The Humbling Insight of Customers...
Strong customer interaction has always been important part of Sun's culture. Not only does it occur at the executive level but it is also strongly encourage at the individual contributor level. My team has taken that to heart and has been aggressively seeking out customers no matter how large or small to achieve several goals -- telling them about Solaris 10, about networking performance, and most importantly listening to their issues and needs. This however can be a humbling experience.
One example of this was an early roadshow to companies in Ireland and the UK to showcase Solaris 10, the enhanced high-performance TCP stack called FireEngine, and some of the future networking performance projects that we had in the pipeline. Universally all the customers thought it was all great stuff but during the Q&A session we kept running across the same question..."But does it help our network back-up performance?".
We had great performance data on numerous industry benchmarks that we could point to but nothing on something so basic that we hadn't thought about. It was certianly a bit humbling to say "We'll have to get back to you on that." Fortunately, we could follow-up with some great performance wins in this area but in terms of increased throughput and reduced CPU utilization. This is a great example of how it is important to really listen to customers and to create ongoing relationships that allow the free flow of information.
Just as a side note you may be asking why the performance of the network back-ups are so important. In a nutshell, many of our customer's business is transaction based (e.g. # of webpage hits, stock trades, downloads, bank transactions, database queries, etc.) with the performance of those transactions being paramount to business success or failure. Back-ups however are a negative impact on the bottom line given that it takes networking and system bandwidth away from those transactions.
More on the humbling insight of customers to come...
Darrin
One example of this was an early roadshow to companies in Ireland and the UK to showcase Solaris 10, the enhanced high-performance TCP stack called FireEngine, and some of the future networking performance projects that we had in the pipeline. Universally all the customers thought it was all great stuff but during the Q&A session we kept running across the same question..."But does it help our network back-up performance?".
We had great performance data on numerous industry benchmarks that we could point to but nothing on something so basic that we hadn't thought about. It was certianly a bit humbling to say "We'll have to get back to you on that." Fortunately, we could follow-up with some great performance wins in this area but in terms of increased throughput and reduced CPU utilization. This is a great example of how it is important to really listen to customers and to create ongoing relationships that allow the free flow of information.
Just as a side note you may be asking why the performance of the network back-ups are so important. In a nutshell, many of our customer's business is transaction based (e.g. # of webpage hits, stock trades, downloads, bank transactions, database queries, etc.) with the performance of those transactions being paramount to business success or failure. Back-ups however are a negative impact on the bottom line given that it takes networking and system bandwidth away from those transactions.
More on the humbling insight of customers to come...
Darrin
Posted by Mike Gerdts on May 13, 2005 at 03:44 PM PDT #