mamafufu Q: how is life? A: mamafufu

when i first saw the reusable chopsticks here, i said to myself i have to get one. thanks for my colleague in beijing china, mine came yesterday in light blue for his and pink for hers. outside the box it says "sun-green-future 太阳-绿色-未来". can't wait to try it out in my favorite pho place later this afternoon.

greening and future proofing data centers continue to be a challenge and a priority for many enterprises big or small globally. as we all learned in management 201 - "we can't manage what we don't measure". ability to measure, analyze and forecast energy consumption, cooling requirements and load utilization is one of the first and important step on better data center resource management.

last week sun announced the early access release of the sun intelligent power monitoring service. with its innovative software-only solution, it can be immediately deployed and doesn't require any external sensors. take advantage of the free 60 days early access release offer that supports these five Sun Fire systems initally: 6800, X4600, T2000, T1000 and T5440.

still thinking about the reusable chopsticks? good luck .

my mobile service contract commitment ended a few weeks ago. like many others may do, i shop for my next phone. it will come down to do i want to go with iphone 3G and switch carrier or do i stay with my current carrier and go with the newly available LG dare? if the LG dare provides better language support as in the iphone, it will be a much harder decision to make. while the LG phone itself certainly has the ability to support languages like chinese, don't understand why it is opted out in the US market.

so what am i going to do with my perfectly fine moto Q that i use today? i will keep it as a piece of memory or history. this reminds me my first mobile phone. it was a moto 8800 ultra classic upright brick model. it has a LED display of 7 characters, 30 minutes talk time, expensive, ability to store about 20 numbers, big and heavy. it made and received cellular calls in very limited areas mainly outdoor. at that time mobile phone was more like a status thing than necessity for many people. that pretty much sums up all the features and characteristics of my first mobile phone.

in first quarter of 2008 there were nearly 300 millions mobile phones shipped worldwide compared with about 70 million PCs shipped and the gap is widening. with mobile technologies like 3G, wi-fi, bigger screen with higher resolution, audio, video, and web enabled applications, accessing the internet from mobile phones becomes more real, fun and practical, .

as mobile phones become more internet-centric, what does it mean to the service industry? how can existing services use this new opportunity to enhance its offerings or as a competitive edge? what innovative services can be developed to catch this new wave? a colleague of mine alok rishi started a service science blog recently to discuss those opportunities and challenges.  looking forward to learning more ...

adobe announced photoshop express beta last week as its implementation of yet-another picture-sharing site with web-based photo editing capability.  although the photo editing capability in photoshop express has next to nothing in common with its bigger brother photoshop or even photoshop elements, it run's on adobe's own browsers friendly and OS independent flash plug-in.  it is free as long as you keep your collections under 2 GB in storage.

if adobe manages to offer full photoshop capabilities as a hosted application on the web that carries a subscription-based fee, charge by storage, supported by some sort of advertisement program or other creative revenue generating business model, would you give up your computer-bound software and give it a try for the following good reasons:

• low initial software acquisition cost. don't need to pay for the $649 full computer-bound software license from day one. easier to switch to another provider without worry about vendor lock-in.

• low maintenance and support cost since the software is hosted and managed by the vendor. don't need to worry about software configuration, patch and upgrade etc. on-going support and operational cost is more predictable.

• don't need to worry about data storage and management (i.e. backup/restore) since they are stored in the data center of your service provider.

• software and data are more accessible wherever there is a web browser and internet connection. this greatly simplifies your computing environment.

this example describes the essence of software as a service (SaaS). SaaS is certainly not new in the corporate world. while whether it is just a new marketing term for application service provider (ASP) may be up for some debate, SaaS will continue to stay and to evolve - or until someone comes up a fancier or more eye-catching name.

last week sun announced product availability for sun modular datacenter (sun MD) s20, widely known as project blackbox.  i am sure you have already heard or read so much about this innovative datacenter-in-a-box and its simplicity, flexibility, transportability, environmental friendliness and many other great features.  in addition, sun also offered a suite of innovative services that covers the full spectrum of plan, build, support and transform.

over the past few months i have read many interesting stories as how companies, universities and governments applied and deployed the sun md creatively.  here is an interesting one - an 100m below ground datacenter in an abandoned coal mine in japan with 30 sun MDs.  it must be an interesting experience to field a support call in such subterranean environment.

this picture was taken earlier this week from the sun office in ashburn, va, usa.  it is my home office and also was the headquarter of sevenspace, inc. before it was acquired by sun in jan 2005.  this month marks the third anniversary of the acquisition.  i remember because i was one of the "sevenspacer" and became a sun employee since then.

now going back to the picture above.  it was made of alphabet cookies and it must has been there shortly after the acquisition.  while i am surprised to see the cookies are still in good looking condition after all these time, i am more amazed that they have not been eaten by now.

as for the IT managed services that sevenspace built and was known for, it is now known as the sun managed operations to the world - just bigger and better.  in addition to servicing external partners and customers, sun is also using the same technology and the ITIL based operational process to support its internal infrastructure as well as integrating it into new offerings such as project blackbox and network.com - the sun grid utility computing.
 
as an ex-sevenspacer, i feel good and proud of the managed operations line of business that we helped to build at sun.  also want to take this opportunity to again thank all my colleagues at sun.  you made my transition to sun a painless one and many of you have gone out of your ways to make me feel like home from day one.  i noticed, i remember and i thank you.

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i had an opportunity to speak at a conference in the beautiful city of chengdu, china.  the conference was very much academic centric.  it was also an honor to share the same podium with some of the great educators and minds in fields of mathematics and computer science all over the world.  being the only delegation from the business sector, the first challenge was to pick the right topic.  with help from jon, service science came to mind and it turned out to be a great choice.  it made the right "connection" with the academic audiences.

so what is service science?  since the term is evolving and the field is still emerging, there is no one universally accepted definition. or we are still at the blind men and an elephant phase which is perfectly fine.  in a nutshell service science is an emerging multi-discipline approach that accelerates development of innovative service offerings and delivery mechanisms with collaboration from industries, governments, academia and communities.

the service industry has grown significantly globally and it represents 57% of global GDP according to latest available data.  the number is a lot higher for some of the industrialized countries.  while we know how innovation works for products, there are little tools and methods that guide innovation in services.  in order to sustain such growth, industries, governments and academia need to put service innovation as a priority.

during Q&A a great question was asked by a student - sun is known as a "product" company with server, storage and software such as solaris and java, why service and why now?  beside the fact that service revenue at sun for Q1FY08 represents 38% of total revenue, customers are no longer just buying products from sun.  they are buying end-to-end solutions from us.   solutions that include support service, professional service, managed service, educational service and many others.

there are a lot more to talk about service science and it sure is an exciting frontier.  will service science make the same impact to the human kind similar to what computer science has been doing since the 60's?

act now and stay ahead ...

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