HR Geek: (Product) Strategy for the Rest of Us

(Full credit to Rich Zippel for many of the ideas below, which came out in a discussion we had earlier this week and to Lew Tucker, who mentioned a few of them at the CTO all hands this morning.)

I've been thinking about how OpenOffice might be enhanced by its connection to Cloud Computing and how integration with the network might be additive to the productivity tool experience. 

The obvious first step would be storage.  With a link to the cloud, you could easily build in a "save to the network" button, leveraging the storage cloud as your primary home directory. 

An online version of the tool running in the cloud is certainly possible (see GoogleDocs, Zoho, ThinkFree, etc.).

How about a hybrid desktop and cloud experience?  I spend a fair bit of time dealing with obscenely large spreadsheets.  It would be great to leverage the compute infrastructure of the cloud to enhance the speed at which large re-sorts, format changes, formula updates, and macros are executed. 

And how about allowing direct data links to cloud-stored data?  Rather than run a report, run analytics against it, and then (a day, a week, a month later) get a new data set and start over, why not link directly to the data source?  This would be particularly useful for things with additive data (more records today than there were yesterday), especially if you could define where the data joins and how the formulas interact with new data.

Going a step further on the storage side, how about treating individual presentation slides like songs?   The presentation is then a playlist of individual slides from any number of presentations.  Building a conference presentation for Cloud Computing could mean pulling slides from the EVP, CTO, Marketing, and Engineering lead decks into a coherent flow.  The cloud would then apply template, page numbers, and other formatting and spit out a document in the format of your choice.

For that matter, how about printing and publishing plug ins which leverage the cloud for execution?  For example, print to the nearest Kinkos; publish as a web-presentation (e.g. to slideshare.net); post a web link to a wiki or other site; etc.

My guess is that these are just the beginning of what we might accomplish with a hybrid (or fully web-based) productivity tool.

In addition to focusing the product portfolio, you can also think about the resulting changes as representative of the way we approach customers (and the types of customers we approach).

Solaris and xVM are largely products that add value to Sun hardware.  (Sure, you can run them on non-Sun hardware, but we should be able to add more value through the combination of our hardware and software).  These are fairly traditional enterprise sales through a direct (and partner) sales force, with hardware-driven sales.

The application platforms software organization holds a number of point products, e.g. our Identity suite, mySQL.  Here we're monetizing the software through licensing or service contracts in a fairly traditional software sale.  It's a software-driven sale.  Yes, we'd like to pull hardware, but it is a pull. 

The cloud computing and developer group is focused on services for developers and startups.  The contact with customers should be entirely web-driven.  These typically aren't folks who want to talk to a sales guy.  In some ways, this is the group at Sun most likely to interact on a consumer-type model, where the end user is interacting with the company directly.

It's not a perfect fit, but it's a helpful addition to the product focus discussions.

One of the things I've struggled with in this blog is how much of what I'd like to post is still considered confidential and proprietary and thus not available to a wider external audience.  I'd dabbled with posting internal links here in the past, but it's not a very efficient way of communicating and it completely misses many of the things I'd like to talk about.   As such, I've added a new blog for Sun employees. 

Whenever possible, I'll be posting to this blog.  When I can't - because it's not yet ready for the public or because it's a site, video, training, etc. that's only available to employees - I'll post it to the internal blog.

So if you're a Sun employee, take a look at the inside blog too.

Roger Meike is a Director in SunLabs and head of the group that built the SunSPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) sensors.  His blog highlights a lot of the interesting and unique uses that people have come up with for SunSPOTs and is an interesting read in itself.

His most recent post includes a video of a presentation he did for middle and high school students.  It covers a bit on research versus development, the role of a Labs organization, and a few of the things that Sun does.  He then goes into detail on what the SPOTs are, how they work, and what you can do with them.  If you can find the time, it's a really straightforward explanation on a number of technical topics.

On Monday of this week I officially took over support for Sun's Network.com organization (Sun's technologies and services in grid, utility, and cloud computing).  For the inner geek in me, it's been fun already.

One of the discussions I've been following is a critique of different Network Access Point (NAP) providers, their designs, their efficiency, their security, their capacity, and other arcana way above my head.  The point of the discussion is to compare against Sun internal designs and look at who potential partners (or customers) might be, but for me, it's fun just to see how some of these things are built. 

One of the ones that caught my eye is the NAP of the Americas, located in Miami.  Here are a few of the technical specs:

• Design to withstand a category 5 hurricane with 19 million pounds of concrete ballast
  


• Equipment floors 32 feet above sea level (to avoid any storm surges from hurricanes)


• Roof designed to shed 100-year storm intensity rains


• 7" thick steel-reinforced concrete exterior walls

They seem pretty serious about having this thing still standing and running during even the nastiest of weather. 

Given it's role switching the majority of the network traffic for Latin America and Caribbean (148 countries connected in all), that makes a lot of sense.

I think you can make a serious case for Sun's Mike Dillon as the world's coolest Chief Counsel.  Where else will you find an executive who dresses up as a pirate, is obsessed with the Tour de France, goes to Maker Faire, rides a vintage motorcycle, and goes sea kayaking in the arctic for vacation?  Not to mention intentionally simplifying legal documents, challenging patents, and questioning the actions of the RIAA.  If you're not yet reading his blog, click on one of the links and start reading - it's all worth your time.

I've had a couple of occasions to interact with Mike over the last couple of years and I'll award some bonus points for his being a really nice guy.

Almost makes me reconsider law school.

Anyone with a pulse will have noticed the interesting couple of weeks that Wall Street has had. While the exact impacts the implosion of the financial sector will have on Sun's business remain to be seen, I'd be surprised if it were a net positive.

Sun seems to have fairly deep penetration in the financial sector (or in the new nomenclature, is "exposed to" the financial sector). It's possible that the strength of Sun customers acquiring others will outweigh the demise of Sun customers being acquired, though it seems a bit unlikely. (In all fairness, I'd be surprised if the troubles on Wall Street are a net positive for any company. Financial turmoil is a net negative for market perceptions overall, which will inevitably dial down IT spending.)

What I fear most however is the upcoming messaging around the financial markets when we hold our next analyst/earnings call. As noted above, it will clearly have an impact on earnings and analysts will likely want to understand the impact. But I don't want to hear our leaders using the financial markets as an excuse. I don't want to hear Sun made out to be a victim of the market.

If the financial crash has a significant negative impact to our business, that's our fault as much as the fault of the market. It means that we've failed to adequately diversify across industries. It means that we've failed to learn from the impact of our "telecom exposure" following the first dotcom crash. We're not victims of the market, we're victims of our own complacency. (Yes, financial services firms are huge users of IT and it's reasonable to have a significant penetration there. Yes, new customer acquisition and market diversification is being addressed now, but I wish we'd done it years ago.)

So what to talk about instead of victimization?

Special thanks to David Harris, head of Sun's Workplace Environment organization, for reminding me that the Repo Man is having a banner year.  While the line of work may be socially unfortunate, the reality is that it is possible to thrive in a down economy - you just have to find the right product or service to offer and the right customer to offer it to.

When Jonathan first took over as President, he was constantly talking about everything as a competitive weapon.  He's backed off that messaging in the last couple of years, but I'd like to see him return to it.  While there were likely some who found it disingenuous, I personally found it empowering.  It changed my mindset and I started thinking about how the work I was doing would help the company, started sending ideas to leaders who could take action to change the company's posture, started shedding some of the complacency.  (I saw the same thing happen with the eco-responsibility work.) 

I don't want to work for a victim; I want to work for a company that responds to, and takes advantage of, the market, regardless of its condition.  I want a company that hits bad times, quits complaining, and starts thinking about what it's equivalent of the repo man profession is.  I want a company that views a market downturn as a competitive weapon.  And I want that company to be Sun.

Apologies to Mr. Michael Murray of Sun for the absence of posts on this blog. The short answer excuse is that I've been kept very busy of late. (Mike - Mr. Lang says he's happy to give you more work as well - just let him know. ;))

In addition to supporting Sun's Labs organization and various elements of it's Chief Technical Office, I've been tackling a number of cross-engineering projects and lending my input to a couple of scenario planning exercises in the People & Places organization (HR + Work Environment for any outsiders who may be reading). I'll shortly be picking up support work for the network.com organization.

So, I do have things to share. The question is what I can get away with making public that will still be of interest to a broader audience.

Unfortunately, I'll be contemplating more than writing in the immediate future. I'm off to a week and a half of vacation followed by three days sequestered in a scenario planning effort.

Upon my return, I'll make an effort to post a bit more regularly. (Has it really been 9 WEEKS!?!)

Thanks to Steve Heller of Sun Labs for pointing out the "New to Java Programming Center - Young Developers" section on java.sun.com. The site is targeted at teaching young (and in some cases, really young) people the basics of object oriented programming and at teaching Java specifically.

If Sun can teach elementary school kids the basics of Java, than it just might be a suitable learning site for HR folks as well.

Since the beginning of April, I've taken three trips to the Bay, had family in town twice, braved Midwestern storms and flooding to join a family reunion, been stranded in Boston by flight cancellations, and participated in reeducation training programs. In short, I've been busy.

I'll get something interesting up here again in the near future.