CEC2008 has started... This is Sun's Customer Engineering Conference, in Las Vegas. New this year is that we follow tracks and get assessments at the end, so hard work and none of the distractions the city offers... Viva Las Vegas !
We do get some distractions in the hangout area: bean bags, games, internet connections...
The general sessions this morning where great, and I had a few in my years with other companies... I offer some thoughts here randomly from my notes, I was writing the whole time. These speakers had some good messages to bring and excellent presentations. Energizing !
All interpretations and observations are my own...
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Peter Ryan talked about the excellent “third Coke” analogy, people say about Sun that the world does not need a “third coke” (after Coca Cola and Pepsi a.k.a IBM and HP). Well plenty of people nowadays need Jack Daniels...
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Interesting observations from Jonathan who notes customer's top frustrations are with database licensing costs, where MySQL helps, and a certain networking vendor.... stay tuned. Maybe to do with Andy Bechtolsheim's new startup ? Or Project Crossbow ?
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Jonathan notes that the innovation we do with open source is not to be confused with the revenue generation we run behind that. We bring the solution in critical times with choice.
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Quote from Peter: In times of rapid change the learners inherit the world, while the learned find themselves fully equipped to deal with a world tha no longer exists...
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From a customer visit, a big exchange: They turn to us for innovation, out of the box thinking, they look elsewhere for low cost.
Jim Baty had a very interesting presentation with excellent slides on cloud computing. A lot of interesting notions here. Web 1.0 was about publishing to everyone, Web 2.0 is about everyone publishing and web 3.0 is about everyone becoming a web programmer. Instead of spreadsheets, people will write apps in Google analytics, Zembly,...
We live in a data tsunami, 45 GB per person on earth, 10% growth in the last 5 years, 50% is thrown away...
The desktop is dead, welcome to the internet cloud. George Gilder in Wired.
Key cloud technology is virtualization.
The end of Science (Wired Magazine): The quest for knowledge now starts with petabytes of data. No single theory that needs testing, but big amounts of data that need analyzing.
Open Storage is very important, it allows us to talk to customers we did not talk to before.
Everyone needs to become a web programmer, get on Facebook, embrace the cloud.
Hal Stern did a riveting talk as usual, key for him is to capture the imagination. A designer imbues something with the way the world should work. (Paul Lansky).
“Peak Performers” by Charles Garfield on his work with the Apollo programme.
Ivan Sutherland quote: I am a practising technologist, denied my daily dose of technology I get grouchy.
Vendors are uncool, people want to talk to technologists.
Again the notion of unstructured rich data Baty also talked about.
Anyone has taken a shower and had a good idea. It's what you do next that matters. Charles Garfield.
The network is the computer !!!
The information economy does exist, what we called Redshift, apps that turn data into information are key.
Design points: Parallelism, big data, efficiency, open source economies.
Today open storage is a result of open source, tomorrow it is networking with project Crossbow. Networking reference again...
Stay tuned for more this week !
