A busy week indeed. It is not very often that within a week you get a chance to circumnavigate the planet. I started out heading from Prague to San Francisco on June 15th for some meetings with Greg's staff and a few other meetings in CA. Then on to Denver on the 16th for some meetings with my team and such. I then got to spend the weekend with some friends riding dirt bikes and quads in the mountains (I didn't break anything on this trip but I did manage to bruise a number of body parts). Monday was more meetings in Colorado, then back to San Francisco for the Services executive review on Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday afternoon had me off to Shanghai, China for the second of three major legs in rounding the planet. I delivered a keynote address at a conference on Friday morning and then Saturday was back on a plane to take me back home to Prague. There you have it, a little over a week, took me for one lap of planet earth.

The highlight of the week, not that sitting in meetings all day are not fun, was the IEEE International Conference on Service Operations, Logistics and Informatics (SOLI) in Shanghai. This was the second year of the SOLI conference and the first time Sun has publicly displayed its services strength at a technical conference.

Pete Gratzer, John D. Lilli, Mike Gionfriddo and Ray Tan all participated by publishing papers and attending. Sun had a special session (track) at the conference and in general it was well attended. I also had the honer of delivering a keynote at the Friday plenary session. My topic was "IT as a Service", essentially how IT is going through the transformation from being a "place" to becoming a "service".

The conference went very well. A bunch of very interesting papers were submitted and presented. I had the chance to sit on a panel of sorts to discuss how academia could be doing more in preparing students for the services oriented economy. A great discussion was had between the Chinese and USA National Science Foundations, a number of representatives from universities around the world, representatives from IBM and of course Sun.

I also got to spend a good deal of time talking with a number of academia about services related research, what Sun is doing in the services space and general service geek conversation. In particular I had a series of chats with Dr. Sanjay Joshi and Dr. Richard Wysk both of Penn State. We even had a chance to do a bit of Chinese market shopping.

Huge thanks to Dr. Robin Qiu for involving me and for putting on such a great event. Thanks Robin! See you in San Diego next year!