Big, big day today. Lots of winners. Here we go...
1. Please join me in congratulating my favorite Sun Certified Professional for the Solaris Operating system: Jim (Damien's friend)
Jim wins my Sony PlayStation2!
You'll recall that I personally love and adore all Sun Certified professionals. And I am on a personal mission to make them feel the love. Remember how I gave Dave my spectacular Java bomber jacket because he is my favorite Sun Certified professional for Java technology?
We're on to Solaris. (isn't the timing so terribly appropriate?) And this time the prize* is my PlayStation2. (NIB)
Jim wins! He's my favorite Sun Certified Professoinal for the Solaris Operating System (du jour).
Here's the winning entry -- posted by Jim's buddy Damien -- that got Jim this fabulous prize:
Ok, here goes... I'm not Sun certified in the Solaris area (just Java), but a co-worker (and friend) of mine is. His name is Jim, and despite my prodding appears to be too busy to get around to entering himself; so I'm entering him. If this story has a chance of winning the 'free stuff', I'll send you his details so that you can verify his status and confirm his existence.
We work for a company called TeraMedica (www.teramedica.com) and make software that manages medical images and enables communication about those images throughout the healthcare enterprise. This is a significant breakthrough product in the arena of enterprise medical image management and distribution - see http://www.sun.com/br/healthcare_812/feature_brighter.html
Anyway, we deploy the product on multiple platforms (it is developed in Java for the most part), but our largest enterprise deployments are currently on Solaris. Jim has been the key to making this work as well as it does. His certification as a Sun Solaris Operating Environment Administrator and Sun Certified Network Engineer was a major factor in the decision to hire him.
If his key role in this endeavor which greatly improves patient care at our installed sites is not enough, there was a specific instance where his certification benefited me. About a year ago, we undertook an endeavor to benchmark our product at a Sun Benchmark Center. Coming out of this benchmark with flying colors would have a significant impact on the future of our company. The question was; do we really live up to all of our hype in terms of scalability and performance?
Before Jim and I went out to California to conduct the benchmark, we did a lot of brainstorming about how to tune the big Sun systems that we would be running on. Jim had a lot of input to this, and got out one of his training manuals that he received when preparing for the Sun certification. It was a performance tuning guide for Solaris. We ended up using some of the information in that book, and came through the benchmark with flying colors.
This gave us some marketing punch, industry credibility, and validated the scalability and performance of our product's design and deployment. Our company (which at the time was a small startup) has since taken off. So, at some degree, I think that Jim's certification played a part in the company's success, which results in jobs for us, and better patient care for our customers.
But wait, there's more!
2. Mohd Daud and Macjune get a big mondo prize too. Mohd Daud and Macjune: it is my great pleasure to award you each a voucher for a Sun Educational Services exam beginning with a 310 prefix. (value: in the hundreds of dollars neighborhood, i think)
But wait, there's even more!
3. Everybody who posted -- everybody who told me their story about how being Sun Certified pulled their hide out of the fire; got them the job/raise; impressed the ladies, etc... EVERYBODY gets a prize. Everybody's going to get something different because I don't have enough of any single thing to give you all the same thing. I'm going to give you guys the nicest stuff I've got.
So is that a happy day, or what?!
So exciting.
You guys, I want to personally thank you for the investment you've made in being Sun Certified. We appreciate your commitment our platforms and technologies. And that commitment... it's going to continue paying off Big Time... Solaris 10... it's taking the industry by storm. It's the most advanced operating system ever built. It's not just raising the bar... it's catapulting it into orbit. So doesn't that just make all you Sun Certified Professionals for the Solaris Operating System feel good? You know how to pick the winning horse. Just shows how smart you are.
:-)
mary
p.s. *this is not a contest. i don't do contests. this is me giving away stuff that i personally own to somebody i choose. i pay for shipping with stamps that i buy at the post office.
p.p.s. we're running a little behind schedule on awarding prizes. we'll award last week's Friday Free Stuff tomorrow. Which means there's still time to play.