Beijing
I've been to China, Beijing to be precise this week (OK last week when I posted this), its some 5 years since I was here, which is way too long, so many things have changed, Last time I came Beijing was a building site, this time building is still going on, but a lot less of it. The city and the infrastructure is so different from last time as a result of all that building.
The flight was on Air China, it is a Virgin codeshare flight.
I'm starting to write this blog in terminal 3 at Beijing airport, I won't get it finished here, I'll do that on the plane and post it when I get back home this evening. Its hard to comprehend the sheer scale of what was done in 4 years here, this article on the BBC website comes close. Then you think about how long terminal 5 @ Heathrow took, enough said.
Sun has an engineering centre in Beijing along with services (inc. a call centre) and sales. As well as presenting to the engineering teams, I also went customer visiting and spent time talking to the local sales team, they were particularly excited (still) about AmberRoad and the opportunities that is opening up. Customer response around the world on this product seems to be universal, it is a NetApp beater. The sales team in Beijing were particularly interested in the ISV opportunities available with AmberRoad, these are available for all to see here.
To an extent the scale of what was done in building the new airport @ Beijing is akin to what Sun did WRT AmberRoad and about as spectacular.
Like a lot of Sun product it is available via our try and buy programme.
A few things haven't changed in China, such as ringpulls on cans, remember the ones that come off the can? Well in China they still do as you can see.
Anyway back to more serious matters, customer visits the biggest topic here was Solaris 10, the roadmap, OpenSolaris and where Solaris is heading. Lots of excitment here about what we've just released in Update 7, where the roadmap is going and especially OpenSolaris. I covered most of this in my last blog entry so won't clutter up this one with that again.
So as expected I never got to finish this entry in China and since I forgot to save a local copy it is now Monday morning and I'm finishing this off @ LHR waiting for a flight to JFK.
The point is that vast majority of customers I talk to want a couple of things i) stability and ii) innovation, and we basically have that Solaris 10 gives you the stability, with limited new features, primarily those needed for new platform support and device driver support and OpenSolaris with innovations such as Crossbow, which at somepoint will become a Solaris.Next.
We also have that class of customer that would like all the stability that goes with the likes of Solaris 10 along with some of the major innovation that is in Solaris.Next. Sadly as those of you that have ever done software development well know, this is somewhat of a challenge to achieve. Changing 1M+ lines of code in a shipping product is high risk, to say the least, which is why we have a policy of focusing our update releases on platform support and device driver support, with very focused feature enhancements. Now as those of you that have ever spoken to me about this will know (and before I get a bunch of comments on this blog entry), we did not get the balance right in the earlier update releases to Solaris 10, which caused some stability issues, but that has been addressed.
Back to customer feedback, overwhelmingly positive, love Solaris, love the innovation, nice meetings to have. Especially when you get an opportunity to talk about the roadmap for Solaris at the same time. Got a different a far tougher meeting this week, same topic, despite loving Solaris, they've had a tough time of it recently and they want to hold the engineering guys feet to fire, that'll be me then. More about that later this week.
