Tuesday March 03, 2009 
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Dave Johnson
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- Blogroll
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Dave Johnson
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Matt Raible
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Tuesday March 03, 2009 One of our customers in Toronto has an offshore data-entry partner in India and is currently running RDP all the way there - none too satisfactorily, either. Not surprising with a 350 ms latency on a 26,000+ km round trip (as the [very tired] crow flies). The management suggested Citrix to help out, and the techies suggested Sun Rays, and so the bake-off begins. The customer had two Sun Rays tucked under his arm as he went through customs in India. After futzing around with the partner's firewalls for 9 hours, he reports:
After getting over that hurdle [firewalls], I did a mini demo of the SunRays to the VP here who asked (eg. pulling up logon screens, switching users, scrolling thru pages and pages of the giant bloated training pdfs that always give them nightmares).
HE goes away an a big fat hurry and drags in his ops mgrs, show them... same thing.
Then THEY hauled in their worker bees with a big hubub.
Jaws dropped man. Freakin DROPPED. All 3 times it was Eyes like Dinner Plates. They were speechless in awe. I felt like a bloody rock star they nearly mobbed me to get a better look they just couldn't believe what they were seeing with their own eyes.
Holy moly.
We haven't won the business (yet) but I loved this description and thought I would share.
Saturday January 12, 2008 
The big secret is out - Sun Canada was awarded the 2010 Winter Games
as the server and storage supplier. At a 'National' meeting today in
Markham, Ontario this was announced.
Sun Canada's president, Andy Canham,(right) welcomed hundreds of Sun employees physically present, 
and many more over the internet. At a high level Andy laid out what this meant... a lot of work, the right people to do the job, the best servers and storage capabilities in the world, and another opportunity for Sun to shine its capabilities to a globe that would be tuned in. As an employee - this was interesting, but the message hadn't hit home for me, yet.
Andy introduced John Furlong, the CEO of the 2010 Winter Games who flew in from Vancouver for this event. John (left) 
spoke passionately about the importance of not just record keeping but all data for the fans, the athletes, the teams, the transportation, the food... he provided a much bigger picture of what the supplier of servers was all about, and frankly it sounded daunting to me. He also spoke about the fact that Sun was partially chosen because of its clear environmental leadership in server and storage space. That no other computer vendor had achieved what we had, and that leadership was something they were looking for. I was reminded later today in our press release we had done the same for the NHL and the CFL, as well as the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake.
Lastly, Nathalie Lambert, Chef de Mission for the Canadian Team (right)
, spoke and here's where the light went on for me: She spoke about how as an athlete (with a gold and two silver medals in the Olympics herself), the flow if information is all-important. Not just what your time was in a race - that's taken for granted. What about how many minutes until your race since those final mental preparations are all-important, or how about who will be competing in the race, and what lane they might be in, or what the track conditions are on turn one vs turn five (think luge, or downhill skiing), or how long the bus ride is to your venue. All of these things are driven by information - all driven by computers, and at the 2010 Winter games - they will be Sun's computers.
OK - Now I get it. But Nathalie had more about the flow of information from the athletes' perspective.
Nathalie related the story of waiting with the rest of the team to get their bronze medals after placing third in a speed skating relay at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics in 1994. One of the Canadians had fallen during the race (a fall in speed skating can be pretty spectacular - not in a good way) and yet we still ended up third. They waited 20 minutes to go to the podium, and clearly something was wrong, but the Canadian team had no information as what the issue might be. 
As it turned out one of the other teams had protested actions of another team, and the second place team was disqualified. This meant the Canadian Team ended up with Silver - and they still didn't know why until they found out on the way to the podium. The lack of information had kept them in the dark and in this case it turned out well for them (not so well for another country's team). There was no network to them in 1994. While that wouldn't happen today, we are taking on a massive responsibility to ensure immediate data flow... and we're up for it.
After Nathalie spoke, John was presented with an autographed, mounted and framed Sun SAPRC processor from Andy. Why might that be important? 
The processor was a Niagara processor, the backbone of Sun's eco-friendly server line, and it was autographed by Marc Trembly - the chief designer of the Niagara CPU line - and a Canadian.
The 2010 Olympic and Paralympic mascots were there at the end of the event for photos, so here's one of Nathalie and Andy with two of the mascots, Miga (left) and Quatchi.
Tuesday May 15, 2007 It seems to have gone almost unnoticed that IBM announced recently plans to bring out a stateless thin client.... a la the Sun Ray. It was fascinating to read the article that Joseph Kovar put onto CRN (Read it here) that said they have plans for such a device. It was amazing that the article went from the beginning to the end talking about this great revelation, and all the values of not having to manage a stateless desktop device, improved security and the like, and never mentioned that Sun has been doing this since 1999, and the only company doing so today. Magically, Dell, Lenovo and HP got a mention, somehow.
While I welcome IBM to the Party, I have to wonder if Sun Rays are THAT much of a secret to the world at large?
Maybe they are. Oh myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
Lots of noise about the article that John Cox wrote about the usage of 5,000+ Sun Rays at Verizon's call centres. Very cool article and the kind of thing that might help out with my beef from the previous topic. And good for John - his article showed up in LinuxWorld, NetworkWorld, and got picked up by ITWorldCanada, but with a different title. If you haven't seen it, check it out here.
In my latest Podcast (show #7) I talk about the IBM article and the Verizon article a bit, and also have some fun talking about some (hopefully uniquely Canadian) FUD. If you give it a listen, you will see it was a lot of fun to put together. I hope it is as much fun to listen to.
I am supposed to go off to University of Toronto on Friday to film an interview with the Director of IT there, who has had Sun Rays for four years now. They have some pretty innovative uses of the Sun Rays there - one of which doesn't include using it as a desktop which is different from anything else in Canada that I am aware of. Should be fun.
I hope to have it out on my site and YouTube as quick as possible.
Cheers.
Tuesday April 24, 2007 When I posted my podcasts online I really wasn't sure what to expect. I certainly wasn't expecting what I got today - which was a reseller partner of Sun's from another country asking for a higher resolution version of the video I put on YouTube around Sun Rays in Healthcare. And while I happily stuck a 640 x 480 version of the video (143 MB - yikes!) up on my site for this fellow, I guess it shows that this MapleDesk thing can work beit on blogs.sun.com, or youTube, or Google, or iTunes. Hey - if it helps move the ball forward for someone else - I'm all for it. After all - I'm only doing this because someone else pissed me off bigtime, which caused this investiture.
As such, be advised that MapleDesk show #6 is now posted on my site and should be on iTunes whenever their robots pick it up. A little conversation with Miles Faulkner about the recent Forrester Consulting report on the Total Economic Impact of Sun Rays. Miles gets a bit persnicketty about the risk adjustments in the business case. It was fun to record - too bad (for you) I felt compelled to edit it. Enjoy.
I also heard that some marketing folks inside Sun Canada are looking at maybe linking or pointing at my podcasts... potentially. Cool. I was not expecting that. Hoping - yes, but not expecting. Good surprises are... uhm... good!
Friday April 06, 2007 So if my previous post led you to believe I was going to join the Participation Age more fervently - then you would have thought correctly.
If you are one of those who did succumb to the lure dark side -uhmmm... er... the other dark side, and use iTunes on your PCs or Macs, you may be interested in the Podcasts out there on Sun Desktops in Canada. There are only a few there now but I expect five or six by the end of next week. You can go to the iTunes Music Store and seek out Mapledesk.
If you are more the purist type, or maybe don't have Windows or OS X in your arsenal, then you can get the plain old MP3 (hi-fi and low-fi flavours) from this site.
Show #1 is around the first financial analysis document Forrester Research did on Sun Rays in 2004.
Show #2 is an interview with David Woefle, Chief Technologist at EDS Canada. David talks about why Sun Rays make so much sense in their Call Centers around the world (including one in Canada) and why EDS is working with Sun to provide Sun Ray-based desktop solutions to customers in Canada when it is a good fit.
Show #3 is a video-only podcast where I interview Dr. Keith Wilson around the Sun Ray deployment in the clinic in which he works and what he and his colleagues think of Sun Rays. If not from iTunes, you can watch it on YouTube.com by searching on Sun Ray or ... or you can just click on YouTube from here.
Fingers crossed that this helps move the ball forward with the naysayers out there. Open to suggestions.
Wednesday April 04, 2007 It certainly has been a while.
When you are someone like me who synthesizes and evangelizes other people's work, and doesn't create much in the way of IP myself, I didn't have a lot to say when so many others put it so well - particularly on this site! My hat is continuously off to the ThinGuy and many others of this Sun desktop world. Most of my colleagues are technical, and I am not, so I didn't feel I was doing much to help the cause.
But that was then.
Late last year I was given a copy of a genuinely nasty piece of garbage written by a competitor wherein they purported to provide the frightening facts around Sun Rays. >oh my< You know where this is going...
When I first got it I was laughing so hard I didn't make it to the end of the first page. I think there were thirteen 'inaccuracies' (at best - some were outright fabrication) just on that first page, and there were a dozen or so more pages to go. But it occurred to me that if someone didn't know how Sun Rays really worked, you might think this document was a statement of fact - something no doubt the author was hoping for. That idea made me crazy. The best part was that at the end of the document was a disclaimer saying that none of the information actually had to be true and it wasn't the author's responsibility to report factual information.
Nice.
Now with an injustice to correct I have begun to do something I can manage to assist with around our desktop technologies. I am going to try to leverage media that Sun doesn't leverage a whole lot and not at all in Canada. Yet. In talking to folks in Marketing there was decent acceptance of the ideas I had, but these things take time. Who has time?
So with that - hold on a couple days and I will be able to point you at my latest side project(s) in an effort to spread the word around our desktop products and NOT what Sun says about them - what our customers, partners and analysts say about them. Sun Ray, Secure Global Deskop and StarOffice never looked so compelling.
Sunday October 09, 2005 I have the priviledge to work at 5 or 6 trade shows a year as a Desktop guy. Some people hate "booth duty" but I don't mind it at all. I did two with our partner Bell this January (Toronto and Montreal), and one with our partner xwave for Aliant in Halifax, N.B., I spent almost a full day at the SIA Technology Show in New York, one for the Province of Ontario and then most recently I worked a Sun booth at Canada's GTEC Show. This is the annual technology show for the Federal Government of Canada and it is busiest show I have been at in Canada.
To put this in perspective, we had a tiny booth (10 x 9 ft), but at any one time there could have been as many as 7 of us working 'in' the booth (well, 'in' is maybe a bit strong). Sure we had Sun Rays to show off, a rack of StorageTek gear and Identity management stuff to show off (as you can see in the image). But the big draw was the Sun name. I know I was there to talk about Sun Rays, and Sun's Secure Global Desktop (Tarantella), but people wanted to know about all kinds of things...
I got questions about:
- StarOffice
- OpenOffice.org
- Galaxy Servers (X4100 in particular)
- Open Source
- Google*
- How to join the iForce Partner Program
- The difference between Backups and Archiving
- Why Sun seems to encourage Blogging
- The Microsoft partnership
- The move by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to OpenDocument format
- Open Solaris
I have to tell you it was really cool to be asked about our company, on so many levels. Of course I managed to get in pitches for the most secure desktop out there with just about every body, but still... it was really cool to get into dialogues about Sun.
*The Google announcement was a bit of a trip, because we watched the press event in California on a Sun Ray 170 in real time at the GTEC show 3,000 miles away. People came by and watched as if we were watching TV, and we sort of were. The opportunity to watch the event unfold in real time, and see it over the network is what Sun Rays are all about - the network delivering services to the desktop. One woman (Dept. of Agriculture I think) asked what we were showing in our booth and at that particular time I said 'history', because we were. I explained briefly what we were watching and she stood there and watched with the rest with us. There was quite a gang assembled by the time it was done.
Pretty gratifying. Who says booth duty is always dull?
Friday October 07, 2005 After a demo to a large number of folks, the partner got a lot of positive feedback about the idea of never having to manage PCs again, and we got invited back to do a full day workshop.
As I sit on a train running into Toronto for the workshop, I look at the opportunities this partner has brought to Sun. The one I am off to today is a government body that has about 200 seats where our partner runs not only their desktops, but manages their mainframe, and UNIX assets. Since this is a government body (paid for by our taxes) we are all pretty motivated to show cost reductions in short order. Reduction of the management, maintenance and refresh of PCs fit the bill nicely.
We should know by the end of the day if the partner will be asked by the end customer to do a Proof of Concept of Sun's Sun Ray technologies.
Fingers crossed.
Sunday August 21, 2005 Hi, Ho, the Derry-oh....
So today we sat down with a Sun team and an external Partner team and built a Sun Ray presentation for an end customer. The customer is a Government agency - couple hundred seats... but that is not what is really interesting here. Building a 'dumbed down' and in no-way technical presentation isn't interesting either. The fact is that Sun and the Partner are working together to try to help the customer out. There is a lot of talk about such things... I haven't had the luxury of such an experience too many times, though.
The customer NEEDS to get rid of the PCs they have, if only because they are really old. They need to put in something new. Why not put in Sun Rays and not have to worry about desktops (and service packs and viruses...) for a long time? And why not have a service provider run the whole thing for them? That's the pitch. We know the RFP was responded to by HP and Dell, so we know we are bucking the status quo. Having said that, good technology coupled with good service sounds like a winning combo to me. And we did get invited into the customer's site to present to them... 22 of them from what we hear.
We get to try this out in a couple days. Fingers crossed!
So today we sat down with a Sun team and an external Partner team and built a Sun Ray presentation for an end customer. The customer is a Government agency - couple hundred seats... but that is not what is really interesting here. Building a 'dumbed down' and in no-way technical presentation isn't interesting either. The fact is that Sun and the Partner are working together to try to help the customer out. There is a lot of talk about such things... I haven't had the luxury of such an experience too many times, though.
The customer NEEDS to get rid of the PCs they have, if only because they are really old. They need to put in something new. Why not put in Sun Rays and not have to worry about desktops (and service packs and viruses...) for a long time? And why not have a service provider run the whole thing for them? That's the pitch. We know the RFP was responded to by HP and Dell, so we know we are bucking the status quo. Having said that, good technology coupled with good service sounds like a winning combo to me. And we did get invited into the customer's site to present to them... 22 of them from what we hear.
We get to try this out in a couple days. Fingers crossed!
Friday August 19, 2005 Seal recently put out a "Live in Paris" disk that in Canada at least, comes with a companion DVD. Here are my thoughts on the disk.
The disk packaging is... well... small. It comes in the CD format even though there is a full DVD inside, which means you will want to get another case for the DVD. Was it the price of a CD plus a DVD? No. I paid $29 CAD at an airport, so you could get it cheaper for sure, but still it was worth it even at the airport price - I have no issue with the value.The selection of songs was really good. Old and new from all of the albums. Interestingly there is a version of 'Hey Joe' (yes - Seal does Hendrix) on the DVD disc, and there are interviews and other such things one would expect to find on the DVD.
Sound quality of the CD is good, and the DVD comes with a DTS 5.1 track that is (pardon the pun) Killer.
The Band with Seal is... well... adequate. This is my gripe on this product. The guitarist and the drummer both must have had small breakfasts or something. The keyboardist was OK, and the other fellow that alternated guiter and bass was really good. Seal was... Seal. He worked the croud, and they loved it. He sang like that guy you've heard sing all his hits - but in a live setting. Maybe better than you would expect, actually.
If you like Seal and haven't seen him before - this is a great value.
Leverage our Partners
I was lucky enough to see Jonathan Schwartz in Sydney last year when he addressed about 3,000 Sun folks and discuss his vision of where things were going. I was so impressed with the part of his talk on Sun's ever increasing relationship with partners, that I took this photo which I have made my wallpaper.
I meet with partners pretty often, and enjoy figuring out what they are interested in, and how they can make money while saving end customers money. This morning I met with a partner who is pretty interested in building a detailed business model that would cover how they could provide a turn-key desktop solution for businesses, saving their customers money by offering a lower priced solution than anyone else, and doing so at a higher margin than they typically get to enjoy today. Setup properly, a Sun Ray based solution, possibly leveraging Tarantella (or Citrix) could do just that.
We covered the costs of the Sun Rays, the Sun Ray servers, the Windows servers, administration, lower costs on heating, power consumption, lower noise, significantly lower administration costs and generally covered a managed service offering. At the end of the conversation it seemed we had an agreement in principle something could be done and they wanted to get to the next step - a proof of concept in their lab.
The Sun Rays ship Tuesday.
Service Providers are what Sun needs to get the message out. Long gone are the days of battling Microsoft. If end customers want Windows - give 'em Windows. Or Linux, or UNIX, or 3270 or 5260 emulation (or all of them in combination). Short of selling the Windows licenses ourselves, we can provide a complete "S"olution for our customers. Service Provider partners, though, are where this is going to happen.
If my parents could get a Sun Ray for the emails and calendaring they do with a simple office suite for $30 a month (or whatever)- they wouldn't even blink. They would, however, order 2 of them. No viruses, no noise, no boot up time spent waiting, no "Did I back that up?", no "Do I have the latest patch?", no "I've lost my email icon"... It is all just sitting there, waiting for them.
Leverage our partners is what we have to do. I wonder which one in Canada will be first?
I meet with partners pretty often, and enjoy figuring out what they are interested in, and how they can make money while saving end customers money. This morning I met with a partner who is pretty interested in building a detailed business model that would cover how they could provide a turn-key desktop solution for businesses, saving their customers money by offering a lower priced solution than anyone else, and doing so at a higher margin than they typically get to enjoy today. Setup properly, a Sun Ray based solution, possibly leveraging Tarantella (or Citrix) could do just that.We covered the costs of the Sun Rays, the Sun Ray servers, the Windows servers, administration, lower costs on heating, power consumption, lower noise, significantly lower administration costs and generally covered a managed service offering. At the end of the conversation it seemed we had an agreement in principle something could be done and they wanted to get to the next step - a proof of concept in their lab.
The Sun Rays ship Tuesday.
Service Providers are what Sun needs to get the message out. Long gone are the days of battling Microsoft. If end customers want Windows - give 'em Windows. Or Linux, or UNIX, or 3270 or 5260 emulation (or all of them in combination). Short of selling the Windows licenses ourselves, we can provide a complete "S"olution for our customers. Service Provider partners, though, are where this is going to happen.
If my parents could get a Sun Ray for the emails and calendaring they do with a simple office suite for $30 a month (or whatever)- they wouldn't even blink. They would, however, order 2 of them. No viruses, no noise, no boot up time spent waiting, no "Did I back that up?", no "Do I have the latest patch?", no "I've lost my email icon"... It is all just sitting there, waiting for them.
Leverage our partners is what we have to do. I wonder which one in Canada will be first?
Kabir and Home Theatre
On the train back from the annual Sales Kickoff meeting I ended up sitting next to Kabir. He was already sitting and when I got there there weren't too many seats left in the "Sun" car. My guess was that he probably would have preferred someone other than me sit there, but that's just my impression.
Here is someone that is the consummate professional. Always dresses well, always looks good. Soft spoken, likeable, very knowledgeable in the Sun software products he helps customers with and really, really smart. I have seen him in action over the years at Sun and I have no issue saying that while there are lots of really smart people at Sun, I had almost been intimidated by him.
We had some pleasant chit chat as the train pulled out of Montreal covering his work (Identity Management) and mine (Sun Rays, Tarantella, JDS...) and some how ended up talking about home sound systems which led to home theatre discussions. I told him about Bay Bloor Radio's Home Theatre School, and how it was one of the best audio investments of my life (45 minutes - no cost!). If you live within 2 hours of Toronto, the trip for the 'school' is highly worthwhile if you are thinking of putting in a theatre, or something less grandious. I told him about my setup in the basement and he told me about his screens too. But then...
We started into musical tastes.
Satriani, Van Halen (with Diamond Dave), Killers (thanks again, Norm), really old Supertramp and Genesis, the Tubes, and Living Colour. Can you get too much Living Colour? No, we thought not. So we have decided to trade some impossibly hard to get stuff and broaden each other's ecclectic tastes a little - within the confines of our pre-existing tastes, of course. Not too likely that Kabir and I will get into either of the other musical genres: Country or Western.
Here's to learning new things.
Here is someone that is the consummate professional. Always dresses well, always looks good. Soft spoken, likeable, very knowledgeable in the Sun software products he helps customers with and really, really smart. I have seen him in action over the years at Sun and I have no issue saying that while there are lots of really smart people at Sun, I had almost been intimidated by him.
We had some pleasant chit chat as the train pulled out of Montreal covering his work (Identity Management) and mine (Sun Rays, Tarantella, JDS...) and some how ended up talking about home sound systems which led to home theatre discussions. I told him about Bay Bloor Radio's Home Theatre School, and how it was one of the best audio investments of my life (45 minutes - no cost!). If you live within 2 hours of Toronto, the trip for the 'school' is highly worthwhile if you are thinking of putting in a theatre, or something less grandious. I told him about my setup in the basement and he told me about his screens too. But then...
We started into musical tastes.
Satriani, Van Halen (with Diamond Dave), Killers (thanks again, Norm), really old Supertramp and Genesis, the Tubes, and Living Colour. Can you get too much Living Colour? No, we thought not. So we have decided to trade some impossibly hard to get stuff and broaden each other's ecclectic tastes a little - within the confines of our pre-existing tastes, of course. Not too likely that Kabir and I will get into either of the other musical genres: Country or Western.
Here's to learning new things.
How did I get here?
I think this is kinda funny.
I have been watching blogs half heartedly for a while now. Sure there is MaryMary, and Jonathan's which are almost religious things for me, but in general I figured these were things for the cognscenti, people in marketing and generally - people smarter than myself.
So why did I start this campaign of blogging to waste your time? 3 reasons:
1) I was ticked off with the world. Anyone who knows me understands that I totally passionate about something, or I am "the glass is half empty" poster child. Either way, I am sure to have something to say on the topic.
2) I think that what we have to tell Canadians about Sun's desktop solutions is pretty cool. And since that is what I do for a living.... why not continue after hours?
3) I believe that writing is therapeutic. Better to be writing than taking it out on our cat by putting it back in the freezer from the microwave.
And then there was a straw that broke the camel's back.
Every day I get a listing of all of the press Sun gets in Canada. One special article set me off. A Canadian trade paper issued this (at the bottom of the page) cuz it must have been an exceedingly slow news day. The gist of the article was that Sun had again delayed the public release of Star Office 8 (which seriously rocks - I have been using it exclusively for 8 months now on Windows and Linux clients) until Sept 12th and, in my opinion, the article read pretty negatively. But that's not what set me off. What frosted my cake was the issuance of this "news item" in mid-August when the decision to change the SO8 launch was probably made 4 months ago. I am of the impression that Sun's visibility in Canada (in the press) is exceedingly small, and too often negative.
Don't think, BTW, that I am dissing this publication specifically. I am not, and the article was a pretty small thing in hindsight. I read this publication and others often as I am intrigued by the coverage we both do and don't get in Canada. The poor coverage we get is no one's fault but ours... and here's my chance to change that. See 1) and 2), above.
So here I go... and BTW, that cat thing was a joke. We don't have one... anymore.