Doug Toombs @ Sun: Confessions of a Windows geek

As I promised in my last blog entry, all the distractions are over ... I'm now officially married, so I've run out of excuses -- time to start blogging!



Apparently, while I was off getting married, my boss, my boss' boss, and our Chief Technologist in SIO were furiously blogging away - describing service innovation, service science, and what our group in Sun is all about... so I thought I'd add to the chorus and throw in a bit of my perspective as well.

Hopefully you've already read some of the descriptions for Service Science - like "the study, design, and implementation of services systems – complex systems in which specific arrangements of people and technologies take actions that provide value for others". I'll admit, that sounds a little heady, does it not? After all, I'm an engineer at heart - so I've spent a long time defining and thinking about my career in terms of how many different screwdrivers I've turned (i.e. design systems, build systems, launch systems, manage systems, repair systems, etc.) so why would a techie like me be interested in something that is so ... if you will ... "intangible"?

First reason - the marketplace. From the research I've been able to gather, it would appear that the Information Technology market is almost a trillion dollar market worldwide (>$830bn, give or take a few billion). Of that near-trillion dollars, wanna guess where the most spending is? I'll give you a hint ... it's not in "iron" ...

• Storage - $30bn
• Servers - $50bn
• Networking - $70bn
• Software - $230bn
• Services - $450bn

Pretty amazing, yes? Nearly half a trillion dollars, already in the "Services" business - and that's just for Information Technology. Even the slightest of improvements and new services in this space could yield significant benefits when the numbers get this big - and I've been actively working with Jon Greaves and others in Sun to for the past couple years trying to do just that (you'll hear more about some of these innovations shortly). But what about the markets outside of IT?

Jeneanne Rae of Peer Insight delivered some statistics on this at the Service Innovation Design & Development conference in 2007, as quoted by BusinessWeek. According to the figures from Peer Insight - the revenues from the top 10 "non-energy" firms in the US saw 65% of their 2005 revenues come from services. This includes big name companies like WalMart and GE. Now, having had the GE repairmen out to my house twice so far this year to work on my appliances - that one didn't surprise me so much. But WalMart? Services? That one was a bit of a shocker - definitely going to have to research them a bit more.

Even more amazingly, though, these top 10 non-energy companies saw 85% of their 2005 profits come from services - according to Rae's research.

If that's not enough reason to believe that the time is here to be researching in Services Innovation and Service Sciences, then I don't know what is. Even Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) had a Services Science initiative as a part of her "Innovation Agenda" in her run for the Democratic nomination to be president.

So it's a pretty interesting time to be here in the SIO at Sun. For my entire professional career, I've held the philosophy that "if the computer can do the job, then it should be doing the job..." It should be interesting if we can start making some of that a reality...

After quite a period of nudging and cajoling from a number of my peers ... I've finally done it, I've started a Sun blog.

I work for Sun's newly-formed Services Innovation Office, under the management of Kevin Ellis and the directorship of Jon Greaves - Distinguished Engineer and a Chief Technologist in Sun. I'll add more to this blog in about a month or so ... when I have a bit more free time to spare. Right now I'm scrambling with all of the last minute details for my wedding in June - so "free time" is at a bit of a premium at the moment.

For starters, though, here's a collection of ten random bits of information about me that you might not know:

• I was born in upstate NY (the upstate "western" part of New York near Niagara Falls, not the upstate "above New York City" part)


• Although getting 4.0's for most of my collegiate Information Systems courses, I positively sucked at math.


• I am legally a dual-citizen (US and Irish) and hold birth certificates from both countries.


• I've been a published editor for Windows IT Pro magazine for over 10 years, and have won two national awards for my writing. I'll likely be starting a blog up there shortly as well - stay tuned.


• I wrote my first lines of code at age 9. I sold my first software at 13 (a BBS system on a TRS-80). I wrote my first commissioned software project at 16 (an Accounts Receivable system for a local painters' supply store).


• Rome, Italy is my absolute favorite city in all the world.


• My first modem was an Anderson-Jacobsen 300 baud 'Acoustic Coupler'.


• I wrote two books. Well, I co-authored one print book, and authored an eBook sponsored by Microsoft.


• Artificial Intelligence was the only Information Systems course in college that I had to drop. Didn't grok it.


• While I do actually enjoy working in technology quite a bit, I'd seriously consider giving it up to be a travel photographer for a living :-)

I promise - I'll write more posts once July rolls around! In the meantime, have a great Memorial Day weekend.