Last September I wrote about the “geek-to-geek” event that I organized at StorageTek: an opportunity for several dozen senior engineers from Sun and StorageTek to meet each other, network, discuss issues of mutual interest, and so forth. That event seemed to work well, so yesterday we held a second one, at the Monrovia, CA facilities of SeeBeyond. SeeBeyond was the premier vendor of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) software that Sun acquired last year.
The basic integration of the organizations and product lines is going well: we’ve announced the Java Integration Suite which brings together the key integration and composite application capabilities from both companies. However we wanted to broaden the horizontal connections: to bring in people from various parts of Sun to learn from each other. And in particular Greg Papadopoulos joined us for the first half of the day to lead a discussion of the “software as service” ideas that he presented at last week’s Sun Analysts Summit.
We followed the same format that had worked in Louisville: a series of 5-minute self-introduction presentations, open discussion to capture issues of interest, a working lunch, and then afternoon breakout sessions. (And for Sun employees: all of the materials will be posted on my internal blog by the end of the week.)
Herewith a few pictures; full size images are in my gallery:
Jerry Waldorf making a point. (Yes, the classroom layout is sub-optimal; this approach works better if you can arrange people in a circle or horseshoe. But it wasn’t a big problem. And yes, I did PhotoShop one image a bit to remove whiteboard contents.)
Greg attacks a virgin expanse of whiteboard, while Mark Hapner looks on.
The result: I actually prefer this to the version in Greg’s slides. Maybe we need a “scribbled whiteboard” template in StarOffice….
Thanks to all who helped make this happen, especially the intrepid “day-trippers” from northern California, and Judy for pizza and logistics.