SE Thought

Sunday June 18, 2006

OpenSolaris and pre-sales As some of you know, I'm a pre-sales in Sun Singapore. To my customers, I represent Sun, and certainly I got my fair shares of Solaris questions. I've lost count how many times I've presented and discussed Solaris with customers. OpenSolaris, or specifically, the opening of Solaris to anyone out there and the building of the community, have helped me in many ways.

Here are just some:
1. More technical materials are available, be it from forum or blog. Instead of searching onestop and the various intranet sites, now I just go to blogs.sun.com and opensolaris.org. And of course, now I can do Google.

2. More updated materials are available. Before, we only have internal mailing list. Now blogs and opensolaris complement this.

3. More roadmap info is available. This is important for pre-sales, as customers like to know the future so they can plan properly. Nobody likes negative surprise in enterprise architecture.

4. More avenues to ask questions. Before, all we had was internal mailing list.

5. Direct access of information by customers. I've been encouraging my customers to subscribe direct (RSS) to the key engineers blogs, participate in the forum and be part of the community.

6. More documentation on source code. So far, taking parts of source codes to explain the 'under the hood' stuff has been appreciated by customers. The source code is as good as it gets.

7. More information about who actually write which parts of Solaris. With Solaris engineers blogging their work, we know exactly what they are working on. So we know with certainty who knows which part of Solaris very well. Before, they were just names-in-the-mailing-list to me.


The opening of the source code also helps me to push Solaris to customers who value openness and transparency. It also helps as assurance to customers that they have choice beyond Sun hardware. In fact, one major customer has run Solaris on HP servers and very happy with it. We are now talking to them on support contract. 2 years ago, I didn't even dream on this stuff.

The cycle continues. The more these customers learn and appreciate Solaris, the more they use it. Some have begun the process of making it the standard OS. The more they use it, the more information they want, the better they know Solaris, and eventually they would participate and contribute information. And I see that win-win.

With that, Happy Birthday OpenSolaris! Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris (2006-06-17 09:52:47.0) Permalink Comments [2]