Perplexed looking for a guide

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]