1. SUMMARY

Work hard to help the sales rep. (John Wellwood and Dave Mason) develop opportunity at AT&T, Sun Life, and so on, full of challenge and excitement, and got more chances to present different topics at the customer’s site, also spent over-time hours with the customer, and help them plan the project and answer their technical questions.

Thank Domenic, Peter, Ron and Matthew, who help me in the accounts with different activities.

2. Accounts Activities

• AT&T Canada and AT&T Global Network Service

1. Work inside the customer (operation planning group), spent regular hours at the customer site, attended the staff meeting and be their trusted Sun resource. My first challenge was to evaluate any potential problems when they upgraded their SAP production system (E4000) from Solaris 2.5.1 to 2.6, clarified the technical concerns from Sun perspective, and the outcome was excellent, it was a very smooth migration. Step by step, built trusted relationship with them.

2.Currently work on major server software upgrade, which include OS upgrade from 2.5.1/2.6 to 7/8 and 15~20 different application porting as well. From the server platform point of view, the majority of the applications run on Sun (26 out of 30 are E4000/E4500/E450, 2 on HP and 2 on IBM). The software upgrade might not be bring us big immediate revenue, given such a strategic customer, we have to make them happy to follow our direction, and thus make the number in the long-term, otherwise, IBM is pushing hard from the higher level to attack us. I am in the process of getting ACE engaged, whose engineer plans to offer the developers of AT&T a presentation which will focus on application porting from 32-bit to 64-bit.

3.Server component upgrade is needed as well as new testing purpose E4500. Due to the customer’s tight budget, tried to find out not only the most cost-effective but also feasible ways to upgrade existing production system (250MHz@E4000) by leveraging new development server (400MHz @E4500).

4.Kicked off the lunch-and-learn session at AT&T, about 20 people attended the first session. I presented our server product line, delivered the message: one architecture (SPARC), one OS (Solaris) and SMP, Ron talked about new Cobalt appliance. It was well-received, and next session will be Solaris and Cluster.

5.Continued to work with Advanced Data Center at Mississauga for their firewall project. With John Wellwood, our prompt response let us be in a very favorable position when the customer deploys firewall server at the data-center. We talked about 6 x E250 at this time.

• Rogers
1.Rogers Wireless. Followed up Ken’s effort on various servers’ deal (E450, E280R, T3, etc.), communicated with the reseller (Infostream), confirmed the configuration.

2.Rogers@Home: thank Matthew, while Ken and I were not available on that day, he led the technology discussion at the customer site, which might be about 39 x E420R range servers.

3.Rogers Cable: touched base with their contract developers, helped them get started with application porting of Cabletron network management software.

• Sun Life Financial

It is also a busy month for this account. Together with Dave Mason, penetrated Sun’s vision and strategy to senior management level. SunPS has been engaged with Emerging Technologies at Sun Life, which has been built recently to develop a "strategy" plan for the next 3 years, focus on server consolidation. Meanwhile, help the Internet group to fit Sun’s server and Solaris in their environment, with Peter and Dave, we did a very good presentation, Dave talked about Sun in finance and insurance industry, Peter featured Serengeti, and I took the Solaris part.

Met the people of UNIX group, identified what their concern on the storage was, which they opened a service ticket recently. There are 2 x A5000, which are connected with E3500 (SBus) and E250 (PCI). As a matter of fact, PCI or SBus based systems can not be mixed in the same A5000 fabre channel loop (it is ok in a split loop). Based on the existing environment, two alternative solutions were given to the customer:

1. Add large capacity disk drives (36GB) into the existing array, split the fabre loop between E3500 and E250, let each system have enough storage. This is the short term and temporary solution.

2. Changing the SBUS to PCI in the E3500. When they upgrade the OS of E3500 to Solaris 8, they can use PCI I/O board plus the new FC adapter (X6799A) to connect A5000, so that E3500 and E450 can share both A5000s. (the old PCI FC adapter X6722A can not be used on Ex500/Ex000 PCI I/O board, so this is the only solution to share the storage, instead of splitting the storage).

• Spectrum Investments

A lot of efforts have been put into this account. To move forward our storage (T3ES) and server upgrade (E5000) solution, with Domenic, we set up a demo environment at NetFusion. For proof of concept, we installed Veritas Volume Manager and Instant Image, the purpose of this demo is to address their current business concern of long backup window, we would want to show them how Instant Image can backup the data on the fly and thus minimize the backup window. However, the customer changed the direction to SAN environment, and the SAN solution has to support Solaris, NT and Netware, which are the immediate requirements of Spectrum now. We keep the server business, but have to fight back for the storage share with help of Domenic.

• Renaissance Tour on Serengeti, it is very informative and helpful.

4. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

• Updated JETS (Java Equipment Tracking System) web site, and will help Vic sync the equipment inventory and customer data.

5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

• Keep up the momentum at AT&T and Sun Life, work closely with Sales Rep. for Q4.
• Prepare presentation of Solaris 8/ Serengeti /Cluster for AT&T and Motorola;
• Plan the presentation for AT&T development group on application porting, which will be done by ACE.
• Storage plan for Sun Life, etc.
• Spend a few mintues to present JETS to the team.