Remember way back in late September, just before CEC? In particular there was a post by our GSE Diva's about a special give away. The contest was to find and identify the Diva's at our October Customer Engineering Conference. The first person to find them would win a special sweat shirt / Jersey. At CEC I ran into the Diva's near the end of the conference but I still asked, "did I win?" The answer was clearly "no".

Well the Diva's did not let me down. A special package arrived for me in Prague. As you can see from the photo, I now have my very own "Jersey Girl" jersey! Thanks Diva's!

Also pictured here with me is Susan McMynn wearing the latest in transgender New Jersey fasion; a Jersey Boy baseball cap. Susan is the manager of our Customer Engineering Programs group and happened to be in Prague for some meetings in time to model the goods from the Diva's.

Technorati Tags: Customer Engineering, Geek, Prague

I am in Madrid today. I am in the middle of a push to visit all of our EMEA markets by the end of the calendar year. In most cases I am meeting with the local teams, reviewing the business and understanding where we need to invest from a technical skills perspective. Do we have the right technical skills? Are we serving our customers is the best way possible? Are we balancing our capabilities between the technology and products of today vs. driving adoption for the technologies that will power the future? These are the questions that keep me up at night. Well that and I usually read my email late at night.

Here is my schedule:

• Week of Nov. 13th in California for leadership meeting and Colorado for Customer Engineering Meeting
• Week of Nov. 20th in Birmingham, England for EMEA Operations reviews, in Madrid for Iberia Systems Engineering review
• Week of Nov. 27th in Paris for France Systems Engineering review and my staff meeting
• Week of Dec. 4th in Rome for Italy Systems Engineering review
• Week of Dec. 11th in Stockholm for Central and Northern Europe Systems Engineering review and then to California for a Customer Engineering Programs review and Team CTO meeting
• Week of Dec. 18th in Munich for Germany Systems Engineering Review and Peter Ryan's staff meeting

So in a few weeks time and ten cities, I will be on my way to Austria for a needed holiday break. Some skiing, family time and rest.

Technorati Tags: Customer Engineering, Sun, Travel

This week I attended our SMI leadership meeting in California. Now I could go on about all the positive things going on in Sun and how we are growing, have great technology and great customers, but I'm not going to. Rather I though what I would talk about briefly is what followed our leadership meeting. After my time in California, I got to take a mini-vacation and spend some time with my buddies doing what I love, riding dirt bikes.

Yes I got to spend a couple of days in and around Moab in Utah. The picture is me, really. I am riding along the slick rock trail in Moab. The other is Tom Berghoff and I at the head of the Hell's Revenge trail. The weather was great and it was not crowded at all. Great fun!

It was great to get away, relax, ride and then moan at night and the next mornings about the aches and pains.

Ohh and in case there are any riding fanatics out there, I ride a '04 KTM 300 EXC. Got to love the Austrians!

Technorati Tags: Dirtbikes, Sun, Travel

I got to spend a few days in Cannes this week at the most famous event held each year in this great city. Well, OK, maybe it is not the most famous event held here, but it should be at least in the top 10. ...or 100. I attended the annual Gartner Symposium/ITExpo.

I had the chance to sit down and chat with a number of Gartner analysts to chat about Sun, technology and our industry. It is great to hear so many different perspectives, some that are in line with my thinking, some that needed a bit more convincing and some that needed have their "reset" button pushed. ;-) Two long days of interviews, meetings with customers and attending sessions and keynotes.

One of the keynotes that I enjoyed quite a bit was delivered by Peter Sondergaard. Peter is the SVP in charge of Research at Gartner. Peter talked about consumer driven IT and the "consumerization of IT". His main point was that more and more end users are influencing IT direction and playing a bigger part of deciding what is important. This is a fundamental shift that Peter sees, and I believe it to be 100% inline with some of the discussions I have had in the past year with CIOs and our customers.

Fundamentally users want more. More bandwidth, faster processing, more storage, etc. This is not so much different then the past, but the demand seems to be growing. Do you plan to store any less photos? Listen to any less music? The difference I believe is that users are becoming more and more aware of technology and its implications on their day to day lives. Ask any teenager. You will find that most teens have already integrated technology into their lives, from their mobile phones, to their community groups, blogs and instant messaging accounts. Proof is in one of the data points that Peter mentioned: 89% of teens use search as their first source of information. Mark Prensky (I believe the first to claim the term) called these people "Digital Natives". The opposite of this is the Digital Immigrants. I am a Digital Immigrant. Most likely you are as well, unless you are some teenager up at 3AM with nothing better to read then an immigrants blog. ;-)

I found many similarities between Peter's talk, Prensky's ideas and Sun's mission to create the technologies and fuel the communities that power the Participation Age. I am glad to see that others have caught on the these ideas as well. We are all playing our part in a much larger global stage, where by participation we all begin to close the huge gap in the global digital divide.

So all you Digital Immigrants, get out there and get to know the Natives and let's see if we can continue to drive the direction of our technology future.

Technorati Tags: IT, Sun, Technology