What a year 2008 was for me. It was a year of great personal growth -- if I may say so myself. And I didn't even take a course for that 
.
2009 also was a year of change. Change for SUN as a company: I clearly saw us moving further and further towards Open Source and learning (if not struggling) how to make money with that. I saw our Chip Multi Threading business take off with double digits growth. I saw OpenSolaris becoming more and more accepted, with our own distributions that integrate many new ideas. I saw our x64 business grow with Intel-based servers being added.
What I also noticed is that SUN has been and will always be a Technology Company, driven by Innovation. Despite quarterly results that are under great pressure, despite people leaving the company (voluntarily or not), despite declining customer spendings... we still do innovate and come up with new products and ideas. The most proliferate and recent example of this is our Open Storage proposition with accompanying Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems.
Last but certainly not least I saw SUN entering the world of Virtualization. I have had great involvement with this myself, evangelizing our xVM offerings and explaining the underlying technologies.
But what I saw most of all is that SUN is a company driven by people. Great, wonderful people who work really hard because they care. No matter when I was working (days, evenings, weekends, different timezones, ...), there is always a predictable group of people working too. At the risk of forgetting someone, and in no particular order I want to really thank the following individuals for their support, insights, discussions, reflections, demonstrations, ideas, help and most of all: enthousiasm: Sjaak, Martien, Franz, Menno, Gerard, Joep, Casper, Stephane, Paul, Marc M., my fellow Operating Systems Ambassadors, the Datacenter Ambassadors, Gert Jan, Jim L., Matthias, Eric, Hartmut, Ram, the people-who-apparently-never-sleep at the CMT, xVM and CMT aliases... and the local SEs and ISO reps (without whom I wouldn't have as much fun and challenges) -- you all know who you are. I am very much looking forward to continue working with all of you!
So what will 2009 bring? At the very least a lot of changes and hence even more chances. Chances to develop myself further, chances to deepen my knowledge, chances to share what I have learned and will learn. My plan for the year 2009 can be best described in two words:
Keep Going
And that's exactly what I'll do.
I wish everyone around me and everyone who happens to read this blog a very prosperous, healthy and in every aspect succesful New Year!