The Sun Blade Blog

Simple by Design

Our engineers and architects spend a lot of time to eliminate complexity and provide optimal designs for our systems.  The users and administrators of the world recognize and appreciate that simplicity.  Back when I was a developer prior to coming to Sun I had to develop on multiple systems.  I had a Sun box and a couple of vendors systems on my desk.  It was always easier on the Sun box.  Stuff just worked and things were where you expected to find them.  I can't explain what it was or why.

This is where the disconnect comes in.  In this day and age of multi-dimensional RFPs and website overload how do customers value and find simplicity.  Describing simplicity comes down to marketing what you don't have.  An off switch on an iPOD or Mark Twain's famous quote about not having enough time to write something shorter.  Both descriptions of not having something increases simplicity.  From a feature perspective wouldn't it be better to have an off switch or a longer book.  I can see it now, the marketing claim that they have 50% more off switches than anyone else.

A good example of this in our blade architecture is Transparent Management.  Transparent Management allows you to manage our blades just like you manage a rackmount system.  The 10 blades just look like 10 servers in your management console.  You can use Sun or leading third party tools to manage the system.  Simple right?

If you look at the other extreme you would see a custom proprietary set of management tools for blades that instead of managing as a normal server you manage as a Blade Chassis with servers in side.  You have a whole new set of tools and techniques to manage the blades in the chassis, some which could be very compelling most are just different ways of solving the same tasks you did in your existing management tools.   This new management tool is proprietary to a specific vendors blade product.  It not only locks you into a single vendor it also introduces a who new licensing and training effort.  Sound familiar?

So how do we market simplicity.  How do we break the dreaded multi-dimensional RFP cycle.  Simple, we just give customers free trials of our products.  If you would like to try our blades simply go to the website and ask for one.

Try it.  Enjoy simple.

Posted at 08:08PM Jan 24, 2008 by blades in Sun  |  Comments[2]