Jim Laurent's Weblog

If you are looking for a bunch of guys (and a few ladies) at Sun who are simply NUTS about Solaris, look no further than the OS Ambassador group!

For many years now, Sun has had a variety of technical communities designed to spur information sharing and education.  They go by various names such as Aces, Expert Groups and Ambassadors.  Ambassadors are an officially sanctioned collection of experts in a variety of topics.  The ambassador groups within Sun currently include:

• Operating Systems (Solaris and Linux variants)
  
• Techical Systems (hardware and graphics)
• Software and Java (developers)
• Security
• Data Management (storage)
• Data Center

Our jobs are to be evangelists and sounding boards filling the gap between Sun engineering resources and customers.  Ambassadors come from a variety of positions including pre-sales engineers, benchmarking specialists, customer support and are almost always customer facing.  We sport a variety of skills from the deeply technical to mastery of public speaking.  Ambassador membership is kept to about 60 world-wide in each of the categories listed. 

It is NOT our "day job," however.  We do it because we are true propeller heads and can't  help ourselves.  We also like putting the cool title on our business cards!

As an OS Ambassador, I interface with customers, engineers, marketing, management and my peers.  I act as a two way conduit of information between engineering and customers to ensure that Solaris remains the most advanced operating system on the planet.

The OS Ambassadors provide a variety of services for customers including:

• Running Solaris 10 bootcamps and presentations
• Performing systems analysis using tools such as DTrace
• Helping to port and migrate code from other OSes and older releases to Solaris 10.
• Contributing content to Sun Blueprints and BigAdmin sites
• Helping beta customer test the latest versions
• Monitoring and contributing to the OpenSolaris community
  

Next time you meet with your Sun account team, ask them who the local OS Ambassador is and how he or she can help.

Why you should care.

An OS Ambassador can help you to get a deeper understanding and appreciation of Solaris, improving your system availability, security and scalability while lowering costs.