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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.