Focusing on the Customer
Over the last couple of weeks I've been involved with the Innovation at Sun Conference, where we get the senior technical leadership of the company together, and I spent a week in China speaking with students and universities about innovation. There's lots to blog about, which I'll try to do over the next couple of weeks, but I thought I'd start with a point I made in my introduction to the Innovation@Sun conference.
We often debate what makes good engineering. Should we spend the effort to create or improve a technology? Which of several approaches should we take in improving a product that we've built, including should we improve it at all? As engineers we tend to be biased in favor of elegance and the "coolness" of the technology being developed. While this is important, in the end there is a simpler way to look at it. Stated bluntly it is: "Our job is to make our customers rich." If they can use our technology, products, and services to to make larger profits than by using alternative techniques then they will buy what we sell and will come back for more.
Thus, the first question on almost any technical decision should be, How does this benefit the customer? Does the customer have an alternative that will be better for their business? If there is a better alternative from the customer's perspective then all of our elegance will be for naught. Especially in these tough economic times, everyone is looking for a way gain an edge on their competition. And they are eager to try new approaches that will give them that edge.
Sun's technology portfolio is vast and deep. We are in a unique position to put together enormously cost effective solutions to key customer problems, that would be difficult for slower moving competitors without the IP portfolio we have. A good example that we have started to talk about is our Open Storage Strategy and how it will revolutionize not only data storage, but data analytics and information life cycle management.
Coupling our technology portfolio with our focus on building communities around these core technologies; involving people with intimate knowledge of customer's issues and opportunities that depend on information technology, and leveraging our ability to create hardware/software/services systems that enable key customer opportunities it is hard to see how we can fail.
We just need to focus on making our customers rich, and they will return the favor.
Posted at 11:17AM Nov 06, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[0]
Project Caroline Video
Project Caroline presentation at the SunLabs Open house is now on line! Its almost two hours, but you get a bunch of bonuses. In addition detailed technical presentations and live demonstrations of Project Caroline by John McClain, Bob Scheifler and Vinod Johnson, you get Greg Papadopoulos' welcome to the Sunlabs Open house (lot's of other good stuff there, take a look here for the slides and here for pointers to video presentations) and my introductory comments on why Project Caroline is architected as a high level virtualization platform across all aspects of the IT infrastructure (computation, communications, and storage). Here it is:
We've been getting a bunch of comments about Project Caroline in other blogs and press reports. We're really happy at how positive they've been. Here I'd like to clarify some details.
- Project Caroline supports applications built in a number of languages. Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP are supported now. Others are being considered for future development.
- While we are optimistic about the capabilities of Project Caroline, we really don't really think that "all applications will tie back to Sun servers on the Internet". More accurately, we're really bullish about the ability to develop, deploy, and deliver software services on the Internet and think that Project Caroline and similar platforms are a great approach.
- We currently provide instances of Postgres databases. You don't have to install or configure the databases software to use it, you just request a database instance. This is an example of Project Caroline's attitude of allowing developers to focus on the applications they want to build with minimal attention to details of of operating a data center. We have a lot of work to do on the storage side, but it's fair to assume that we'll provide MySQL at some point as well as other mechanisms.
- The Web server component is a pre-release version of GlassFish v3 that has been adapted to the Project Caroline infrastructure and, with changing loads, can automatically flex its resource utilization. See Vinod's section at the end of the video for more details.
- The Project Caroline web site is built using Drupal and actually runs on the Project Caroline infrastructure (we really are eating our own dog food!). More details can be found here.
- Finally, we really are an open source research project. You can download all of our software from the Project Caroline web site and see how we've done all the magic you see in the video. The software all uses the GPLv2 license, and we really aren't holding anything back. Take a look at what we've done, how we've done it, and let us know what you think.
Technorati Tags:
ProjectCaroline, Redshift, Cloud Computing
Posted at 10:10AM Apr 22, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[2]
Project Caroline
I feel like a proud papa! Earlier this week my team had the opportunity to show off the research they've on the development and deployment of horizontally scaled Internet services. The most tangible result is the research platform Project Caroline. We have a Project Caroline grid running and connected to the Internet. We are allowing external research partners to use this "public evaluation" grid, as resources allow. (If you are internal to Sun, we have an internal grid on which we can give you access.)
We've posted an article on Project Caroline on the Sun Research site: "A Platform ... as a Service". During the Sun Labs Open House we also gave a presentation on Project Caroline that included a couple of demos. The video of the presentation should be available soon.
It's a really cool platform that allows you to programmatically control all of the infrastructure resources you might need in building a horizontally scaled system. You can allocate and configure databases, file systems, private networks (VLAN's), load balancers, and a lot more, all dynamically, which makes it easy to flex the resources your application uses up and down as required.
One of the things I like the best, since I never write perfect code, is the NetBeans plug-in that allows you to monitor the behavior of application running on the grid, from your laptop; and then debug, single step, etc. any of the processes or resources you have running on the grid. No more writing and testing applications on your laptop only to port them to grid environment, and spend more time debugging. Instead, with Project Caroline, you write you code in NetBeans and run it the first time directly on the grid and debug it there, just as if it were running on your laptop but in the real production environment!
If you want to take a closer look at Project Caroline go to the the Project Caroline Web site, where you can find documentation, samples applications, tools for using the grid, and discussion forums. All of our source code is licensed under GPLv2, and can be found on the web site.
Finally, remember this is part of a research project in the Sun Chief Technologist's Office where we exploring different approaches to utility computing. We are eager to see what in this approach works and what doesn't, where this approach fits and for what problems it doesn't. Let us know.
Technorati Tags: redshift, ProjectCaroline
Posted at 03:02PM Apr 11, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[3]
Redshift in Second Life
Steve Wilson gave a presentation on Virtualization in Second Life a month or so ago: Friday Feb 01, 2008: My Trip to Second Life that went very well. Now it seems that I've been roped in as well. I'll be speaking about Redshift, Virtualization, and our research activity, Project Caroline at at Second Life time 10:00AM, i.e., 1:00PM Eastern time at the Von Neumann Convention Center on Dr. Dobbs Island (Search for "Sun's Zippel").
Jessica from the Sun Second Life team put together my avatar and I got a great introduction on navigating Second Life form Ed Wetland of Sun. I now understand why people like Second Life so much. My avatar is a lot better looking than I am in person, and much more atheletic.
It should be fun tomorrow. Come join in!
Technorati Tags: redshift, Second Life
Posted at 12:46AM Mar 06, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[3]
WW Education and Research Conference
It's been a while since I last posted, and this really should be the last time I make that apology---get real! This week, I'm attending the Sun's Education and Research Conference and got involved in a couple of pretty interesting discussions.
First, the technology that grabbed everyone is virtual reality. Aaron Walsh, from Boston College, gave a series of wonderful demo's of uses of interactive, 3D technology in education. An example of this is the Theban Mapping Project, which allows the visitor to explore tombs of the Pharaohs. It's a great site and worth a visit. Compared to your standard, musty textbooks, you can imagine how much more engaging a site like that can be for a student, and how much fresher it can be for the academic.
As interesting as such a site might be, even more compelling demonstrations were shown where students could participate in explorations of spaces like the Valley of the Kings. A related technology, which we are using at Sun is MPK20/Project Wonderland, which provides a 3D virtual space for collaboration and dissemination of information. There's a great demo here that everyone should watch. It's a great glimpse into what the office, and school room, of the future could be.
There was an interesting presentation by Neil Howe on the Millennials, the generation of people born since 1982. He brought up a lot of interesting characteristics millenials, but one that I think is relevant is that they tend to multi-process much more than people of my generation. They are constantly IM-ing, emailing, and twittering with their friends. Their active groups aren't geographically defined. In many ways, they have begun the process of breaking the limits of our physical locality. They don't need to find a single, centrally located coffee-house to get together. When they share a bottle of wine, it doesn't need to a single bottle.
How does this affect the way that students learn? Won't the physical models we are creating in these 3D models be limiting to our students? Should their avatars exist in more than one place at once? Can't we as educators use this dispersive existence to help identify the connections between different topics in education. While exploring the Thebes, shouldn't we also be exposed to the developments in China? The state of language in different regions?
In other words, aren't we limited enough in the real world by having a single localized physical body? Why do we need to be similarly limited in virtual worlds?
Posted at 07:26PM Feb 27, 2008 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[0]
A Fable on On Arms and Armies
Once upon a time there was a family named Scawa whose trade was making swords. The family was very proud of the swords they made; they took great care designing their swords and their level of craftsmanship produced swords that were popular and had a great following. In time, new weapons came to be and marginalized the family's sword trade. Being clever and industrious they adapted to the new business and began producing bullets.
As with he sword business, the family were supreme craftsman and produced the best bullets that money could buy. Their bullets flew farther and were more accurate than their competitors. They were able to charge a premium for their bullets and became prosperous. One of their motto's was "You only need one Scawa bullet to hit your target," because an expert shot with a Scawa bullet was sure to find his mark with each firing. Things were again looking up for the Scawa family until industrialization affected the bullet business. Other families could suddenly make bullets with machines, and though the quality wasn't as good as the Scawa bullets, they required less skill to create and could be produced much more cheaply.
For a while the Scawa family tried to sell their premium bullets, but they were only successful with marksmen and others who demanded the highest quality bullets, and had the resources to pay the Scawa prices. Each year their sales dropped and they family began to worry about their future.
At this point the Scawa family had two sons. The oldest son, fearing that there would be nothing left of the old family business for him to inherit, decided a new course needed to be taken. He said, "The buyer of the largest number of bullets are armies, but they don't buy ours. Since we make better bullets than anyone else, we should raise our own army and equip them with our bullets. We will defeat all other armies and we get far richer by waging war than by selling bullets." So, after a tearful farewell, the oldest son went off to war. In time, his letters became less upbeat about the excitement of leading a (small) army, and also less frequent. In time the letters stopped and he was never heard from again.
The youngest son had looked up to his brave, older brother, but was distraught by the path his decision to start an army had taken him. He thought long and hard about what to do, because if he did nothing his inheritance would also disappear.
Eventually he went to his father and said: "Father, while we still make a few elegant swords these days, they are for display in offices and homes. We learned that we needed to create other weapons if we were to remain prosperous. Now, bullets are cheap and plentiful and no one wants our creations. Instead of fighting with skilled swordsmen or marksmen, the armies fight as masses of people and don't need our precision bullets. We can build bigger bullets, I hear there is a new weapon called a cannon that needs especially expensive bullets, or we can again adapt. Since battles are now fought by armies, not small groups of Samurai. Let us add observation balloons to our bullet business, so that the leaders will now know what is happening during a battle."
The father agreed, and the family again became prosperous. In time their balloons became airplanes, to which they gave their name (Scawa turned into AWACS). And they were a lot more profitable selling AWACS than selling finely engineered, high performance cannon balls.
Posted at 03:09PM Jun 27, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[1]
Red shift, Blue shift, ...
All companies process raw materials to produce more valuable products that can be sold for a profit. Until recently, these raw materials where usually physical resources: iron ore, cotton fiber, coal, etc. With the onset of computers, it become practical to create companies that process information, as a valuable raw material, to produce valuable products. Google has figured out how to convert (indices of) information into advertising targets and thus into profits. Salesforce.com and eBay manage and broker information to make it more valuable to their customers. Banks and arbitrage firms take the raw data of markets and identify times to make acquisitions and when to sell. The ultimate version of this is the intelligence agencies (and newspapers), who take scraps of noisy data, process, and clean them up, identify relationships and produce extremely valuable insights, when they get it right.
On the otherhand, almost all companies use information technology to manage customer lists, payrolls, etc. In this case, information technology is part of the overhead.
When information is a raw material and processing improves value, increasing the cost/performance of IT improves the total profit proportionally to the size of the customers (at least). If it is part of the overhead, the impact is much less.
As a consequence, companies that produce information based (or redshift) products are driven to increase their IT infrastructures as rapidly and as cheaply as possible (scale means more value, reduced cost means more profit). Companies whose product is does not depend on information as a raw material (blue shift products) are less much less sensitive to IT cost; it is just overhead and the cost (and benefit) isn't multiplied by their number of customers.
An interesting question that remains is what sort of computations are done to "refine" information raw material. Most that I am aware of are embarrassingly parallel operations. These are the easiest (and safest) to scale up. But are there more communication and computationally intensive "refining" steps as well?
Posted at 02:01PM May 14, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[0]
Technology @ Sun 2007
I had the distinct honor of hosting the Technology Leadership Conference held at the Chaminade in Santa Cruz last week. About 150 of the technical leadership of the company attended the meeting, with nearly sixty providing posters describing some aspect of their work. It was fascinating to me, someone who is relatively new to Sun, to see so much innovation in one company. The invited talks gave us a great overview of some of the technological themes underway in the company, like vitualization and the SPARC roadmap, while others covered more technical issues like how magnetic tape works and how it compares to disk (it's not as far off as you might think). Perhaps most gratifying to me was the level of energy at the conference and the enthusiasm for Sun's technologies with which everyone left. If you weren't there, go talk to you local DE or fellow. I'll announce when we make some of the posters and slides from the conference available.
Posted at 07:06PM Apr 30, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[1]
Oldest Registered .COM Domains and where they are now
A number of people (Out of the Woodwork, Sun tied with IBM for 11th oldest .com domain name, and The 100 Oldest Registered .COMs) have already noted this web site with the 100 oldest currently registered .COM domains and noted that Sun was one of the first registered web sites, registered at the same time as IBM and before Intel and years before Cisco and Microsoft. What got my attention was the names the top of the list. The oldest registered .com domain, one full year before Sun and IBM was Symbolics, followed by BBN and Think.
Those names really take me back. BBN, of course, was one of the early contractors on the ARPANet. As a student I remember the excitement when the first "network interface" were rolled into MIT. That's one in the picture! Technology has really improved over the years. So it is not at all surprising that they were one of the very first to register a domain.
But its the symbolics.com and think.com that brought back the most memories. Symbolics was the Lisp Machine company that spun off from MIT. They built $80K workstations that were heavily used by the Artificial Intelligence community, but also by researchers in Vision and in the animation industry at the time. (They were about the same size and price as that BBN IMP we used as our Arpanet interface.) I remember being awed by the "render farm" of Symbolics machines at Pixar on a customer visit to Pixar, which was one of Symbolics' larger customers. Symbolics did their own animated film, Stanley and Stella in Breaking the Ice, by using the rendering jobs to burn in machines coming off the manufacturing line.
Symbolics' (Lisp implementation) of TCP/IP was the reference implementation when it came out. It was the first implemented and due to the debugging and development tools on the Lisp Machine, people had the most confidence in it in those early days. I remember discussions at Symbolics about Sun; how they didn't have any interesting technology, how buggy their networking code was, and how they could never survive. I believe Symbolics had a market cap about twice Sun's when it went public. At that time Symbolics was taping out their first custom microprocessor (Ivory) and was in development of of their second version (Sapphire), while Sun was just using commodity Motorola 68K's. And of course, Symbolics had the very advanced operating system developed for the Lisp Machine, while Sun was using Unix, which was just an inferior rehash of Multics. How wrong we were!
Somewhere in there, a grad student at MIT and I were involved in an evaluation of Symbolics' Lisp machine implementation and TI's (which also had a lot custom silicon). The two of us had a great time eating barbecue at the County Line in Austin and fantasizing about the super computers we could build by combining hundreds of these machines.
Well, that never happened, but the grad student was pretty successful. He did design some super computers (using Symbolics machines) at Thinking machines (think.com) before they also went out of business and he (Greg Papadopoulos, you probably guessed) came to Sun along with his friend Dave Douglas, Steve Heller and others.
A year ago I also joined Sun (and work for Greg). I think we all still believe in those same fantasies we shared overlooking the river Austin. You see glimpses of it in Greg's discussions about global computers and my ramblings on utility computing. The next few years are really going to be fun!
It's amazing how the circle closes.
Posted at 10:22AM Mar 06, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[3]
Digital Rights, RIAA & Open Source
I'm sitting here at 1:00AM trying to futilely guess when the winter storm is going to hit, and wondering if my plane to California will leave tomorrow morning, as scheduled, in the evening, or not at all. The later the storm hits, the greater the chance that my flight will leave, more or less on time, so here I sit reading the paper and waiting for the snow to fall. Why not just go to sleep you ask? You know the old proverb, "A watched pot never boils."? Perhaps the longer I watch for the snow to fall, the longer it will take to start falling and the better my chances are.... or perhaps I'm just over tired.
One article that caught my eye, was about Steve Job's latest missive urging the music industry to eliminate the digital rights management for music. Among Steve's arguments is that (1) the music industry already release music without DRM (CD's), which can be easily ripped, (i.e., the cows are already out of the barn) (2) this is better for the consumer, because then any player can play music purchased from any store, (3) any DRM system can be cracked by smart people, so promise to the music industry to protect their music from illegal copying is specious.
While all of these are true, I think it misses the key point. By making it easier for consumers to use their music wherever and however they want, you lower the barrier of entry to using digital music, and thus you've increased the size of your potential market. You make up for any loss due to illegal copies by the vastly larger number of customers to whom you can now sell. As a minor point, you've also become one of the "good guys" to consumers. That's always a good thing.
In essence, this is the same basis we have used for open sourcing Java, Solaris, and the Sparc architecture. By eliminating artificial barriers to their use, we increase the number of users of our technology, a percentage of whom will actually purchase something from us, i.e., hardware or services. I think the customer also feels better about this, since they are paying for products and services that have real value. Fundamentally, exorbitant technology licensing fees try to monetize a market position, without providing an real value for the license fees. (Is $200-400 for an OS exorbitant?) Both hardware and services are things that provide real value to the customer.
It's great that Sun has invested tens of thousands of hours great engineering into Java, Solaris and other technologies that we have now released into the open source community. What engineer wouldn't want to be able to share their masterpieces with the widest possible audience, and create a community around their work? At the same time, we understand Java, Solaris, multi-core and multi-threaded processors, etc. better than anyone else---we both invented them and have more experience using them. Use Sun's technologies to make your world better, and if you need assistance using those technologies advance your organization you know how to reach us.
It feels good to be part of a company that charges for things that deliver value to the customer and tries to eliminate barriers to the technology's use. Now where is that storm?
Posted at 11:45AM Feb 14, 2007 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[0]
Web 2.0 and the Participation Age
I got a chance to congratulation Jonathan on taking on his new CEO responsibilities this week and I don't think I had gotten the word "congratulations" out before he asked me where my blog was. Now that I think about, I believe he asked me that question when I interviewed for my job several months ago. I think it's a bad idea not to have a good answer for your boss when he asks a question three times, so...
As way of introduction, I work for Greg Papadopoulos, EVP and CTO of Sun Microsystems, and have the title of VP of Technology. So I'm helping Greg with some of the advanced technology projects and am having a ball with all the smart people around here.
I've always prefered to discuss problems and ideas with others rather than to sit in a corner and write about them. For me, the adreline rush of intellectual combat has been the fuel for my best ideas. Nothing get's me going more, than saying "that just can't be done." So blogging gives me an opportunity throw out a couple of wild ideas and watch them be attacked. What a great opportunity for me learn.
Here's the first....
Web 2.0 and the Participation Age
There has been a lot of discussion in the press and on the web about the new way to build web presences using AJAX, mashups, different scripting languages and the latest technobuzz-de-jour. The results have been some pretty cool web sites, but I claim we are just making it easier to create the sort of web sites we always wanted to create, but never had the time or energy to build. Google maps and the mashups based on it are great, but didn't we all know that that was what we wanted the first time we used Mapquest? Surely, there is more.
Jonathan and Scott have been talking about the Participation Age since before I joined Sun and I've missed lots of what they've said and thus don't really know what they're talking about. Nonetheless, I believe they are right. We are at the beginning of a new era of global participation. I believe we have the technology to create it. But is the technology and systems being created today helping to create a global participatory world, or is it hindering it?
Google and the wide availability of information on the web has minimized or eliminated the time we spend in libraries. When I was a student, long, long. ago you went to reading rooms not just for the books and journals that were available there but also to talk to people, see what others where reading, get help on problems etc. It was the place where students could participate in the creation of new science. Why is it so much more valuable to go to actually go to college than to sit at your computer and watch the course lectures, do the problems sets, and read the papers that come from those universities? It's because participation in the process of "doing science" not only teaches you facts, but also increases your sophistication about science and begins the development of your scientific "taste." You beome not just a more knowledge scientist, you become a more sophisticated scientist. (This probably holds in all fields, (e.g., the Socratic method in philosophy), but my experience is in science.)
Just as importantly, the participation of many people doing science is not additive, it is multiplicative. That hand-to-hand intellectual combat not only increases the energy each participant puts into doing science, it increase focus, strips away irrelevant issues, and sharpens our definitions and understandings of the problems. More so than we would do on our own.
Now what does that have to do with Web 2.0? I don;'t see Web 2.0 focused on creating a place for participation of individuals, nor do I see concern for creating places where different services can "participate" or "interact" in a multiplicative fashion. Think about all the Google maps based mashups. Are they multiplicative combinations of services or are they additive collections? I claim they are, at best, additive.
When you were younger did you ever meet with some of your friends to figure out how to put together a really great date for someone you were especially fond of? A couple of friends were really movie afficando's, a few others new all the music and comedy acts in town, some else new about the restaurants, others the romantic walks in the city. And you knew that your special-some-one liked sunsets, zydeco, raspberries and champagne. Didn't you come up with some great evenings that way? That's multiplicative participation.
Each of those bits of knowledge, restuarants, moves, geography, etc are available as web services of one form or another today. But how do you create the multiplicative, creative mashup that you and your friends, a plate of nachos and some beer could produce? Is that Web 2.0? is it even part of the agenda? I think it should be. I think that when are able to create places where services can participate, and where people can truly participate, we will get the muliplicative effect that will define the participation age.
There are not many companies that have the breadth of technology and the depth of talent to create the infrastructure to support the (multiplicative) participation age. Certainly I think Sun does. I wonder if a business focus on ad revenue leads to linear thinking and precludes the creation of non-linear, multiplicative places. What does need to be changed to support the Participation Age? There are certainly technology challenges, lots of them (dueling web sites??). But not just technology challenges.
What do you think?
Posted at 11:15PM Apr 27, 2006 by rezippel in Sun | Comments[1]
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