Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

Marc Hamilton and I put the spin on High Performance Computing in the latest wave of our Innovating@Sun podcast program.

HPC normally conjures up images of big FORTRAN applications and ray tracing, look for radar shadows or casting light shadows to make computer animation more pleasing to our visual radar. But we're now seeing a class of HPC applications that shift the usual time-space tradeoffs, putting enough data into memory to allow near real-time analysis in areas like transaction fraud detection and logistics optimization.

Volker Seubert, who is our Global Systems Engineering HR business partner in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), has a great HR blog. While many people see HR as the fun-removing enforcer of rules, a good HR partner really creates fun, creates opportunity and makes sure the rules are appropriate.

I am not your usual corporate cadence person. I only tolerate face to face meetings if there's something that can be accomplished by thinking out loud, drawing on the white board, or splitting off into small teams to divide and conquer a bigger problem. I believe in regular, fact-filled communications. I'm not a fan of long staff meetings. Now that I have a global staff that reaches Seoul, Prague, St. Petersberg (Russia, not Florida), Menlo Park, New Jersey, Boston and soon, Dallas, I'm experimenting with time-space synchronization.

Last night was the first (and potentially last) late-night staff call. Trying to limit the number of badly timed calls per month, we rotate our conference call times, with last night's agenda starting at midnight EDT, early morning in eastern Europe and a pleasant mid-afternoon in Korea. This may work.

More important than communication among my staff is our communication to anyone with an interest, inside or outside of Sun. That's the whole point of transparency; you don't really care about the line items on a budget unless it means there's something new you can use as an employee, customer, developer, or partner of Sun's. In addition to my blog, Dan Berg, CTO for Global Sales and Services and the Vice President of Europe, Middle East and Africa Systems Engineering is in the mix, and today, SeChang Oh, Director of Asia-Pacific Systems Engineering added his voice. They represent the electronic face of Global Systems Engineering, and cross time zones and cultures much better than our own Late Night show posing as a staff meeting.

One of the major problems I need to tackle in our field organization is to foster communites of experts, and create some open space in which new expertise can blossom and be discovered. In a sidebar with our Chief Learning Officer, Karie Willyerd, it hit me that we really need are vanity wikipedia pages for engineers in systems engineering, our product-focused practices, and our customer support functions.

About three weeks ago, we did a stealth launch of our CEpedia (if you're inside of Sun's network firewall, try it as a universal URL from any SWAN domain). CEpedia is the Customer Engineering Wikipedia. It's based on the WikiMedia software distribution; it was built in all of about 3 days with some hard work from Liz Wilson, Mike Briggs and Scott Radeztsky (thanks, folks). Simple efforts with massive leverage -- one of the ways I think most grassroots efforts start.

It grew to about 50 users through the usual "don't tell anyone" electronic word of mouth that initiates a tipping point. I pushed it along a bit further this morning by talking about it in front of our Americas sales organization. That's all of the advertising I'll give it; the rest should be floated by the community of engineers. My first evidence of traction came tonight when I found a blog referrer pointing back to cepedia. That was my intent -- to create a map of the myriad respositories, resources, and content within and outside of Sun, and to make it easy to find experts.

Now it's up to the experts to populate the wiki. I'm confident that our customer-facing engineers will do just that, with the right blend of fun, facts and fresh ideas to make cepedia the internal, entertaining authority on who knows what.

Just got back from Orlando where I had a blast at the Americas Sales Kickoff. The energy level was high, a combination of a clear strategy and a great set of products to sell. I did my first trial run of a technical strategy for the global systems engineering community -- most of which I'm going to share here.

I had the advantage of being Scott's warmup act. Guaranteed audience, even if it was in the "hangover slot" first thing in the morning. I titled my talk We're the "Oh" in Web 2.0, mostly a play on Jonathan's post about the dot in 2.0. My goal was to generate some interest in the "oh" as in "oh, there is a bucket of technologies in which we can drive customer conversations". As some folks have argued, we're not sure it's Web 2.0 if we don't know when the cutover from Web 1.0 happened, and we may very well be into Web 3.0. I'm much more interested in the version suffix as an indicator of change and opportunity, rather than the major version.

I have a new job at Sun, prompting a new blog category. But first (as always), the back story.

I tend to mark time relative to events rather than calendar dates. The Miracle on Ice happened on a Friday night at the midpoint of the 1980 Winter Olympics. My summer's tenor is pitched on the 4th Monday of May, when Memorial Day is observed at golf courses and beaches. And for the past 22 years, I can recall what I've done on the Friday before Princeton Reunions: it's sort of a half-New Year's Eve for reflection. I've spent it in Connecticut, China and Cincinatti, and a dozen other places that break my alliteration.

Seventeen years ago, the Friday before Reunions, I accepted a job offer from Sun Microsystems to be a systems engineer in the Boston area sales office. I was fleeing a startup company in the molecular modeling space that was attempting to port industry-leading visualization software from Sun workstations and SunOS to a combination of MS-DOS and VAX/VMS. The exit criteria were pretty obvious. By the time my wife and I arrived on the Princeton campus, my Tiger classmates were questioning why I was joining a company that had just pre-announced a quarterly loss (that was, I believe, the last time Sun went cash flow negative for the fiscal year).

My answers were simple: the technology was solid, the people were smart, and the combination was fun. We've come a long way since SunOS 4.0.3 and the SPARCStation 1, but those traits remain constant.

On Friday, I changed longitudes in Sun's organization chart, the Friday before Reunions, the first Friday of the Jersey summer, and one that I hope I remember for another 22 years. I'm returning to Sun's field organization to be the spiritual and functional leader of Sun's global customer engineering force. Defining the exact organizational parameters is this week's job, and it will include both structuring our systems engineering community as well technical leadership for the entire customer-facing engineering community at Sun.

Here's what I do know:

Don Grantham, Executive VP of Global Sales and Services, stated in late April he was going to re-invigorate the technical talent in Sun's field organization. I'm not going to suck up to my new boss in public, but I can tell you Don gets things done. Quickly. Like sending out an organization announcement at 6:00 AM his time quickly. Given how little he sleeps and eats (and how rare breaks are in his staff meetings), I'd be tempted to believe he's a good AI, but I think capturing his wry, British sense of humor is probably beyond current coding paradigms.

I'm continuing in my position on Greg Papadopoulos' CTO staff so that every single engineer in the company now has a voice at Greg's table. R&D is represented through lines of business CTOs; the field is represented through our organization. I'm going to be a router for customer issues; it's critical that we get remain customer focused.

We are going to be amazingly consistent in terms of our technical vision, modulating technology market and industry trends by some architectural focus areas that are percolating our of our company-wide R&D review. Sun's field will once again be the source of disruptive, clever and technically sound ideas for our customers -- both current and new ones.

We are going to put the systems back in "systems engineering." Whether it's security architectures, performance, or making sure that every interesting software project runs on Sun (in Java, on the JVM, on Solaris, on our servers, using our storage, or as part of our tools ecology, "runs on Sun" is big), we are going to deliver on both "systems" and "engineering." It's table stakes for building (and in some cases, rebuilding) our street cred.

With our software strategies in full bloom, from dynamic languages on the Java Platform, to open sourcing the stack, to building a new value proposition with Aduva, it seems a rather strange time to leave my role as Software CTO. There's never a good time to make a job change when things are going well; but I believe you have mentally made the change when you find your inter-email thoughts turning into "How cool would it be if..." propositions about the new role.

In short, that's why I'm back in the field: because (a) we have great technology, (b) there are amazingly smart people to turn that technology into systems, and a management chain that wants (a) times (b) to equal fun. Again. In the words of Stuart Scott, it's time to rock the party that rocks the (engineering) pinata.