Conversation with a neighbor about CoolThreads
Tuesday Dec 06, 2005
I was talking to my neighbor this morning & here is how the conversation went.
"How is SUNW stock doing nowadays?" asked my neighbor.
"Flat" I replied.
"You know, there seems to be a tight relationship between the stock price of a company and employee morale" he said (you are right if you guessed that he is in management).
"Looking at SUNW stock price performance over time, I suspect that your employee morale is probably low. How do you as a manager deal with it?" he probed.
"Actually, Employee morale in my group is pretty good" was my reply.
I could tell that he was not expecting that answer.
"My group works closely and influences product design & development. We also work closely with customers who use these products. We believe we now have the STRONGEST product portfolio in the industry and today, we are announcing new servers which is going to change the datacenter world" I mentioned.
Naturally, his curiosity level increased, "How is the datacentre world going to change?".
"We are introducing servers based on a 32 thread processor chip in UltraSPARC T1. With these servers, we can process lots of simultaneous secure web online transactions needing web, app and database processing with less server footprint, power requirements and you can pack the datacenter footprint better. We even put together a metric called SWaP - Space Watt and Performance to let customers compare the servers".
"Hmmm... Faster, cheaper, smaller, more reliable. Sounds like how the industry evolves normally. What's so different about your servers?"
"Great Question. You are not looking at a 20% or 50% improvement here. You are looking at something like 5 fold improvement in these factors. A datacenter manager can use a LOT less of $$, space, power to do their job. This is enabled by a radical thinking and innovation which started almost 4 years back. So, it will do wonders to Total Cost of Ownership and we expect this platform to cause economic disruption in the datacenter".
"Sounds cool, any customer reactions?"
"Apart from demonstrating benchmark results which beat competition in terms of price/performance, my team have been working closely with many potential customers and they are blown away with the performance and footprint of these products. Some of them actually reran the apps a few times as they could not believe what they saw".
"Now I get why the morale of your team is good" he circled back.
I did not get a chance to talk to him about our how proud my team has been with complete server line refresh with the UltraSPARC IV+ servers as well as the Opteron servers we introduced recently and the positive reaction we have been getting from our customers.
You may want to check Richard's blog & benchmark data to get more info.
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NiagaraCMT
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