Dinesh Bahal: Web 2 Industry Practice @ Sun

I joined Sun 13 years ago, and until I took on this position last year I spent most of my career in Sun Education and Research – a group chartered to understand the needs of Sun’s education customers, and deliver programs and offerings to help solve their problems. I loved every minute I spent working with this dedicated and diverse group of customers.

You may be wondering, now that I’m the Web 2 guy, why am I still talking about education? Bear with me for a moment and I’ll connect the dots.

Frequently I used to meet with education industry customers and they would ask me why Sun focused on them even if  they didn’t necessarily buy much from us. The answer is, Sun has always had a special relationship with education. (Even our name reinforces this... Sun is an acronym for Stanford University Network, because our founders met at Stanford). We continue to foster strong connections with the education community because:

• The problems that educational institutions are trying to solve are the same problems that our commercial customers will be addressing at some point in the future.
• The technologies that students use throughout their education will be the ones they use to build out the architectures for companies that employ them once they graduate and begin their careers.
• The communities that have their genesis in the education sector eventually grow to influence other industries.

So, why do we care about Web 2? For very similar reasons…

• Because approaches to resolve scaling challenges that Web 2 customers are trying to solve today will be the ones that our commercial customers will face over time.
• Because the technologies that the Web 2 customers are pioneering will become part of the mainstream over time - and therefore the technologies that we build for our Web 2 customers will be the ones the traditional customers care about.
• Because Web 2 customers belong to communities that interact with and influence core commercial customers, tackling and solving the challenges that all enterprises will face over time.

Sun recently organized a meeting of some of our Internet-based customers with press  and analysts to discuss how they are dealing with ever-growing demands for computing power, data storage and open-source software. One of the participating companies was Flexilis, a Web 2 company focused on mobile security solutions.  Founder and chief operating officer James Burgess commented "In today's Internet landscape, we're forced to do more with less. Sun's open approach to computing provides us low-cost, high-performance solutions that enable my business to grow and rapidly innovate. There's not an enterprise vendor in the industry that understands my needs better."

We're proud to be working with and learning from our involvement with the hottest new companies. We also expect the distinctions between Web 2 customers and our more traditional customers will blur over time -- after all, who can afford a computing environment that doesn't support growth and rapid innovation?

I am responsible for the Web 2/Internet Industry Practice at Sun. Prior to this, I spent a lot of time in the group responsible for the Education & Research marketplace at Sun - where I held roles in Marketing, Business Development and International Sales. I have been at Sun a long time - almost fourteen years.