Monday March 03, 2008

The First Tech Demo..

At last the realisation of our dream - the day of the first Tech Demo at Sheffield. An early start for me to catch the train to London and be part of the daily commuter scramble to the capital. The circle line almost behaved itself and I was soon in the refurbished St Pancreas station looking at the statue of the couple embracing below the impressive clock which are both at one end of the building.

At midday as my train pulled into Sheffield my co-presenter Jarod was waiting in a car to whisk us off the the University. He was already 'up north' having done the same presentation two days before at York. My teaser presentation to introduce the students to the company had also been presented to students by Rhodri their Campus Mentor.

At this point the weather took a turn for the worst and heavy winds were now accompanied by rain. We spent half an hour driving around the area looking for a place to park near the building where the presentation was to be held. The Sheffield campus is split over many buildings in the city it is not as the modern Universities are and on one site. We found a place to park and after three attempts we finally found our building and theatre. A quick bite of lunch and we then met Andrew and set things up. By 2pm we had about thirty people in the theatre and by the end of my pitch that was up to forty. In the audience we had one of last years students who is at the other University in Sheffield completing his final year.

My pitch went quite well but I have never used other someone elses presentations which I think is hard unless you are a seasoned presenter which I am not. If you write a presentation I think it is easier for you to present it as you know it so well. But I think I got my point over - where Sun came from and that our products are much more than just Java and Solaris and we are bigger than most people think!

Jarod then did his ZFS presentation. I'll be honest and say I've not done much with it and I really enjoyed being educated! Jarod then did the live demo but sadly his laptop packed in halfway through it and a backup one would also not play ball. But he got loads of questions at the end which were really good so it was clear people understood and were interested in the technology.

At the end people took away some cd's with OpenSolaris on them and also the Open Solaris Developer preview 2 which has the new installer and packaging system. So popular were they we ran out of them! I also had the T5120 machine with its lid off for students to look. I think they were amazed by the small heatsink on the CPU, the small amount of extra components on the main board and the engineering excellence. I should at this point now thank our host Andrew, Jarod and Rhodri and the students who came to see us on Friday. A special thanks to James who came along to support us and helped us answer some questios at the end on compatibility of platforms and Opensolaris.

We drove home and got back around 8pm. It was a long but very satisfying day.

Monday February 25, 2008

Free Training ?

If you want free training you need look no further. Depending on your situation there are several possibilities open to you:

If you are a developer you need to look here .

It gets slightly more complicated if you are a student. Here is a site open to all students. Sun also has a program called the Sun Academic Initiative and you should encourage your University to join it if they are not already part SAI - a form is here that needs to be filled in to apply - you will need to get a senior person from your University to fill this in.

Once your University is a member of SAI you should then be able to get login details from your University and access more courses here

Note there is a guest login on the site so you can see what you are missing!

Monday February 04, 2008

A change of plan...

Initially we were going to kick off the Sheffield tech talks with one on ZFS . However after a couple of friends visited another University and did a couple of presentations ( shorter ones however ) on ZFS and another subject it was clear to them their audience knew about but the idea that Sun had an operating system called Solaris , sold their machines with AMD , Intel and Sparc processors inside them, had a wide storage portfolio and numerous other offerings - software stacks and so on was clearly not known to them!

Armed with this information Andrew and myself have decided to do a taster on Sun's technologies. I spent a lot of time looking at Marketing information - and I think I have a collection of Slides that I can draw upon to do our first tech demo on Solaris and the hardware we sell. Hopefully after this the students appetites will be nicely setup for what we have in store. I am also planning to take a couple of machines up with me to show to the students to add a touch of drama to the event. When I joined Sun many years ago I did a series of presentations to customers on how I upgraded our Sun machines to Solaris, I am not a seasoned presenter even now but then we did small groups of less than a hundred, but the biggest event however was in the Barbican where I think there were three hundred in the theatre.. I think that was the easiest - as the lights went off I could not see my audience. For my efforts both myself and my peer got given a Tag Heuer watch. I still have it. The only thing I am worried about this one is doing such a presentation and getting a question I can't answer.. One of this years students is hopefully coming along to help - he hopes to be an ambassador at his university when he leaves us in the autumn so it will be good practise for him!

Back at Sun we have had our second meeting where all the mentors meet and discuss progress problems etc. I think compared to the first meeting us mentors are now seeing the fruits of our support - there is plenty more to do and I think this program will grow over the next few years. On that subject if you think either you and/or your University should be in this program do let us know I am happy to put both Universities or students forward for the next years program starting Autumn 2008.

Wednesday January 16, 2008

More mentoring..

It has been a while since my last post and we are starting to make good progress now. I think it has been frustrating for both me and Andrew in that seemingly simple things seem to take too long but the admin nightmare is over now. Our first Tech Demo on ZFS is planned for the 29th February and I am getting someone from Sun to deliver it. This is not the expected situation but I think to get some of the key tech demos done before the academic year ends Andrew is going to need a hand. I have someone lined up to do Solaris containers and also Xvm .

Andrew should now be able to take some courses; I am going to suggest he does Solaris administration Intermediate on the web and then Advanced here at the campus. It will give us a chance to meet up again and for him to spend some time with my current batch of students. There are lots of other Tech Demos he plans to do on Java and the like. The main concern for me at the present is making sure we get a good number of people attending, I plan to do a poster campaign which I hope will attract some interest. At this time of the year students are taking exams so it is difficult to attract their attention as they will be doing lots of swatting - hence the delay in doing the first Demo.

We are also making progress on getting the SunRay technology visible to students and the university. Andrew's University use SunRay's but he is keen to see them adopted to a wider audience. So I have engaged several people in Sun to decide how we can place a specific Demo suite of SunRay's for students and the Computing Department to see.

For me the most interesting aspect of this whole program is how the relationship between me and Andrew is developing. I remember meeting him off the train and introducing him to the lab team and making our plans. I think that my actions of helping him and oiling the wheels is helping us both reach the common goal of a successful ambassador program at his University. Later this month we have a meeting of the UK mentors where I am sure we will see how the other ambassadors are doing.

Friday January 04, 2008

So what is this ambassador thing all about?

So what is this Campus Ambassador program all about?

Well if you read Jonathan's weblog on a regular basis you will know very clearly what he thinks we need do to increase the revenue and encourage a community spirit amongst our user base. Many will remember that many years ago this community spirit was very strong in universities across the world. But Linux and Windows have taken over and computer labs are now full of endless machines running either of these operating systems. So what we want to do is get students in universities exposed to our technologies so they can judge for themselves which to use.

The whole ambassador business started with the recruitment of them, and finding people in Sun to mentor them. In November last year there was a kick off event in London where Scott Mcnealy did a presentation and all the people involved in the UK on this program met ( mentors/ambassadors etc). I could not go as I was on holiday but I sent one of my full time employees and Liam who is to be a ambassador for his university now he has returned there. After my return from holiday I asked Andrew to come down and meet me and the rest of our team. We made our plans together, showed him the lab and we had a meeting where I asked the current batch of students to tell him about their experience at Sun and what technology they thought was interesting. Liam did a great presentation on ZFS. I also agreed with Andrew to have regular one on ones with him to discuss progress. Even though he is part time I want him to feel very much part of my team. We have regular one on ones to discuss progress which I also think is important to both of us.

So over the time my ambassador remains at his university he will be setting up a user group and on a regular basis, doing tech demos of technology he is interested in to students who will hopefully come along. You won't be surprised that the first one we are planning is about ZFS . I personally want to demo to the students our Sunray technology which I think would be amazingly popular at any university.

So as events happen I will keep you all posted with what is going on...

Friday December 14, 2007

Back soon !

Well in a few days this weblog will be active again. However it will be very much work only related and there is a reason for that. A month or so ago I was invited to join the throngs of Sun Mentors for the Campus Ambassadors we have employed in Universities around the world. The good news is two of this years students are mentors for the Universities they are studying at. My University is Sheffield University and the ambassador I am looking after is Andrew John Hughes . Over the next few months I will be explaining my role and that of the Ambassadors so anyone interested in taking part next year knows what it is all about. The links on the right panel of this weblog list the Ambassadors I know personally. More soon!