CEC – pulling it all together

I tried real-time blogging at last weekend’s CEC (Customer Engineering Conference), using my Treo 650, but without a decent blog tool it wasn’t really practical. I found myself wrestling with the web interface to MovableType rather than listening to the speakers – bad idea.

So here are my collected notes from CEC (slightly edited, definitely selective), followed by a few closing thoughts.

SATURDAY MORNING

One of the great traditions of CEC is the collection of video clips produced by various geo and functional orgs. It would be invidious to pick one as best, but the French piece – a Ken doll scaling the heights of a server to fix it, and earning the fulsome thanks of Barbie and her friends – got most applause. (But NZ had the best lip-sync.) And US PTS nailed the “piggybacking” joke perfectly. Best music (including alpenhorn) from Switzerland.

Next, Jim Baty & Hal Stern. Moving to utility model, refactoring business. Feels like it’s 1995 – tectonic shift again. Key messages: Technology is cultural. Addressing the PE (principal engineer) role – align with DE model. Community is key – blogging, BOFs. At CEC: Engage – act – share. When you go home: Communicate – train – improve.

Bob MacRitchie – EVP GSO: Described evolution of sales model. Review progress of Project Genesis [reorg of sales, professional services, and field engineering launched 12 months ago]. Simplify, flatten, empower org. (I’d missed that the US sales headquarters is moving to Boston – most of our US sales are east of the Mississippi.)

Marissa Peterson – services: services revenue & gross margin are improving significantly

Jonathan Schwartz – who never uses sports metaphors – appears in a Dallas Mavericks shirt.

How do we grow? Sell more to existing customers, or steal other people’s customers.

What’s changed over 3 years?

  • Sparc vs. Itanium
  • Solaris
  • Storage revival – 6920
  • x86 – now #1 Opteron seller, more coming
  • JES
  • Utility computing & grid (compare with IBM OnDemand fiasco)
  • Java on devices

In response to Q&A:

  • How come the OSS community is never satisfied with Sun, while IBM can do no wrong? The GPL people will never be happy, but they’re a minority. Second, we’re going to open source everything – JES, N1, etcetera – and if IBM won’t opensource WebSphere or Tivoli, they’re going to be left behind.
  • OSS grows revenue. The key is developers, and they have no money. (Jonathan has only one button on his blog – Download NetBeans)
  • What about N1? The technology in N1 was right on; our mistake was in overestimating the readiness of existing data centers to buy in. They don’t call them “brownfield sites” for nothing. On the other hand, the N1 technology is going to be critical to successfully creating a utility computing business

Greg Papadopoulos, CTO (via video): Computing becomes a commodity, but (network scale) computer systems aren’t. Consequences: operational concerns dominate, scale matters.

Robert Youngjohns – utility grid: What we’ve done, where we’re going. Great presentation – more material at the Sun Grid page.

.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

SOA and Jini – Tom Barratt & Larry Mitchell: Nothing unfamiliar, just wanted to see how people were presenting – and reacting to – SOA and Jini. Basic background, ray-tracing demo. Excellent discussion, good questions, lot of interest.

N1 SPS/SJS App Server – David Ogren: Talking about AppServer 8.1 + N1SPS 5.0. We got what David called the “Fire and Brimstone” to “Nirvana” presentation… Plus a nice demo.

InstallFest and Demo Room: Lots of cool stuff in the demo room. Re-installed Solaris 10 on my Ferrari from the latest flash archive.

SUNDAY MORNING

John Loicano, SW EVP: Big emphasis on Solaris, tools, restructuring JES Suites (especially Identity Management with Identity Auditor) Tag-team with Juan Soto (SW CTO & MktDev) for a deep dive on leading with SW for opening new customers. Emphasized importance of Netbeans vs. Eclipse. (Netbeans nailed all the recent tools awards.) Impressive performance numbers on the new TCP stack. Great demos of Solaris 10 Predictive Self-Healing and Identity Auditor.

Mark Canepa – network storage: Data management is more than storage…. Industry survey, strategy, product overview. Nice discussion of synergy between Solaris 10 zones and 6920 virtualization. Head-to-head comparison against EMC. Plea for help in improving remote monitoring connectivity. Java Storage System – not a technology, but a JES-style busness model. [The idea is interesting; I’m not crazy about the name.]

John Fowler & Andy Bechtolsheim: network systems: John summarized NSG history & progress. Stunning benchmark numbers, unveiled Galaxy: 8 socket (16-way, with dual cores) in new 4U packaging. BIG fans. The dual cores are coming very soon – well ahead of Intel. Full product line from 1U 2 sockets up to 4U 8 socket. Also blades – but no compromise in performance. Blades will support virtualized SAN port sharing, will save huge dollars. (Low cost, low speed blades aren’t cost-effective because of software licensing costs.) Will mix-and-match AMD and SPARC blades. Box design is dramatically future-proofed. Also mgmt sw and Nauticus (N2000) switches.Many early sales have been driven by customer solution and Blueprint sales. Seed units work well. Challenge: every sale is an audition. We can sell the boxes, need to make sure service will be able to meet the challenge.

David Yen, scalable systems EVP: What’s the difference between NSG and SSG? Ultimately, competence in system packaging vs. competence in silicon. SPARC roadmaps. Lots of interesting stuff: I wish he’d skipped the umpteenth repetition of “how chip-level multithreading works” to spend more time on the new material. Oh, well.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Real World Cluster Grids – Tony Kay: Disambiguating “grid”, all the way back to Foster & Kesselman. Important to match language with customer expectation – we say grid, they (may) say cluster, for example. Detailed discussions of HPC grids, especially oil & gas biz. Importance (or not) of various technologies: OGSA, Globus; cluster, MPI libs, network fabrics, file systems, specialized protocol stacks. Had a chance to talk to my former SunLabs colleague Bruce Daniels who’s now in PS.

ZFS – Nolen Hayden: (Jeff Bonwick was sick: his director subbed for him.) Interesting to hear the issues that were uppermost in the minds of the customer-facing engineers.

Grids for Financial Services – Alec Muffett: Intensely, relentlessly, and amusingly pragmatic and iconoclastic. But you knew that.

FINAL THOUGHTS

  • An excellent conference – kudos to Hal Stern and Jim Baty, and their team.
  • I really regret that I had to miss the Monday morning session, especially Scott’s talk.
  • While I understand the traditional focus on the field engineering organization, I really think that CEC has turned into something that speaks to all of engineering. How we could achieve this while preserving the value to the field I have no idea….
  • The openness of the whole event was remarkable. At lunch on Saturday, I asked Hal whether it was all bloggable. “Absolutely!” he said.

Consciousness 2005

This afternoon I’m heading over to the Harvard Medical School in Longwood to attend a symposium exploring the neuroscientific and philosphical aspects of Consciousness. The speakers are Dan Dennett from Tufts (my PhilOfMind prof), Patrick Haggard from UCL, Ned Block of NYU, and Chris Koch from CalTech. I’ve read enough of Dennett, Block and Koch to know that they’re pretty far apart on many issues, so it should be “stimulating”!

Observations on the Hblogger app.

Observations on the Hblogger app. As you can see, Hblogger doesn’t really understand MT very well. It uses the first five words of the text as the subject – or maybe that’s MT compensating. I can’t set the category, which sucks. Image upload is only via FTP, which is disabled on grommit. Sigh….
[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

In San Francisco

As several of my colleagues have reported, we’ve just concluded the SEC (Sun Engineering Conference) down in Santa Clara. I don’t have a lot to add to what they said, except to note that it’s nice to attend as a participant rather than an organizer. (I ran a number of similar conferences over the last few years: it’s hard work.)
With SEC over, I’ve shifted hotels, from the Holiday Inn Express in Mountain View to the Hilton in San Francisco. Obviously the Hilton is a much nicer hotel – I have a spectacular view from my window, looking out over the bay towards Oakland – but it’s odd that the little $95/night Holiday Inn Express can give me high-speed Internet access for free while the Hilton wants to charge me an arm and a leg…. (And the Hilton’s connection feels a bit sluggish – but perhaps that’s because of the hundreds of Sun geeks who’ve just checked in and are getting a much-needed fix of raw TCP/IP.)
Tonight is the opening session of the CEC. If you read blogs.sun.com or PlanetSun, you’re going to see lots of blogging from this conference. I shall be here all Saturday and most of Sunday; I’m flying home on the red-eye on Sunday night. Even though I dodged an eight inch snowstorm last night back in Boston, the weatherman is promising more snow and ice for Monday.

Fleeing the snow

As yet another coating of snow gets dumped on the Boston area, I have fled to warmer climes – California, as is my wont; Silicon Valley, to be more precise. I shall be down in Santa Clara for a few days, then move up to San Francisco for the CEC conference that a number of my colleagues have blogged about. I return to Boston on the Sunday night red-eye.
A few more or less random observations. First, my ticket today was on US Airways, but the flight was actually a United one – ah, the joys of code sharing. I found myself wondering if I could use United FF miles to upgrade, given that I wasn’t actually on a United ticket. Of course that would require that I talk to a human being, and these days things like checkin are handled by robots. (Kiosks plus unskilled baggage handlers.)
The flight was uneventful, but spoilt by the presence of a number of small children who had not yet reached the age at which they have any sense of personal space. I gave up trying to sleep after being elbowed in the ribs by a 6 year old girl for the seventh or eighth time. Her father didn’t help: this was clearly a custody transfer trip (it’s his ex-wife’s turn), and he wanted this to be Quality Time the whole way. His voice droned on all through the flight, reading to his daughter, helping her with math problems, playing games (educational, needless to day), reading again (this time some wretched story-book in which the Fibonacci series played a key role – almost as weird as that TV program “Numbers” last week, where the plot revolved around a failed attempt to prove Riemann’s Hypothesis). My nice Bose noise-cancelling headphones do a good job of blocking out the noise of a 757’s engines, but they were no match for this dutiful father’s insistent voice. And on top of this there was a 4 year old behind me who relieved his obvious boredom by kicking my seat every so often.
Two technical notes. First, I find that I can read both my Sun email and my ISP mail through my Treo. This is very cool; I have only to sort out access to Gmail and I’m all set. I picked up both a case and an SD Card for the Treo today. (Memo: PalmOne asks $99 for a 512MB SD card; Fry’s in Santa Clara had a 1GB SD card for $89. A gigabyte cellphone…. /me shakes head in disbelief) Secondly, this is the first trip for many years when I don’t have my Mac (iBook or PowerBook); I’m using my Acer Ferrari running Solaris 10. I miss all my blogging tools, not to mention a decent PDF toolset. (I’m not impressed by the Gnome PDF viewer. Font substitution isn’t that hard.)

On creating software that people want to use…

I stumbled across this piece in Jamie Zawinski’s blog pointing off to a longer article entitled Groupware Bad. He discusses the history of collaboration and calendaring software, and why it sucks. (There are a bunch of really interesting responses on the blog; see also here.) Direct and to the point (and, apparently, widely linked). Money quote:
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. When words like “groupware” and “enterprise” start getting tossed around, you’re doing the latter, [and] nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it’s just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.
So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software). [It’s] about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
(Linked from Many-to-Many, which is fascinating in its own right.)

PS on the Treo 650

After getting my Treo 650, I found that I couldn’t access any data (GPRS) services – mail, messaging, web surfing, etc. This was odd, since the folks at the Cingular store had sold me a data plan to accompany my chosen voice plan. I spent several hours last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the phone to Cingular [thank heavens for phone headsets – at least I could get on with my work while I was on hold], discussing why my data services weren’t working. Everyone I talked to assured me that they had the situation in hand, were working on it, would resolve it shortly….
On Thursday I finally got to talk to a Data Services Specialist. He immediately told me that the reason for my problem was simple: I’d been sold the wrong plan. I’d been offered a choice between an unlimited data plan ($29.99/mo) and a limited plan ($19.99/mo); feeling cheap, I’d chosen the latter. The DSS told me that neither of these plans would support the Treo; I needed a $29.99 $39.99 “PDA Plan”, which included unlimited data and some other stuff. Sigh. Several hours later (and a power cycle), I was in business.
At first I cynically thought that this was just a trick to get me into an unlimited data plan, but after watching the Blazer web browser doing its thing for a while I realized that it made sense. Unlike WAP browsers optimized for minimal feeds, this is a full-blown HTTP(S) browser. I can open my home page and suck down a quarter of a meg in a few seconds; clearly I would blow through any limited data plan in a couple of days. (Of course this doesn’t explain why a Cingular salesperson sold me an unusable plan, and why customer support failed to identify the problem for three days.)
The great news is that the email client supplied by Palm supports full SSL-secured IMAP and SMTP, which means I can access my Sun email through our “Edgemail” gateway. This is going to be phenomenally useful….
[NOTE CORRECTION TO PLAN PRICE]