Taiwan Futures Exchange (TAIFEX, 台灣期貨交易所) is a Sun shop, at least since 2003. They have few dozen Sun servers in two locations and run Solaris 8 on pretty much all of them. In May, few hard disks failed. No big deal, but sales guys thought it will be a good idea for me to meet them.

Mr. Arthur Yeh (葉邵威), Exec Vice President that seems like CIO, met me in this plush room with very comfortable chairs. Joe Pai (白大新), Sun's General Manager in Taiwan, and few others joined us too. Mr. Yeh talked about the importance of 24x7 services and high reliability. I described FMA and dTrace from Solaris 10 and urged him to upgrade. Few days after I left the island, they have started a pilot on Solaris 10 on T2000. This is Sun's bread and butter business.

In Sheraton's 17th floor lounge, Joe and I met Mr. Wang from ETS. His company manages all ETS's tests — TOEFL, GRE, TOEIC, etc. These are the authentic criteria for anyone pursuing a career that requires serious English skills. Mr. Wang's company administers a test almost everyday. They deal with hundreds of thousands of registration, score inquiry, change of record, etc. everyday. They wish to move away from their Linux-based service to something better, and hopefully cheaper. The IT consultant came in with a hardware angle and they are not that comfortable.

Joe and I talked about the software architecture and why would a Solaris 10 based one will save them money and headaches in the future. When the conversation ended, Joe will send a Niagara over and they will start experimenting a solution based on Java EE 5. This is perfect for the employee-based price model.

An old friend sought me out when I was in town. He was excited about OpenSolaris and wanted to create an embedded version for all Taiwan's manufacturers and ODM industry. He needed to know Sun's general position for other people to start such project (we couldn't be happier) and would like to have some fundings from Sun (sorry). Lack of funding, however, is not a deterrent. He has connections and may get few millions here and there. The key question is, "if I get the funding, would Sun provide technical assistance?"

Gulp. What kind of question is that? Of course we will.

Taiwan is a much different island from last time I visited. There are entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large institutes all trying to better the productivity with IT investments. Sun's open technologies bring opportunities and are they are willing to experiment.

Like Arnold said, "I will be back."