Thursday June 30, 2005
Thursday June 30, 2005 As of last night when the Pavillion at JavaOne closed, we had DTraced 16 applications with 15 of those getting performance increases of between 5% and 280%.
To put this achievement in perspective you really had to be there, some of the challenges we faced were: 1)We had one person doing 95% of the work, including installing the apps, getting them running and doing the DTracing. 2)The pavillion was only open for ~8 hours every day. 3)None of the Sun people involved were Java experts. 4)The majority of the apps had never been run on Solaris before. 5)The booth right next to us subscribed to the "employ an idiot with a loudspeaker to shout about your product once every ten minutes" school of marketing (this might not sound too bad, but after 2 days it starts to get very annoying).
The good news is we had a lot of happy customers and got to show off DTrace in the best possible way - solving real world applications. The applications themselves were surprisingly diverse, everything from a CDMA network interference modeling app to an XML parser and something that was representative of a military app (the customer wasn't allowed to talk about that one).
It was great to see and hear so many Java developers asking about Solaris 10, we handed out literally hundreds of Solaris 10 DVD's and the latest reports from the DTrace presentation going on today indicate that there were more than 900 people in attendance. That's over 10% of the total attendees at JavaOne this year.
Have you heard the one about Bono, the Pope and the airport security guy?
One of the nice things about marketing is that in many respects we control our own schedule. We decide when we're going to launch a product or make an announcement or do a press release. The downside is that we can't control when other vendors make announcements.
Even though we generally know that some form of announcement is coming from a competitor, we usually have to wait to see it in order to respond. That tends to introduce some serious bumps on the road to effective time management (marketing isn't all cappucino's and advertising you know). In an industry where there's new announcements coming out every day, this can lead to a pretty hectic work environment.
The flipside is of course, that being at the "pointy end of the ship" I occasionally have to attend customer, partner and analyst events (which is usually a lot less glamorous than it sounds, actually, I'm not sure it sounds all that glamorous). Having said that, every once in a while we get to do something thats a lot of fun.
You may have read about the work that Bono (the singer in U2) is doing to help eradicate poverty in Africa, it's a truly unique campaign that has garnered a huge amount of interest recently and I'm very proud that Sun (and Solaris) is a part of it. In less than six weeks some of the very bright individuals here at Sun put together an enterprise class mobility solution that allows Bono to recruit audience members at U2 concerts into the One campaign via their cell phones.
It's all running on Solaris 10 on Sun V20Z and V40Z servers and results in a pretty special moment during U2's show. At a certain point in the night audience members are asked to text their names to UNITE (86483 try it yourself). As U2 play, all those names are aggregated through two datacenters, one in Singapore and the other in the US and are then some are randomly chosen for display on a large video screen above the band - all in less than 10 seconds.
The names are registered with the One campaign and the next day everyone who texted receives an email explaining how they can become more involved. I urge you to try it, it's a really fascinating use of technology and more importantly, it's the right thing to do from a social perspective. What has this got to do with marketing? I'm getting to that.
A few weeks ago I ended up taking some Sun customers to a U2 concert in Boston to show them this technology in action, and even better, Danny (one of the people who developed the system) let me hang out with him and monitor the system at work during the part of the show where this happens. It was a truly unique experience and one of those once in 10 years things that helps keep the job interesting, and I got to see U2.
The next morning I was going through my mail and saw that the Holy See (aka the Vatican, yes, that Vatican) had chosen Sun as part of their infrastructure only weeks after reportedly moving to Solaris when their existing (TRU64) systems failed to cope with the demands being put on them after the death of Pope John Paul II.
Now, where I come from, when you can claim Bono AND the Pope as customers, it's time to either retire or move on to something new but something else happened later in the day that has convinced me to stick with Solaris.
While I was going through security screening at the airport on my way home, my laptop was taken away for an additional security check. The TSA screener who brought it back started a surprising conversation that went something like this:
Screener: "Nice laptop. Are you running Solaris on it?" Me: *Stunned Silence* "Yes" Screener: "8 or 9?" Me: "10" Screener: "Cool, I'll have to try it" It turns out that in the past he'd worked for a company that installed some networking into a conference center and he'd been exposed to Solaris there (in case you're wondering, I wasn't wearing any Sun or Solaris branded clothing). Where else am I going to be able to work on a product that's as good as Solaris 10 and has such interesting and diverse customers?