Human Challenges

Earlier this month we held Sun's annual Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) in Las Vegas. More than 4000 engineers attended, several hundred from our partners. Other than the opportunity for networking they had a choice of 200 technical breakout sessions to learn from others. Really an innovation this year were the parallel event on Second Life and the unconference and the speed geeking sessions. The unconference covered topics voted by the community via a wiki page until the last minute. During speed geeking several “geeks” sat each at a table and gave a 5 minute elevator pitch of an idea they had, after five minutes they gave the pitch to someone else. Nice way to hear interesting things.

The heart of CEC though were the main sessions on each of the three conference days. Contents was built around the theme SHIFT –Our Universe – Our World – Your Move.

Our Universe: CEC host Dan Berg introduced our new enhanced customer engineering web CE 2.0 with features of file sharing, building own communities (add your friends), voting, etc. Peter describes it in his blog. The most interesting thing really is how we measure contribution and participation. Each user gets a personalized overview where he/she stands in these terms via a dynamically updated community equity widget.

Jim Baty talked about “Redshift” referenced from the measure of the ever-increasing rate of the expansion of the universe. We have adopted this term to describe enterprises that are integrating the rapidly expanding, high-velocity change through network scale applications in their own universe. Like high performance computing, network services, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS), social networking and streaming content are paving the way for a new generation of network computing for our customers. Now it is all about us to make the shift to be ahead of them!

Our World: On Day 2 we had our CEO, Jonathan speak to the audience. I personally liked his presentation a lot, structured around our mission: for whom, in what and how! Just a partial insight on the “for whom”: customers who want to use IT as a weapon, who see their datacenters as an extension of their businesses, as a way to gain competitive advantage!

Also Dave Douglas our VP for Eco Responsibility gave an overview about our environmental efforts and I have to say not only our products get more and more energy efficient also the company in general is constantly reducing it's carbon footprint (we even opensourced the tools we used to assess, track and compare our energy performance on OpenEco.org!) And again let's make the shift to map our world of innovative eco-responsible technology to respond to market demand for green across the globe!

Then we had a product launch announcing our new Ultrasparc T2 Systems based on the new T2 processor still with 8 cores but compared to the T1 it is doubling the amount of threads it is able to handle in parallel to 64! We are talking about the first true system on a chip not speeding up through more Gigahertz power but through more multithreading capabilities! One of the main results: less energy consumption! (Product names are: Sun Blade T6320, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220.)

Your Move: Our EVP Sales & Services Don Grantham was there on Day 3 to energize the audience to move ahead with continued pace to execute on our goals and targets. The technical sales force with it's creativity and new thinking will fuel our future growth, this was his conviction. He says that they are one of the main reasons we are winning against our competitors. Don honored this by announcing that he has already signed the contract to do CEC again next year, again in Las Vegas!

If you are a Sun Employee go to the CE 2.0 session page where you can watch the videos of the main sessions. Finally have some fun watching this video featuring Dan and Jim.