Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

People inside and outside Sun ask me all the time, "What is the next big technology Sun is working on?". These days, there are a lot of technologies to talk about. I ran into Marc Tremblay at dinner last night. Marc is a Sun Fellow and one of the driving forces behind SPARC technology and our new Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) technology. He was sharing with me a big SPARC design win that you should be reading about in the press soon. Last week, I had several conversations with Andy Bechtolsheim on his latest dual-core AMD Opteron system designs. Also last week, our storage and desktop technology acquisitions were in the news. So which one is our best technology weapon? IMHO, it actually isn't any of the above products or technologies but our people, not only world reknown engineers like Marc T. or Andy or the thousands of other hardware and software engineers at Sun, but all of our customer facing engineers in Sun's Client Solutions and Services groups as well. If you follow Sun closely, you will have noticed lots of changes in our customer facing engineering organizations over the years, but for over ten years one consistent field program has survived every re-org thrown at it, the ambassador program.

The ambassador program isn't some strange group of engineers that study politics. For over ten years, the ambassador program has consisted of several groups of customer facing engineers organized around technology disciplines that tend to stay relevant over time. The ambassadors get to learn about Sun's new products long before the general public or even general Sun employee gets to. They provide feedback to product engineers during early phases of product design and then actually work with early prototypes during "alpha" and "beta" testing. Not surprising, the ambassador groups are pretty busy these days. I'm lucky enough to lead a generic sounding group called the "technology ambassdors". Just yesterday I was called by two different product groups asking for technology ambassador support with their new products.

The ambassador program works because it is a volunteer group. All the customer engineers who participate have regular day jobs. You can't just decide to join an ambassador group, all members are peer reviewed and must be internally recognized specialists in their field before joining. There are perks, of course. The operating system ambassadors all received shiny red Solaris x86 laptops before the Solaris 10 launch so they could better understand and demo Solaris features. Many technical systems ambassadors received Sun Java Workstations last year to learn about the latest Opteron processors and other features. What customers get is some of Sun's best and brightest customer engineering staff that can help them solve their toughest technical requirements. Not a bad trade-off all around.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris