Sun Cloud
Sun did some great announcements in the cloud space yesterday. What is a cloud or cloud computing? Watch this 4.51 min video and you know the concept. In case you never heard of virtualization you may want to spend another 5 min watching this prior to the above. Our strategy on Cloud Computing is very well described in this video by our Sr. VP Dave Douglas. You may also want to watch the recorded web cast from yesterday when we presented our Cloud concept at the CommunityOneEast Developer Conference in New York. We will be launching our Sun Cloud Storage Service and Sun Cloud Compute Service this summer!
One notion of the cloud is utility computing or what we called grid before, or call it network, using remote computing power on a needs basis. You do not own the hardware, you use power (CPU power in this context) over a data connection just the same as you use electricity or even the phone. You only take a phone in your hands, get a dial tone and start calling, not an awful lot of hardware in your house, no software to update. Wouldn't the same concept be nice for everything you do on a computer today? Just press a button and instantly have the network available to go look something up in the internet?
For me this is the future of computing not only for companies but also for each of us. I really dream of it mostly in those moments when I set up my computer again (usually takes hours to reconfigure everything), when I need to update software or store and backup my data. I really would love a provider do this for me in the most secure way, provide me with the latest software I need in this very moment, have a choice of applications that I could not all purchase myself for use a few times a year. I would be ready to pay a monthly subscription fee – absolutely yes.
Just think that you would never have to buy a computer again, which generally is a waste of money as 2-3 years afterwards you can throw it away and buy a new one. You have a thin client at home that simply does not need any updating and if so your provider just sends you a new one for free like they already do today for ADSL modems.
Already many years back Scott McNealy talked about what he was calling a “big friggin' Web Tone switch”. Still our motto today is “The Network is the Computer”. I really hope that I do not have to dream much more until this vision will really become true. With launching our grid a few years ago we were maybe a bit early but now the whole concept takes root as we see with Amazon Web Services' success.
Posted at
07:39PM Mar 19, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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State of Enterprise 2.0
Updating myself a bit on the Web/Enterprise 2.0 buzz over the past week. You only need to look for it and you find the numbers 2.0 everywhere. Still since I touched on this topic here the first time in November 2006 it did not loose but rather gain traction. The trend towards Enterprise 2.0 started beginning of 2006, 3 years from now. It is persistent and no one should have any doubt that the future is going in that direction. Although talking to people in some businesses it looks like the notion of Enterprise 2.0 is only rarely understood or known outside of software and tech companies.
The benefits are huge. Companies who are under pressure to innovate at ever accelerating rates do not have a choice. They need to rely on their employees' potentials and therefor encourage a bottoms up approach for idea generation. Simply networking with colleagues across the globe and structuring knowledge in Wikis leads to huge productivity gains. Additionally with deploying Web 2.0 software the companies' intranets can be made attractive again very easily at lower cost, also because employees themselves are maintaining it.
The entry barrier for companies to join probably is that Enterprise 2.0 is not only about deploying software, it requires a culture shift to an open company that empowers employees. Managers and Executives are responsible for creating the framework and then need to purely focus on leadership, motivation of self directed knowledge workers, nurturing communities, etc. Bertrand discusses the 6 guidelines for going Enterprise 2.0 by McKinsey on his blog.
Also the Hamburg public-private-partnership Hamburg@Work which supports the growth of new media, IT and communications technologies and companies in the city has put Enterprise 2.0 on the title of it's latest edition of “Always On”. Two companies in Hamburg are mentioned as having fully embraced the concept of Enterprise 2.0 and these are CoreMedia and Qype. CoreMedia even created their own in-house Twitter as we did in Sun. Although both are software companies there is the internationally operating Hamburg-based mail order group Otto which created internal forums and wikis as well as an external fashion blog.
Posted at
11:19PM Mar 17, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Sunprise 2.0
Time to give an update. Lot of things happened. Sun announced a major restructuring back in November 2008 and I am very positive that we will come out of this as a much stronger company.
Although times
are difficult we keep momentum with our Enterprise 2.0 strategy. It
is really worth going to Peter's
blog and have a look at what happened mainly with our internal
collaboration tool SunSpace. Formerly the main users were our
technical presales employees and it was known under the name CE 2.0.
100
days after launch in July 2008 we had a dramatic increase of
registered users to 20000 Sun employees. Actually now we are at more
than 25000 (which is more than 70% of all Sun employees). Sun Space is a socially-enabled community, part Facebook,
part wiki, part forum and part document-sharing destination. It
allows users to create their own social networks and profile pages,
then join communities on a range of topics. But it is a lot more than
these simple words can describe, a lot of interesting widgets and
features, Peter described them extensively.
This is exactly the tool we are now using with our global HR Business Partner community. We created a place to share best practices in a structured way. In my opinion one of the most important things in our world of knowledge workers today. We developed an initial best practices taxonomy out of which someone posting a new practice needs to choose where to fit their own. Then a template helps to put some standard and structure around each of the practices posted which makes the process very easy. Finally attachments and/or links can be added.
The benefits really are obvious: enabling reuse of knowledge shortens our „time to client“, learning is fostered as is building our global community of HR Business Partners. We even have it in our job descriptions: „Collaborates across the function to effectively leverage in-house expertise in aid of solving client issues“. On top of all that people will learn to use new technologies! We are actually in the middle of rolling this out officially and starting to drive participation. I am just about to join the community leaders community....We're really taking a big step ahead in direction of HR 2.0!
Read this entry from Peter for a summary on Sun's Enterprise 2.0 activities. It is worth having a brief look at the white paper „The Estuary Effect“ which describes what we are doing from blogs, wikis, forums to socially enabled communities.
I also want to reference my former blog entries on the value of social networking for the enterprise and for HR (including a brief presentation) and Enterprise 2.0/HR 2.0.
Posted at
07:18PM Mar 08, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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