Today we had our “geek-to-geek” meeting at StorageTek’s Louisville, CO campus. Originally I’d planned to hold a brief and informal get-together for a few senior engineers; instead it evolved into a full-blown day-long colloquium involving more than 50 engineers (and two lawyers). Not all are in the picture; a few were slow getting back from lunch, and one was balanced on an SUV taking this photo!
Of those attending, about a third were from Sun and two-thirds from StorageTek.
The schedule was tight: an hour and a half for a series of brief introductory presentations; a break followed by a lively Q&A session; lunch (of course); then break-outs from 1pm to 5pm. There were ten hour-long break-out sessions on topics ranging from product processes to storage virtualization. Amazingly, we stayed on schedule, for which kudos to the speakers. Obviously the presentations and break-out sessions weren’t long enough to dive really deep into specific technical and business issues, but that was never the intent. The point of this meeting was simply to make connections and start conversations, and in this I believe we succeeded. The next step is to broaden the participation and link the discussions to the organizational and product planning processes. The work is just beginning….
Anyway, my thanks to all those who participated, especially to those who made particular travel-related sacrifices to attend, and to my colleague Richard for handling the facilities. I owe you guys.
P.S. Over dinner after the meeting, I was talking for a long-time StorageTek employee, and I mentioned that I was planning to blog about the events of the day. We discussed the fact that StorageTek, like many (?most) companies, had a tradition of secrecy, even over minor matters. For some, Sun’s open style – “living life in public” – is likely to be a culture shock. So this evening after I’d drafted this blog entry I applied my usual test with more care than usual: Should I be concerned that a malevolent marketing type from HP might read my blog and use the contents to disparage Sun to our customers or anyone else? I don’t think so.