Happy New Year !!

Yes, I have been off-line for a while in terms of blogging ... Time to get back in shape and be connected again

All the indications show global economy will be even more challenging in 2009.  We need to weather through it and find opportunties during the crisis together.  Wish you and your family the best in year 2009.

Sun Tech Days 2008 was a SUCCESS last week in Seoul with over 1,800 developers and students participating.  The theme for this year's event was "Next Generation Developers Drive Innovation" covering Java EE/SE/ME, JavaFX, OpenSolaris, Zembly, Ajax, MySQL, Netbeans, JRuby/Ruby/Rails, Glassfish, virtualbox, etc...

Rich Green, our Excutive VP - Sun software, in his key note speech emphasize the importance of opensource and the role developers play - where Sun is committed to supporting developers and driving opensource communities .

We announced today Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 - it will run 4X faster than IBM/HP at half the power and one-fifth the cost.  Please come and take a look.

A snapshot from Sun Korea's Partner Summit 2008 last week.

The 2008-2009 Sun Tech Days World Tour will be in Seoul, Korea during Oct. 15-17th, 2008.  The Tech Days Tour is bringing educational opportunities to you in 12 cities in the world.  It's your opportunity to develop you.  Whether you develop in Java, Scripting, MySQL, on OpenSolaris, with NetBeans or spend your time developing RIA's, next generation applications among others, this conference is for you.  With expert speakers it's your chance to learn, to network, to find peers in your community, it's your chance to Empower You.

APAC GSE extended staff meeting was held in Sun Korea office during past two days.  This was our first face-to-face meeting to start the fiscal year discussing about our priorities and directions for FY09.

We have some changes in our extended staff.  We have new members - Zena Cheng(FSI Industry), Matt Ingenthron(Web 2.0 Industry), Hok-Siong Wong(Professional Services), and Youn Lee(Korea SE Manager).  Welcome everyone!!  We also had a special invited guest from Customer Engineering Program group - thanks for your participation Hansjoerg Klimetzki.

We managed to squeeze in a team building event - everyone thoroughly enjoy Nanta performance.  When you visit Seoul, make sure you go see this non-verbal performance.  You will not be disappointed.

APAC GSE Extended Staff

I am pleased to announce the winners of "FY08 APAC GSE SE of the Year". The contributions they have made to the success of APAC have been tremendous, and I would like to take this opportunity to recognize their efforts in FY08. Please join me in congratulating the APAC GSE winners for their contributions to the APAC organization.

Gold Medal Winner
Takafumi Sasaki (Japan)

Silver Medal Winner
Shailesh Bhadoria (India)
Jongjun Son (Korea)

Bronze Medal Winner
William Lo (Greater China)
Andrew Foote (Australasia)
Tepparit Ritthongpitak (Asia South)

Congratulation again to the winners and thanks you for your great contribution in FY08!


Our Gold Medal winner "Takafumi Sasaki" from Japan



In spirit of the Olympics...

This team photo was taken during last week's APAC GSS FY09 Q1 extended staff meeting.  We now have a new boss in town who is a Sun veteran - Lionel Lim, Senior VP.  Our new motto - "APAC Rocks".

I was in Sydney last week to attend ANZ's sales and services FY09 kickoff event.  It was very well organized 1.5 days event - congratulations for having such a great fiscal FY08 and expect the same in FY09

I also had a chance to meet with all the SEs in person and had informal in-depth discussions with some of them over lunch.

Sun's fiscal year starts on July 1st.  July becomes one of the business months in the year closing the previous fiscal year, setting the direction and tone for the new year, and each GEM(Geographically Established Markets) having it's fiscal year sales kick-off event - all 16 of them.  If it's anything like last year, it will be a blast.

Our(systems engineering) priorities and efforts in the new fiscal year will be focused around customers, competencies, & communities.

APAC GSE - thank you for great contribution to overall APAC success in FY08 and look forward to another GREAT year in FY09.  Please make sure you take some time off to recharge your batteries for the new year !!

While attending a meeting in Singapore last week, I took some time off to drop-in on Asia South's GSE(Global Systems Engineering) Newhire Bootcamp Training.  I meet with new SEs from Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.  It was a week long useful training for them which is a part of APAC GSE University.

Welcome everyone !!!

SeongHoon Whang(황성훈이사), may he rest in peace, passed away this morning from a liver cancer.

He was an old-timer who started in Sun Korea back in 1996.  He was our first employee of professional consulting division in Sun Korea.  He was one of the smartest person I've known and well respected.  Really sad to see him go so early ...

A very busy week for Sun.  Both CommunityOne and JavaOne conferences being held in San Francisco back to back.  First OpenSolaris - OpenSolaris 2008.05 has been announced and released during CommunityOne which you can download now.

You should also review our announcement of world's first open storage platform from last week.

For second consecutive years, Sun Korea has been selected as "the  best place to work in Korea" in a nation-wide contest conducted by Hankyoreh Economy 21, a leading business publication.  Sun Korea was one of 11 companies selected this year representing respective industries.

This is a great recognition for every individual at Sun Korea in striving to make Sun Korea "the most admired company" in Korea - CONGRATULATIONS !!

KSUN(Korea Solaris User Networks) is sponsoring OpenSolaris Conference on March 29th(Sat) as described below:

This photo was taken during Hal's Q3 extended staff meeting in Seoul a couple weeks ago.  James(Americas VP) kept asking difficult questions   Who washes all these hundreds of side dishes ?  You guys eat so much, how do you stay so slim ?

It's done.  It's finally settled - the war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats.  Here are a couple of news from thedigitalbits and NYT.  Now I can finally invest into the High-Definition format.

Bluray is Java friendly with Bluray Disc Java(BD-J) which is an interactive platform for Bluray Disc's advanced content.  Thus, this historical milestone in HD format war is also a win for Sun.  If you want to deepdive into BD-J, please try this videocast.

On a personal note, this really gives me an excuse to buy a Playstation 3 although my kids and I are fan of Wii - especially the latest game Super Mario Galaxy...

Earlier this week, I visited our Taiwan office in Taipei.  We have a very strong group of Systems Engineers which is part of GC(Greater China) GEM(Geographically Established Markets).  It has been over 10 years since I last visited Taiwan and first time in this job - I definitely need to visit more often to aid the growth - there is a great potential here.

After Taiwan's parliamentary elections last weekend and a presidential election to be held in March, there is a great hope for recovery of a sagging economy.  The result of parliamentary election was a landslide victory for opposition party which signaled desire for change and economy improvement.  I was amazed at the similarity betwwen Taiwan and Korea's political/election situation.  Korea's new president was elected last month from an opposition party by a landslide victory also and parliamentary elections to be held in April.  Korea's result also reflected people's desire for globalization and economy improvement.  I believe recovery of economy and unbounded growth await both countries.

Yesterday, Sun made a history by announcing agreement to acquire MySQL -  an open source icon and developer of the world's most popular and one of the fastest growing open source databases.  This without a doubt will become a significant milestone in Sun's history.

Whenever I give a "Why Sun - Sun's History & Vision" speech to new hires(coincidentially, I gave presentation to Sun Korea's new hires yesterday), I recognize key innovations which drove Sun during past 26 years - Solaris, SPARC, and Java.  I personally believe working with MySQL/open source will be another key innovation/event going forward which we can look back in the future to be at equal level.

The significance of the announcement is described by both Jonathan and Greg ...

I have been away from blogging for a bit too long

It's time to return from holiday mode and get back in shape.  I usually don't make new year resolutions because I end up not accomplishing them.  My philosophy is "just do it or get it done when you need to ..."

I am starting the year on a good note - a compliment from my boss Hal Stern.  Thank you very much.  I view it as a recognition to APAC Systems Engineering community and APAC's business success during past year.

It's time to travel again and start blogging again ...

I am back home working in Seoul office after a four consecutive weeks of traveling - I attended  6 meetings in four different countries.  You wonder how I do this.   Well...I have a simple philosophy on this.  "If you can't fight it, enjoy it.  But, more importantly, condition yourself that this is a part of the job"

But, seriously, after all these meetings, I feel good about the progress "Systems Engineering" group in APAC is making in terms of FY08 goals and improvements in becoming trusted advisors for customers.  We may not be comparable to our competitions in terms of size, but we are definitely comparable and exceed our competitors in brain power.

It's time to spend time with my family during the holidays and rejuvenate myself before I hit the road again...

Finally returned home from the largest field engineering event at Sun - CEC 2007.  This is there were 1,000 more engineers attending the event compare to last year.

Interesting trials held this year were unconference and speed Geeking sessions.  Here are two posts to give some flavor of what went on (one, two).

APAC GSE management team got together on Monday night for a team dinner at Planet Hollywood where this picture was taken.

On a personal note...I resisted getting to the gambling table until the last day after the event was completed ... I somehow felt I was obligated to do it just becase I was in Vegas...well as always I tried and donated money to Vegas fund

I am currently attending our annual Customer Engineering Conference(CEC) in Las Vegas.  These are all the great things happening in CEC this year.  Make sure you check out GSE divas photo journal of the event.

We also announced this morning our latest products based on T2 processor during the second day of CEC.

More to come ...

As I have mentioned in my previous entry, Andy presented some interesting facts during his keynote speech and one of them was "silent data corruption".

We all know bugs and errors do happen from applications down to the network layer.  However, we tend to think what's written to the disk is error-free and permanent.  Well...CERN did an interesting experiment (taken from Andy's slides) which proved otherwise:

• Wrote a simple application to write/verify 1 GB files
• Ran on 3000 rack servers with HW RAID card
• Over 3 weeks, 152 silent data corruption instances
• Previously thought “everything was fine”

Where did the errors come from ?  Any defect in disk, switch, controller, cable, driver, or firmware can corrupt data silently.  With ever-increasing use of data and storage, the silent data corrupt is going to become a fact of life.  So, how do we cope with this ?  This is where Sun's "ZFS" file system comes to rescue.   ZFS provides pooled storage with end-to-end data integrity:

• Completely eliminates the concept of volumes
  
• Does for storage what VM did for memory
• Everything is copy-on-write
  
• Uses 256-bit checksums per disk block
• Self-healing data on every read
• Transactional
  
• Disk scrubbing in background
• etc...
  

It basically creates "reliable storage out of unreliable components".

"Silent Data Corruption" is also briefly discussed during one of the innovation@sun podcast.

HPC Asia 2007 was held in Seoul Korea last week and Andy Bechtolsheim gave a keynote speech - "Scaling to PetaFlops".

There were some interesting ideas, facts, and data from the presentation which I will blog in future posts.

During our Q1 meeting, we had an interesting team building exercise - we were divided into teams where each was tasked to build a "Mars Surface Rover" (yes, actual working version).  The exercise was to measure the effectiveness of different type of leadership.

Each team was assigned with one of the following leader types:

• traditional leader - they are authoritative and controlling and do not have a great deal of trust in their subordinates' abilities.
  
• passive leader - they take the opposite view of traditional leaders.  They take employee empowerment to the furthest extreme.
  
• facilitative leader - they combine the best attributes of the passive and traditional leaders.  They give their team members plenty of room to do their job, but they know when to step in and supply input and guidance.
  

Of course the facilitative leader/team won out, but some people cried foul   Anyways... we really did have fun with this little exercise and it truely brought out teamwork and team building.  The following sequence of photos will tell you the story ...

p.s. Thank you Jade(our HR Business Partner) for suggesting this team building exercise !!

It's been a year since the reformation of APAC GSE(Systems Engineering) group.  The size of extended staff has grown since then.  Like last year, we had our first quarterly meeting of the fiscal year in Seoul last Wed & Thurs.  We've discussed our priorities and goals for FY08.

It was very productve meeting as usual with a special invited guest John Bost - Storage Practice's CTO.  Thank you John for joining us to give storage update!!  We also had a unique team building exercise which was suggested by our HR Business Partner - Jade Chung(special dedicated blog on this on my next blog entry).

The meeting always need good team dinner.  Not to disappoint the guests, we had Korean BBQ as usual and a special tradition dinner with live Korean music & dance at Pulhyanggi(풀향기).


A group photo at Pulhyanggi taken with Shitamichi-san's(our Japanese Chief Technologist) Ricoh Caplio GX100

Which office is the most cleanest field office at Sun?  Well...among all the offices which I've had a chance to visit, Bangkok office is the winner so far.  It definitely deserves 5 stars - although the office is 5 years old, it's so well maintained.  I was really careful not to leave any dust behind.

I visited Bangkok office last week to meet with the pre-sales technical team and with customers.  I always enjoy talking to field engineers to understand how they work and what their concerns/issues are.  Due to the size of pre-sales technical community in Thailand, I took a bit of different approach in holding a townhall (or un-townhall) meeting.  We sat in a conference room with no specific agenda discussing various topics for a few hours - We had lunch brought in to the office and talked thru lunch.

I really enjoyed the visit and thank you Bangkok office for the hospitality.

Picture with a few Thailand SEs

Last month I gave "Sun's Vision & Why Sun ?" speech to a group of 16 college new hires thru Sun Korea's "Millennial Talent(MT)" program. 

All sixteen MTs went thru four stages of arduous testing, evaluation, and interview processes.  The competition was 170:1(applicants to position ratio) on average with most competitive position at 500:1.  New hires are among the brightest people I've met in recent years.  I am really glad they chose Sun and not our competitors.

Again, welcome MTs and thank you for making the right choice to join Sun!

p.s. I was about their age when I started at Sun 18 years ago - how time flies...

Our fiscal year starts on July 1.  All countries or regions have GSS(Global Sales & Services) fiscal year kick-off event during July to communicate our plans for the year - Korea was the first to kick it off yesterday.

Here is a series of pictures from the event - pictures speak thousand words.

Big boss - Denis Heraud (APAC GSS Senior VP)


Sun Korea GEM President - Wonsik Yoo


Sun Korea Sales Team Performance


Sun Korea College Intern Performance


Sun Korea Internal Rock Band - SPARK


Sun Korea Internal Rock Band - SPARK

People ask you where you are going next.  When you tell them I am going to Phuket on a business trip, people give you a perplexed look.  I do have to agree "Phuket & business trip" are oxymoron.  Well...what can I say, it was all business.

Early this week, I was invited to a graduation of Asia South & India GEMs LDP(Leadership Development Program) to be a member of judging panel for participants' final projects.

LDP is a year long leadership development program which started in the beginning of FY07 to grow the SMI leadership talent for the current and future business opportinuties in Asia South & India.

The participants have gone through four strenous modules:

• Personal Motivation - individual profiling
• Competency Assessment - self-awareness MBTI, others perception 360 assessment, actual behavior development center
  
• Knowledge Acquisition - mini-MBA & project assignment
  
• Skills Workshop & Graduation

I and all the judges were very impressed with the dedicated and quality of work delivered by the participants/students of this program - good work everyone and thanks for your dedication in truely being interested in becoming leaders !!