Srikanth Anandal

I have just got my blog account activated. So, here is my first one, and hoping this is one of many to come in future....

I had the opportunity to attend SunTech Days in Hyderabad last week. I went along with my colleague, Prasad Subramanian, on Feb 18th which was the first day of the 3 day event. This is my 2nd visit to this annual event in India. Like previous years, the event seemed to be heading for a major hit. Inspite of the global economic gloom, I could see plenty of people paying registration fees to attend this event. Again,like before, the vast majority of the attendees were college students or junior engineers interested in Sun technologies. This year, I did not see that many booths. From Sun, I saw booths from IPG, Startup Essentials, Localization, and OpenSolaris. Apart from Sun's booths, I also saw couple of sponsors displaying their wares. My intent of this visit was to represent as local contact for GlassFish and SailFin products. Last year, we had one full track dedicated to GlassFish and its ecosystem. This year, we had not planned anything similar. So,it was felt that there should be representation from local GlassFish team to meet interested participants who had questions regarding the products or roadmaps.I also wanted to use this opportunity to introduce Sailfin wherever possible while talking to the attendees.

Opening session was just fabulous. A child prodigy played several percussion instruments and brought the entire auditorium down with his terrific performance.His act was followed by the key note speech by "Father of Java" James Gosling. His talk was eagerly awaited and the whole auditorium with almost 2000 people latched onto every word from him with rapt attention. His appearance kick started the event in grand style. I was very happy to hear him talk in length about GlassFish and its features. He also talked about few other Sun Technologies like Netbeans, Java FX, SE update 12 etc. He showed some demos on Java FX. Overall the session was pretty good though I felt the energy was a bit low-key, probably because he was jet-lagged and tired.

After his talk, I went to attend the session provided by Arun Gupta on "GlassFish and future of JavaEE". The objective was to provide an introduction to GlassFish and its ecosystem and remove any barrier to entry. If there was anyone unaware of GlassFish in that event, James Gosling's keynote definitely addressed that gap. This created enough curiosity for everyone to know about GlassFish and Arun's talk was timed perfectly to satisfy that. .. For his talk, the hall was almost full. This hall must have had a seating capacity of atleast 1000. Arun's talk was as usual highly energetic and very informative for that crowd. He showed some very useful demos on how easily GlassFish could be installed and configured. Luckily, all the demos worked like charm...Prasad Subramanian shared the stage with Arun and talked about SailFin. He showed the Call Setup Demo to provide an overview of SailFin's role in Telco space. Overall, the session was nicely presented, and the objective was met. We stayed in the hall for more than 30 minutes after the talk to answer questions from several attendees. Most of the questions were around GlassFish though there were a few on SailFin. There were questions around Migration process, V3 and modularization strategy, localization etc. Most of the questions were from beginners. I did not meet anyone who was a hard core GlassFish user. Similarly, there were some queries around SIP but again, I did not find anyone who had extensively worked on SailFin.

SunTech in India has always been a hit. It is very well attended. I understand it is a mammoth show that Sun is putting spending several thousands of dollars hosting the show, and flying in people from several locations to give talks and demos. We should definitely continue this event going forward as this is a great way to showcase all our technologies.The one change I would like to see is for Sun to figure out a way to attract more attendance from 'Decision Makers' of the organizations. Right now, the crowd is predominantly student community. It nicely makes up for no.s and long term adoption story. Along with this crowd, what would be worthwhile is to figure out what it would take to get the industry send it representatives for this show. That will make a huge difference considering the no. of companies that are located in this part of the country. My 2 cents....