Prague
I have been in Prague last week. It was very exciting. We have an engineering center and a sales office there. The site has become more and more important over the past years. Recently we opened our new offices in a very modern technology park a little bit outside the city, very fancy and stylish (to learn more Czech this out).
We grew the site from the initial netbeans acquisition in 1999 with 40 people to over 240 in engineering today. Netbeans has now around 100 employees. They just released Netbeans 5.5. last week. Netbeans is a developer tool supporting them to write Java code (a programming language invented by a team around James Gosling from Sun Microsystems widely known as the “father of Java”). We got a live demo of the tool. They showed us how quickly you can develop an SMS application for a mobile phone (almost every mobile phone is equipped with Java today). When you first see it you do not believe it is a developer tool. The user interface has the same look and feel as any other application the average end-user is working with. You can drag & drop and go to menus to select standard functionality. After 10min, only writing minimal lines of code, the application was running on the emulator, “beamed” to a cell phone and also running live! Really cool! Congratulations to the Netbeans team for their new release!
One of the main purposes of my trip was to work with Pavel, our Engineering Site Director, on the HR Strategy for the site and listen to his management team (Pavel promised me to continue his blog). As already mentioned in my blog about Our HR Organization there are issues around our outsourcing model that we need to tackle. We had really good discussions and NO, they “did not beat me up” 
most of them were accepting our HR model in general, we just need to make the services work well and might need some adjustments here and there. Overall I got a lot of insight in what they are doing and where the biggest needs are. They are really a fantastic team!
Then I accompanied Dan to the meeting he had with his peers from the EMEA practices here in Europe as VP (Vice President) of our EMEA Systems Engineering Organization. Dan moved to Prague earlier this year to provide technical leadership and serve as a liaison by collaborating with the local engineering community and amplifying their innovation, best practices, and technical excellence on top of his main job being one of our CTOs (Chief Technical Officers). Some months ago he added this VP job to that. Really great for us as we now have one of the brightest geeks in our company giving technical vision and direction to our EMEA Sales Organization!
Dan did a great job in hosting the meeting and the final highlight was a kind of geek session updating ourselves on Sun Technology. Thanks to Dan's ability to explain complex technology in simple words I got a lot out of it!
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04:40PM Nov 04, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Europe & Beyond |
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