When Java came to life in 1995, the web went from an endless series of hyperlinks to a platform that delivered live content. Which is exactly why Java is on more than a billion computers in the world today. And it's cuz of those billion computers that we keep innovating in JDK 7 for the desktop and Java EE for the enterprise.

But it's 2009 and almost a third of Internet access today is through mobile devices. And the percentage of mobile Internet users is expected to surpass those using traditional computers in the next few years! So while the desktop, laptop, and enterprise computer remain important, there are so many new ways to access content on the web. And they were all on display at JavaOne, running the same apps across smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, e-books, set-top boxes, TVs. So basically any device you chose can now run the same application! Check out Eric's keynote for the full story.

But there are two other key pieces to the Java story this year: first Nandini showed the JavaFX authoring tool which lets you create graphical applications easily, and then you can send the app directly to a whole bunch of devices simultaneously. And last but not least - the Java Store - the key to distribution for developers. Cuz if Java's gonna run on everything around us, and more and more developers are gonna write interesting apps for all those devices using the new tools, we're all gonna be looking for a handy way to get ahold of those apps.

Graduation is about accomplishment, but it's also about potential. So congrats to Java and the whole team (including Jeet, my charm school buddy Octavian, Eric, and the JavaOne peeps: Ash, Lizzi, Kim, Jen, Heidi...). And here's looking forward to seeing Java everywhere. The potential is unlimited!

Every year in our IT industry we enthusiastically embrace a different buzzword as the panacea of IT. Recall grid, virtualization and ILM – all laudable technologies that solve IT problems, but not fitting the definition of panacea. This year the buzzword seems to be cloud.

I'm an ardent fan of technological innovation – without it we're missing one of the most important ways to truly change the world in which we live. And I believe cloud is game-changing technology. Being a true geek, I'm genuinely excited about the potential cloud offers in changing the IT landscape dramatically: if done right it doesn't matter how compute, network, and storage interact inside a cloud... leaving broad room for innovation that would be considered too disruptive in today's datacenter... paving the way for a new generation of applications that will solve problems many of us haven't even thought of yet.

Yet cloud is no panacea. It takes hard work to solve IT problems: scale, security, compliance, data portability, privacy and so on. In addition the use of cloud requires changes to IT process and organization, with risk around every corner. But there's reward in embracing clouds – reward in using IT to enable businesses to enter new markets more quickly, using cloud to reduce IT costs through economies of scale, and in changing those age-old financial conversations around capital and expense.

But it takes expertise, experience, and insight to figure out how to apply cloud technologies to meet the IT challenges of today and tomorrow. Which is why our Sun Professional Services team, who have been working with customers to make their IT environments as efficient as possible, will also help customers figure out where cloud fits in their IT roadmaps. It's a perfect match – PS experts who understand where cloud technology is going and who work every day to build efficient datacenters, helping to determine where cloud fits in customer's IT roadmaps.

So if the question is “How do I get the most efficient IT environment to run and grow my business - both today and tomorrow?”, our PS experts can help determine where cloud fits in the answer - for both today and tomorrow.

Next Monday we are sponsoring our CommunityOne West event, where developers, technologists and students come together to share experiences about open platforms, tools and services. The day is stuffed with over 70 technical sessions, over 40 lightning talks and some hands-on labs. Cloud, web, social media, mobile, operating systems and platforms, and more. And after all that, there are some rocking parties in the evening to light up everyone's smiles - like the one last year where I tried hitting a piñata blindfolded.

But an event does not make a community - Monday is not the beginning or the end of this technical community. CommunityOne simply provides a time and place for community members to meet and strengthen the work they do together all year round. The work that goes on in community forums on-line (like Sun Developer Network), in local events (like Sun Tech Days), and in the many blogs, tweets, skype-facilitated meetings, and so on and so on, round-the-world, round-the-clock, year-in and year-out.

This past weekend I had the privilege to join a different community at their annual event: the AngelRide. Where over 400 riders and volunteers come together with a common goal: to fund a hospital outreach program that brings joy into the lives of children with cancer. The outreach program is an extension of the Hole in The Wall Gang Camps - a wonderful set of camps around the country for youngsters with cancer to have some fun, to find some peace, and to feed the spirit they need to face their cancer battles. What I found this weekend was a strong, loving, and dedicated community of people who work year round to ensure the AngelRide logistics are seamless, to offer a web site and pictures community members can use to communicate their mission, to sweat and train hard so that the 135 miles of Connecticut hills don't look so impossibly daunting, to deliver to the ultimate goal - raising the most money to makes the kids lives easier.

While this past weekend's AngelRide was a beautiful event, the true beauty could be found in the smiles on the Angel rider's and volunteer's faces... Because the community once again raised funds for an outreach program that puts smiles on kids faces... And that's over 14000 kids the AngelRide has smiled upon so far.

Why is ROM a good option for IT right now? We all know the world today is always on, has an insatiable appetite for information, and expects service at it's fingertips. And this means IT shops are under more pressure than ever - pressure to focus on strategic initiatives to grow business while shrinking IT costs at the same time. How do you free up IT for new projects when 70-80% of the IT budgets and the majority of IT staff are taking care of legacy infrastructure? Remote Operations Management for efficient processes and variable financing models.

Who should customers turn to for help? Certified ROM experts with expert tools. You want a vendor with years of experience, with technical and IT service management (e.g.; ITIL) certifications, with a knowledge base built from experience. You don't want to be the first customer of an inexperienced remote management vendor.

Where does your remote operations vendor need to be? Everywhere - a ROM vendor needs to have global, local, and ubiquitous presence. So many businesses have global or multinational needs - your ROM vendor must have multiple Network Operation Centers (NOCs) in multiple locations - able to serve round the globe and round the clock. And service is a people business - you need local language support and local law compliance - so your ROM vendor must have a local presence as well. And transparency is a must - meaning you as a ROM customer must have ubiquitous access to see how your ROM vendor is doing - make sure you have portal access to see your environment from anywhere.

What should you turn over to a ROM vendor? Anyone in IT knows that the outsourcing model of the early 2000's - where IT turned over the keys to the entire datacenter to outsourcing vendors - just didn't work. It left IT with little control over their own destiny, with little ability to align with changing business needs. A much better strategy is selective sourcing - "a strategy that treats IT as a portfolio of activities, some of which should be outsourced and others of which should be performed by internal staff. In other words, decide what's critical to differentiate and manage it internally; decide what's becoming commodity IT and look to selectively source it".

When will a vendor help you with your selective sourcing? Certainly it needs to be on your terms - do you need interim management to help through a spike in your IT needs? Are you building a new application and want someone else to manage the infrastructure? Do you need someone to take over some of your legacy environment - to help increase availability and scale? A true selective sourcing vendor will take on any of these circumstances - dictated by your needs not by their demands.

Quite often the 5W's are accompanied by 1H. Once you get the 5W's out of the way in your analysis of remote operations management services, the How moves to front and center. So How? Just take a look at how Sun Remote Operations Management has answered these questions for other customers. And then let our ROM team lead the way.

I'm not green around the gills or even green with envy. I'm feeling Eco-Green! Today Sun was named to the Uptime Institute's Global Green 100 list. For three great green reasons:

Sun Booth at the Uptime Institute Symposium

• We focus on building server, storage and software products that are sustainable. Some of my favorites are the new Open Network Systems announced earlier this week (using the killer Intel Nehalem processor at 30% less power for compute, and integrated flash at 38% less power/GB) and of course the virtualization built right into Solaris and OpenSolaris. Cuz we all know that most servers are drastically underutilized - like maybe by 85% - meaning lots of the power they consume and heat they put off is a complete waste. I'm also a fan of virtualized desktops - although the SunRay in my office throws off so little heat I have to wear gloves to keep my hands warm.

• We've consolidated our Sun datacenters into eco-friendly environments, using next-gen power and cooling systems - saving 60% in power load. It took a lot of ingenuity to build those new datacenters - ingenuity fueled by the innovative minds at Sun.

• And we've built professional services expertise around that innovation. So now we're building eco-friendly datacenters for our customers - helping them to be as green as we are.

Which means next year I expect to see our customer names on the Global Green 100 list too.

I mean Luck Oapostrophe The Irish to you. I've been struggling for years with the special character in my surname name O'Connor. The apostrophe, which originally took the form Ó, indicates that my father is the grandson of Connor. But many computer systems cannot handle the apostrophe because they view it as a string delimiter, and therefore get confused when it shows up in a name.

Cycle way back to my first computer assignment: write a program to read in a string containing your name and print it back out. Anyone who's ever taken a CS course knows this one. However, long after our classmates had left for Teds, only my good friend Scott O'Brien and I were left struggling in UConn's basement computer center. Yup, we were suffering from the dreaded apostrophe syndrome while the Smiths, the Jones, and even the McCabes were off drinking beer.

And I ran into the same problem recently while I was booking a flight on the Aer Lingus website - check this out:

Like the mantra of eradicating short date formats back in the yesteryear of Y2K, can't we Irish computer geeks band together to make the apostrophe a first class citizen? Eradicate the lazy string delimiter checking...

Well that's my wish for the day. Now this Irish geek is off to find some good green beer. Signed, Amy OapostropheConnor

It was close to lunchtime when my iphone buzzed with the SMS: “Want some FUD?” I had to laugh; while my teenagers are specialists in the new lingo – this errant 'Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt' message from a co-worker was actually an abbreviation for "food". But seeing FUD on my phone's screen reminded me of the months before Y2K – I was working in IT for a telco, and we were feverishly updating all our server equipment to ensure we wouldn't run into the dreaded short date format issues.

Scroll forward 9 years. Here we are, and IT shops are looking at their aging server and storage inventory – many acquired in '99 with Y2K budgets, many facing end-of-service-life, many not meeting current or projected performance demands, costing too much for power and cooling and taking up too much datacenter floorspace.

With the efficiency and consolidation options available today, it's easy to make the case that it's cheaper to move to a new server than stay on the old. So why does anyone hesitate in moving from their older systems? FUD – think of all the issues with moving to something new: painful learning curve, disruption, customized software, ISV apps. Will moving cause costly interruptions to business?

Sun offers two solutions to take the FUD out of datacenter upgrades:

1. Solaris 8 and 9 Containers;
2. Sun Professional Services.

Solaris 8 and 9 Containers are virtual environments for hosting Solaris 8 and 9 applications on a Solaris 10 box. They provide a Solaris 8 and 9 runtime environment with all the performance and quality improvements of the Solaris 10 OS (DTrace, ZFS, Solaris Resource Manager). Now you can upgrade hardware in one stage and your applications in another. Less pain, more time to plan. Containers are a "transition tool" to help port applications to Solaris 10 in comfortable stages (watch this great video with the great Joost Pronk in which he explains Solaris Containers).

And to go with our Containers we have our experts - Sun Professional Services. Our migration team analyzes your original Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 environments, creates a migration plan, and implements and tests solutions as stand-alone projects. Professional Services can easily test, implement and optimize future system and network architectures for our customers (like Barmer Ersatzkasse), while protecting their prior qualification efforts.

No worries. Sun, we take the FUD out of migration. Now if I could just get some lunch.

Well, no more laments. Today we officially launched OpenSolaris 2008.11. And while it's always been a great operating system for all the hard stuff - like scalability, diagnosability, reliability, it's now really easy to use on your desktop because of all the hardware compatibility features and new applications built right in. So you don't have to worry about finding network device drivers, and media applications. You can just get right down to business - using OpenSolaris to build applications that will grow your business.

And when OpenSolaris is deployed in production, we're happy to provide the support. Here's a quote I love from one of our OpenSolaris customers “The level of enterprise customer service support that comes with Sun is exponentially better than what you get with other open source products and solutions. When you compare Sun with vendors such as Red Hat or Novell in the platform space, the difference is like night and day." Need I say anymore?

Check out the whitepaper and the webinar. And if you're really handling that much data in your MySQL database, you should consider an enterprise subscription plan for access to 7/24 expertise, knowledge and some additional tools that will help your database run better.

Which brings me to our announcement yesterday. Keeping data for long periods of time is important these days. Of equal importance is truly destroying data as required by internal corporate erasure or regulatory policy. That's why we developed a new on-site service to help customers with this challenge. Our experts delivering the new Sun Data Protection Data Erasure service will work with customers to ensure their erasure policies are compliant.

Now back to Thanksgiving: tomorrow we will give thanks for our baker's pie-making expertise while we erase those four pies.

Yesterday I participated in the Sun Analyst Series (SAS) with Peter Ryan (Sun's EVP of Global Sales and Services), Ingrid Van Den Hoogen (Sun's Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing) and Dave Douglas (Senior V.P. of Network.com and now leading Cloud Computing and Developer Programs, and Sun's Chief Sustainability Officer - I really believe he has the longest title at Sun).

It was a good day. We talked with industry analysts about Sun's strategy for growth (software infrastructure, HPC, enterprise virtualization and consolidation, developer community growth and cloud computing), our new business groups (System Platforms, Application Platform Software, and Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms), and changes within marketing (product and technology marketing are now fully embedded directly into the product groups). Ingrid outlined the changes at Sun and how they'll help us moving forward. Peter talked about how Sun's innovations continue to set us apart (and ahead) of other companies. Dave gave a glimpse of cloud computing at Sun and I spoke about all the great things we do in Sun Services - oh, can I mention again that we have a great remote operations management business? As I said, it was a good day. We had a lot of good conversations. Answered a lot of good questions.

Today at Sun we're all bouncing off the walls because today Sun launches the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Series (code name "Amber Road"), the world's first open storage appliances. Words like "disruptive", "revolutionary", "transformative" and "radical" have been used to describe the new Sun Storage 7110, 7210, and 7410 Unified Storage Systems. Deserved or hype? I can think of three things off the bat that argue for deserved:

• an Open Architecture
• ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools and
• unprecedented, unheard of Storage Analytics.

ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools are storage stacks made from a mix of DRAM, Flash/SSD and SATA. ZFS manages this storage hierarchy as one transparent pool optimizing it to leverage the best attributes of each device. This optimization means the best performance (at about 25% the cost of traditional storage) and best energy-efficiency possible. ZFS's optimizations yields a 3.2 times faster Read IOPS, 11% faster Write IOPS and a 2 times faster raw capacity. ZFS not only optimizes for speed it also constantly runs data integrity checks to prevent any data corruption. It's not only fast, it's good.

Storage Analytics The 7000 Class Systems has a browser user interface (BUI) that radically simplifies administration tasks like configuration, maintenance (including hardware), checking shares (the 7000 line exports files systems as shares) and status (current usage of CPU, memory, storage, network, services, hardware, CIFS, NDMP, NFSv3 and v4, and iSCSI - it's pretty comprehensive and all on one page!) and, most wonderfully, DTrace analytics. In the storage world robust analytics on workloads in production just haven't existed. Now an administrator is able to look at a problem in real time - all while systems continue running in production. The Storage Analytics uses a drill-down analysis - checking the higher level statistics first and then going into finer detail based on previous findings. So, for example, things are moving along smoothly and suddenly performance is bad. With the Storage Analytics you can now ask: How many IOPS is the system doing? Which clients are causing a spike in IOPS? Let's say it's a CIFS protocol causing the problem; from that data point you'll then drill down and ask, Which Windows Client is going crazy? Is it doing more reads or writes? Which file is it reading or writing to? Before you would have been stopped at the second question. Now life is good. An administrator can quickly identify and diagnose system performance issues, and debug storage and network problems. Find it quick and fix it quick without shutting anything down. Pretty amazing. So far ahead of anything else available, you might even call it disruptive.

Sun doesn't stop at great open architecture, open storage appliances, revolutionary features like ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools, and get-it-no-where-else Storage Analytics. Sun follows up the 7000 class systems with great services. Our Professional Services is ready to help your storage migration with our Sun Unified Storage Data Migration Service. Sun's experts will migrate your storage systems quickly and securely saving you time and bringing you the full benefits of all the 7000 series features.

In a way that surprises me, I love my Mini Cooper. I've become a car enthusiast as I never imagined possible. My attachment to my car borders on the downright giddy. I love all things Mini Cooper and even went to a Mini Driving Academy. I'm fairly new to Mini Mania but I've seen my future in Classic Mini owners. At Mini Meet-ups the classic owners talk a lot about maintenance - where to get classic engine parts, where the best, most knowledgeable mechanics can be found, who to trust with your paint job.

At Sun we have a classic community too - our Solaris 8 users. They like what they have and want to stay at that rev. Our classic community doesn't need to worry about maintenance or search for experts; Sun Services provides them Solaris 8 Vintage Patch Service. Vintage Patch Service can take two forms: straight-up Solaris 8 environment Vintage Patch support or Solaris 8 Containers run on a Solaris 10 machine with Vintage Patch support. Either way Vintage Patch support keeps our Solaris 8 users up and running smoothly.

And should our classic Solaris 8 users decide to move to Solaris 10, Sun Professional Services is ready with migration support to plan, test and implement their upgrade.

Sometimes beauty is more than just skin deep. Sometimes something looks great and makes life easier. Sometimes a beautiful form yields better function. Sometimes Sun redesigns our sun.com home page. We don't make changes to sun.com lightly. We don't do it to follow font or color trends or add new web widgets. We do it to recognize, value and build our communities. At Sun we have student, startup, small & medium business, developer, partner, and enterprise communities. Now our communities have their own chunk of the home page. Things that interest a community are grouped together and easier to find. Pages are targeted and focused to each community's needs. Developers will quickly find the SDN or updates to the SDK. Students will find the Sun Academic Initiative and a student community page. Startups will find information, community and specialized help from Sun all on a single page.

We also now have a direct path to our top downloads. Interest in our open source software cuts across all our communities so we've placed it where everyone will see it. No searching, no navigating. Just click and download!

We're interested in what our communities think of this change-up. We want your feedback. We'll listen. Click on the feedback button and let us know.

How do you get your team together when they're scattered all over the globe? Well, I hosted my first all-hands meeting in Second Life yesterday and it was awesome to see people from Germany, Singapore, London, France, Sweden, Canada, Colorado, California, and Massachusetts - to name a few - coming together, across time zones and continents, to share thoughts and ideas.

What a time to be in marketing - the transformation from traditional media to social media is changing how we interact with each other, our partners, and our customers. While there's still lots to figure out about how to use social media effectively to get Sun's message out through communities, we were privileged to have MaryMary (Sun's Mary Smaragdis) to help lead our discussion. Mary talked about the exponential growth of the various Social Media communities and, most interestingly, she explained the powerful impact of individual conversations in this new social ecosystem. One short blog entry, one twitter, one facebook update can add to a cadence to create a ripple effect. These individual bloggers start and sway conversations within the tech-influencer community.

It was great to see everyone hang out after the all-hands to mingle - I particularly enjoyed the many conversations about avatar hairdos ("Are you the one with the green hair?" "I have more hair here than in the real-world"). And I'll admit - I love that my avatar never has a bad hair day.

This week I watched with interest India's launch of their first lunar orbiter, the Chandrayaan-1. My favorite part of any launch is watching Ground Control go from absolute, deadly-serious silence to uncontrolled, jumping joy when their rocket leaves the tower and earth's atmosphere. The success of the mission is down to the knowledge and expertise of this team on the ground. They may never be famous or fly into outer space but without their collective know-how and experience the Chandrayaan-1 would not be a reality.

I was thinking how similar this is to what happens with our Professional Services team. They've taken our leading datacenter technologies like the Solaris 10 OS, LDOMs, and CoolThreads, with our over 25 years of expertise in datacenter strategy, design and build to create Sun's Datacenter Efficiency Practice.

This is because we've found our customers facing a space, power and cooling crunch - not enough floorspace for their expanding datacenters, not enough throughput/power to meet current and near-future performance demands, and utility costs and cooling costs sometimes exceeding the cost of server acquisition. And while many companies faced the same types of datacenter problems, we knew that the solutions need to be tuned to each company's unique business and IT requirements. So we start with Datacenter Strategy Consulting to review our customer's datacenter floorspace, cooling facilities, power requirements, hardware and software, network, and security needs. We then can recommend retrofitting and optimization of current datacenter, or a Sun Modular Datacenter (the always cool Project Blackbox) or building a new facility (like we did, check out this video about our own energy-efficient datacenter in Santa Clara).

And once you have an expert datacenter strategy, you need expert datacenter design. Sun uses a modular or "pod" design that groups racks having the same requirements. Pods create a standard within the datacenter that make the design repeatable and scalable for future growth. We design all our datacenters, whether retrofitted, modular or a new build-out, with energy-efficient equipment and technologies, and green building design concepts. Datacenter Build also means installation and configuration of equipment and readiness services. At its completion your datacenter maximizes space utilization, maximizes energy-efficiency, and minimizes costs.

Sun's Datacenter Efficiency Practice - think of us as the Mission Control to your successful datacenter launch. This is the rocket science of data centers.

It's October... it's the postseason... and Sun's new T5440 Server gets me thinking about the Red Sox. Bit of a stretch? Not at all. Think back to last Monday's ALDS game. The rookie - the newest guy on the team - Jed Lowrie- brought in the winning run against the Los Angeles Angels to win the game and the first-round playoff series. Same thing with the T5440 Server – Sun's newest server - paving an entirely new way in the industry, setting an all time new bar, the "way of the future" for servers.

I'm a baseball junkie... I love stats and the T5440 Server's are impressive:
• one to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus Chip Multi-threaded Technology (CMT) SPARC processors running at 1.2 or 1.4 Ghz with 8 cores,
• up to 256 threads,
• 4 SAS disks and 8 PCIe slots,
• offers a total of 512 GB memory in its 8 GB FB-DIMM Sockets,
• 4 GbEthernet interfaces on the motherboard
• supports up to 128 LDOMs

What does all this get you? Only the highest throughput (up to 4 times higher performance) in the smallest space (a 4 RU chassis) with the lowest power requirements (2 times higher performance per Watt) in the industry. What else? You get a system on a chip – integrated directly on the processor: networking, security and PCI-Express I/O. Built-in, no-cost LDOMs and Solaris Containers virtualization technologies to consolidate workloads. The industry's most open platform built on open source technologies and open standards. You get breakthrough performance, eco-efficiency and cost savings. If I weren't superstitious, I'd say it was like winning the series. But I'll wait a few weeks for that.

Now our favorite rookie Lowrie wasn't on the diamond alone Monday night. He had the Red Sox's experienced veterans Jason Varitek, Kevin Youkilis, Tim Wakefield and Big Papi right alongside him; he's part of an amazing team.

Just like the T5440 Server - part of a great team too. It has the extensive experience of Sun's award-winning Services on its side. Sun's installation, support, training, professional and managed services allow customers to get the most from their T5440 Server. Sun's Professional Services can help with migrating applications and optimizing energy usage, virtualization and performance. Sun's Managed Services give expert help on the day-to-day operational tasks of your IT infrastructure reducing down-time and improving business efficiency and service levels.

There's a live chat taking place with Jonathan Schwartz, John Fowler, EVP Systems, Masood Heydari, VP SPARC Volume Systems, and Jim McHugh, VP Solaris, on Monday October 13th at 10am PT - to register, go to sun.com/launch. You can see a recent video on the launch at This is Something and can hear the webcast replay, download whitepapers or get more info at sun.com.launch. Finally, to see how the T5440 will perform in your environment with your apps, you can try it out for FREE for 60 days WITH FULL TECH SUPPORT. And you can then buy it at 40% off. Visit Sun's Try and Buy for all the details.

Did you know that? That is, did you know it doesn't matter who's on top when it comes to xVM virtualization? That's a line heard from an engineer having a discussion with an industry analyst in our Solutions Center during our xVM launch last week, while they stood in front of an xVM server demo station. xVM server runs Microsoft, Red Hat, and Solaris Operating Systems. And xVM VirtualBox runs practically any x86-based OS. So no worries about where your application runs; we've got you covered. Check out this conversation on xVM.

We've also got you covered if you need help with your virtualization environment. We're ready to help with support, managed, and professional services for xVM - across the whole lifecycle - assessment (know what you need?), architecture, migration, implementation, management (want an experienced partner there every day?), and support...

Really, it doesn't matter who's on top when it comes to Sun xVM. xVM delivers the reliable, scalable, virtualization hypervisor architecture - the foundation upon which you can build everything else. And integrated management for your virtualized and physical environments. Which it why - when it comes to virtualization - although it really doesn't matter who's on top, it really does matter who's on the bottom. Make sure it's xVM.

That's the thing about being in service. You have to anticipate your customer's needs; you have to put yourself in their shoes (or state of hunger); and you can't always expect much in return (yup, I did forget to pay her back... oops).

Surrounding Sun's product innovation with Service innovation to solve our customer's key challenges. That's what we do in Sun services. Server, storage, and software installation, configuration and support. Helping our customers assess, architect, implement, and optimize their IT solutions, in a heterogeneous world. Managing our customer's infrastructure for them. Learning Services to help teach about how our products and services work within our customer's network infrastructures. We also offer Sun Financial Services to provide financing options for Sun products and services (maybe I can get a loan to finance my NY sandwich).

That's Sun Service... with a smile.

So now I know the CSEs are working on JESH in the NOC, which follows ITIL, and the SMGFS helps our customers with these CATK services.

I realigned those acronyms, and after removing duplicate letters, here's what I came up with: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST. Seems we're weak near the end of the alphabet. But I think I can say, it's no longer all geek to me.

Now, as to what's going on in services, we launched OpenSolaris this month at CommunityOne (a fabulous event - it you didn't get there this year, plan on it for May09. FYI, the UnBOFs were outrageously fun! Interesting henna tattoos) and we also announced enterprise support for OpenSolaris. Customers wanting to run OpenSolaris as their OS of choice now have several options for support from Sun. For support coverage, they can purchase one of two new offerings - OpenSolaris Essentials or OpenSolaris Production Subscriptions. In addition, they can receive support coverage under their existing Sun System Service Plans for Solaris, and limited coverage under their existing Solaris Subscriptions. Developers can receive support through Developer Expert Assistance.

Open doesn't have to mean alone. Product and service: that's the right combination.

Yesterday Sun sponsored an employee event in-world. I'll admit I was a skeptic, but sitting in a virtual theater with co-worker avatars is MUCH better than listening to a meeting on a phone. I hung out with friends from all sorts of real-life locales, and was able to fidget and change seats throughout the day. The talks were all great - with a focus on Sun strategy and interesting speakers from across the company.

Ya know how companies typically sponsor parties at the end of a long event? Last night I teleported into Club Java, where I was promptly animated into a great dancer by our Second Life staffers. I'm the redhead on the right, Doreen is in the middle and Lizzi is dancing up a storm in the back.

Who said I couldn't dance?

Signed, AmyO... Later

On Friday I saw a preview of the JavaOne event floor - and it's gonna be awesome! Demos, displays, Java playgrounds, village, living rooms - the community has delivered some incredible innovations this year. So if you haven't yet, make sure to register this week. See you there for the fun!

Once in a lifetime we meet someone that understands us so well, that manages us in a way we never comprehend, that makes life fun. Amazing Shelley is such a person. Thank you Shelley for all you do! Happy Admin Professionals Day.

AmyO

My Sun simulation team was great - we leveraged each other's skills and leaned on the team as we dug our heels in and stuck to our guns on open sourcing all our software. By simulation year 3, we emerged victorious in the market with the most customers and the largest community. And because we had used our [albeit fake] dollars to invest in our products, channel, community, and brand, we were positioned to keep winning in the market for years and years to come. I believe.

Life is tougher at Fenway Park - no simulation here. Manny was ejected during his first at-bat (note to self - if you're not in the game, you can have no positive impact), and Milton Bradley (why do I think of Monopoly every time he comes to bat?) hit a homer that drove in 3 to put the Rangers ahead by five. I stewed and steamed and sunned, and thankfully by the end of the eighth we were ahead 6-5. I believe.

It takes a team to win - that was clear this week. Sure Manny needed Big Papi, Dustin, and Jacoby. I needed Iain, Denis, Eric, Colin, and Octavian to keep our simulated company together. And Sun needs a bunch of other great people that I had the privilege to spend time with this week: Pammy (your Sox hat is in the mail), Jeff, Bob, Lynn, Graham, Cheri, Mark, Russ, Tony, Bev (17 years catching up!), Irene, Suchitra, Andy, Keith, Lorraine, Pavel, Ivonne, Terry, Eric, Connie (fun bus ride), Dan, Emma, Mike, Fritz, Meg, Dan (we're neighbors!), Karen, Georgios, Sivaram (thanks for the advice!), Teresa, Suzanne, Roger, Andy, and so many more. Thanks for the great learnings and all the fun!

How do you expand your business beyond existing customers and traditional revenue opportunities? Take the Red Sox for example. Fenway Park seats just under 40,000 fans and the Red Sox have sold out every home game since May 2003. But with the highest ticket prices in the majors, there's just no room for price uplift to help revenue. So the Sox launched a number of businesses that leverage their baseball success into other areas: services like FanFoto, added value product like post-game concerts that in turn sell more food and merchandise, consulting to businesses that want to market through sports, online ads, and travel packages with the team to away-game destinations.

All around us new business models are maximizing economic value. I often get asked why we open source our software at Sun, and how we can possibly make money doing that. Well, developers that use our software platforms (e.g.; OpenSolaris, Java, NetBeans, MySQL) can innovate in their applications without worrying about the scalability, reliability, and flexibility of the underlying platform. And open sourcing those platforms expands our reach to developers who don't have the funds to pay steep software licenses.

The number of people using our software increases each and every day. But we all learned at a young age that zero times a large number is still zero, so how do we make money when we give away our core software intellectual property?

Our business model today delivers support and managed services, added value products, servers, storage and consulting to empower open source deployers as they grow their businesses at Web scale. Value-added businesses that surround and enhance the open source experience. Ya know, not all that different from what the Red Sox are doing with their Fenway Sports Group business.

I had a mini vacation in Vegas this weekend - took my sweet yellow Mini Cooper to meet its community. Met a yellow twin and lots of minis making personalized statements. Even a mini-meetup at the

The thing about SAM and Q is that their attributes have been required for the medical, military, and oil&gas industries for over a decade now, which is why they are so widely deployed in those market sectors. But the need to store and retrieve large volumes of data quickly and cost-effectively is no longer a requirement limited to those markets. Heck I've got a terabyte of data at home - think about what's going on in media & entertainment, manufacturing, financial services, education...

SAM-QFS was originally developed by LSC Inc, which was purchased by Sun in 2001. I had the opportunity to work closely with the SAM-Q team when they first joined Sun: back then there was Harriet (who has had a fascinating career in high tech), the Matthews brothers and the Intern, Bob, Ted, Tom, Harold, John, Margaret, Clay, Robert, Dave, ... who did I forget? I have lots of crazy Eagan Minnesota memories with the team - like the last slot in the soda machine, the oven at the side of the road, the bratwurst barbeques. The first time I went to Minnesota to meet with them - as I was pulling out of the airport -the Hertz guy said to me "Ya ready for the snow?" Two feet by the morning! Boy was it cold, and that was in the spring! And I have warmer memories of meeting with their customers - like Robert Cecil, PhD, Cleveland Clinic’s network director. Dr Bob gave us a great tour through radiology where SAM-Q was being used to show that a tumor was shrinking, through surgery where SAM-Q provides patient data right in the operating room, and through the data center with huge tape libraries, where SAM-Q was helping to increase the quality of patient care while decreasing costs. And I remember Dr Bob speaking on a panel at a storage conference - when asked about the importance of data availability, he quietly stated that access to data is the difference between life and death. No one can express the need for data availability and integrity better than Dr Bob.

Open sourcing SAM-Q is a key step for Sun and the developer community. It's now easy for people facing large data management challenges to try something that has worked for years in large scale, mission-critical deployments. And in case you're wondering how a business can make money while making such a key asset freely availably, remember that SAM-Q runs on servers, needs to be supported in product environments, stores data on disk and tape, ...

It was a good Saint Patrick's celebration: del.icio.us corned beef and cabbage, ice cold beer and a LOUD Dropkick Murphys concert. My first exposure to the Dropkick Murphys was this past baseball season when they performed at Fenway Park before Game 7 of the ALCS, and then again on a flatbed truck in the Red Sox rolling rally, with Jonathan Papelbon strumming along on his broomstick guitar.

And community is what it's all about these days. Communities of all types and kinds, each with a purpose, but all about sharing their common interests. Take OpenSolaris for instance. According to wikipedia "OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around Solaris Operating System technology. It is aimed at developers, system administrators and users who want to develop and improve operating systems."

Given the security focus in Solaris, it's no wonder the U.S. National Security Agency announced this past week that they are joining the OpenSolaris community to collaborate on new security mechanisms for operating system.

The cool thing about communities is members can chose the level to which they want to participate. The luck of the Irish was with me on Saturday - before I left for the concert, my teenage daughter warned me that moshing is big in the Dropkick Murphy community. So I chose to enjoy the celtic punk tunes from the venue's balcony - and in case you haven't seen moshing, there's a great YouTube video on it that totally had me rolling on the floor with laughter. Slainte!

If you're wondering why I just reposted this entry (St Patty's Day really was last week and I haven't been at the bar this whole time ), I fumble-fingered my blog and managed to unpublish this entry. Sorry about that!