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

One of the most fun parts of my job as CTO for the Sun Services business unit is to co-host the annual Customer Engineering Conference (CEC). What started out as a way to get services engineers together has grown into a 3,000 person, 4-day training and networking event that draws from everyone with a customer-facing engineering job. Jim Baty, CTO for our Global Solutions Organization, is my co-host, and we have some fun surprises planned.

This is the only Sun event, besides the analyst conference, where every business unit Senior VP and CTO speak to the entire audience. We've modeled it roughly after a USENIX conference, with about 700 papers submitted for roughly 300 speaking slots. Our invited talks segment includes each of our CTOs talking about where they're taking their business (N.B: Technically, the SVPs are taking the business somewhere, but in a technical audience, the technologists rule).

Jim and I have been working for the past year to emphasize the "E" in CEC. We try not to make a distinction between product engineering and "the field"; whether we're doing applied engineering in customer situations or more pure computer science in product R&D, it's engineering. Part of my prickliness around the subject comes from spending many years as a UNIX system administrator. Sysadm is an applied engineering discipline, documented at USENIX and LISA and SANS conferences, but not widely acknowledged. Many of the attendees at our CEC05 event are, were, or may be in the systems administration world, and this event gives us a chance to embrace a diversity of engineering perspectives.