Views, News and Cheers!
Alec indicated yesterday that he separating with Sun. After about 17 years.
While I was at Sun, he is very patient in answering all my stupid questions on security. I bet he stored all my internal chat sessions somewhere in a jokes folder. 🙂
Thanks Alec, thanks for your patience and thanks for dropsafe. Wish you a nice break and a much nicer next venture.
Another Opensource related rewards program from Sun. Key contributors to these communities will be rewarded: GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC. It is not just one contest, but each community will have its own rules and judging criteria.
This news may surprise many of you who know about my passion for the company and its technologies. I joined Sun as a consultant in 1995 and took a full time position in 1997. Relocated to India in 2001, but stayed with Sun. It is not easy leaving a company where I learned a lot from the individuals and the infrastructure.
This separation potentially gets me more family time and I will look forward to doing more activities centered in Hyderabad rather than sticking to Bangalore. I miss the great minds at Sun, but strongly feel that with the current global economies and the trend towards open source technologies, that can be bridged easily.
Today I am handing over my laptop and other infrastructure back to Sun. I need to procure some systems to be online “securely.” Until then, I may be out of touch with emails and blogs. I can be reached by email at spurthi at gmail dot com.
I am also planning to take 1-2 weeks of complete time off, before talking to potential associations and affiliations. This break is very much due after more than a decade here.
Will be back online soon.
Sun is conducting medical evaluations for all the employees in India, in collaboration with the insurance company and Sagar Hospitals. I am glad to see lot of employees are taking this opportunity and sparing time to get themselves evaluated.
I went thru these tests on Monday and the reports came on Wednesday. All the reports came up with very normal readings and the doctor pronounced that I am in good health. The only issue is my weight, which can reduce by higher single digits in kilos, to qualify me to be in a much better health condition. (Sorry if the last sentence confuses you. I intentionally made it that way 🙂 )
I should put some serious efforts in that direction. Few years ago, my triglycerides are approaching the suggested maximum, so in the span of 2 years, I got them to a very reasonable level. Now I have to work on the weight factor.
It is always refreshing to talk to some people. John has been doing great work on how to open up ARC process for communities and how to tune it to the changing landscape of scale, participation and the audience. This morning, I had a 15 minute stop over at Katy’s office along with John. We talked about their caboose repainting and I got a print copy of Willow Glen Resident that covered the move of the Caboose. (I felt that John looked like the dad in The Incredibles in that picture.) BTW, thanks Katy for that T-Shirt.
In the last decade of my exposure to US stock markets, I have seen a company’s ticker symbol change only when there are mergers and takeovers and subsequent consolidations. I have never seen a company rebranding itself in the financial markets, without actually going for a formal name change. That unusual event happened with Sun this week. Starting Monday, the 27th, Sun’s ticker symbol changed from SUNW to JAVA. What it may suggest is the product/technology with 12 years of age has made a bigger brand name and identity when compared to its incubating company.
Where else did I see this phenomena outside the IT industry? During my childhood, I used to watch stage plays in the coastal India town of Palakollu. I observed that many of these stage play production houses used to have their most successful play (usually the very first one, which gets all the energies from everyone involved) as their banner name. So I used to ask this question: If their most successful play eventually became (after its success) their banner name, under which banner name they played that particular play? Note that those plays usually had a run of a few years before they are deemed successful. The answer typically is that they used to have a well thought about banner name, but their successful play eventually became their brand identity. Their initial banner name eventually used to limit itself to trivia questions. 🙂
But one thing I learned from the stage play industry. The show goes on and the actors deliver the same punch, even after the transition to the new brand. That rule holds good here too.
I am sure Sun will continue to deliver the software and hardware with the same passion and ever improving performance and quality, irrespective of the brand in the financial markets. The show goes on!
Recently published results from Dataquest put Sun at number 10 in the best employer list in India. Sun ranked high on employee satisfaction score and topped the ranks in categories like work-life balance.
Happy 60th Independence Day, India!
In this global economy, innovations are critical to a country’s growth. India made a mark in the global arena as an emerging economy, now time to showcase its potential to innovate. For innovations to be competent and cost effective, countries like India should look towards tools and solutions that are standards based, open, not-so-restrictive and globally available. Innovations in any field of study now require an Information Technology eco system to back it up, right from pure documentation needs to high end grid computing needs. How can we expose our young minds to the technologies that play a major role in defining the open source based information technology landscape?
Sun launched Code For Freedom contest today for students in India’s academic institutions. Students from recognized Indian academic institutions can contribute to a select list of Open Source products and get themselves exposed to the inner workings of these leading edge technologies. While doing so, even at a student level, they get exposed to the architecture and design of these technologies and work on the actual code, thanks to open source! In addition, they get to win prizes too.
If you are a student in India, this is a great opportunity. Please register for the program, contribute to an open source technology (your choice from the technologies listed here) and submit that info to Sun. It is trivial that you should follow the code contribution rules of respective communities of the technology of your choice. That gives you a feel of what is to be part of an innovating community, a feel of being in the participation age. Wish you all the best!
Happy Independence Day again, independence from proprietary products and independence to know the inner workings of great technologies!
The UltraSparc T2 processor is just amazing! 60Gbps BW capacity? 64 threads simultaneously running? At about 95 Watts? This is gonna rock!
BTW, if you are eager to know what we are going to get you in 2008, look at the graph at the end of this data sheet.
This SEC filing by Sun (which I obtained thru RSS feeds) talks about potential costs in first half of FY08 due to reductions in workforce.