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.

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!

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.

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.

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

That's Sun's extraordinary Shawn Cohoon in the Black Sun shirt

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?

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.

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!

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?