed Operations Services - Offer full Sun support for closed environments fostering a preventative approach to reducing costs and complexity and addressing critical availability concerns.

Disaster Recovery / Continuation of Operations - Offer datacenter services anywhere...anytime to maintain Quality of Service and long-term organizational survival.

ECO Responsibility - Reduce O&M costs for space, power, and cooling and expanding social accountability.

Information Life Cycle / Records Management - Fulfill regulatory requirements for data retention efficiently and securely

Business Application Optimization - Improve flexibility and business agility by taking advantage of legacy applications in an iPhone age.

Speciality Solutions - Solve unique business problems like Ground Station, Video Surveillance, Visualization, Virtual Desktop, and MLS Applications.

We have even dedicated a new section to the Sun Fed website featuring our 12 solution's portfolios. Take a look.

Posted at 01:56PM Jan 17, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[1] | Permalink

Thursday Sep 20, 2007

New Member of SunFed Board of Directors

At SunFed, we leverage our Board of Directors to help guide our business and better serve our government customers. We look for individuals that will drive us forward and provide innovative ideas, tactics and strategies to our executive team. We look for seasoned executives with commercial and government experience that understand both sides of the government technology paradigm.

As a result, I am pleased to announce that Marvin Langston is the newest member of SunFed's Board of Directors. Langston brings more than 40 years of DoD engineering, program management, leadership and organizational skills to the SunFed Board. From the U.S. Navy to DAPRA to SAIC to Langston Associates, Langston has held senior level positions where he has been responsible for both the strategic and tactical implementations of a wide-range of information technology solutions.

I welcome Marvin Langston to our Board of Directors and look forward to having him help push the SunFed organization to better provide end-to-end open source hardware and software
solutions that enable our government customers to maximize taxpayer investments.

Posted at 04:35PM Sep 20, 2007 by BVass in General | Permalink