Monthly Report: 03/15/2001 - 04/15/2001

Name: Honglin Su, Technology Account Specialist, Central Region

1. SUMMARY

It’s a busy and productive month. Deep penetration at AT&T and Rogers; it’s a great opportunity for me not only to show Sun’s value, but also help the customers follow the right technology direction; thus address the customer’s business driven issues and increase Sun’s revenue at the customers. (The more time I spent with the customers, the more opportunities we will get.)

Thanks to Peter Pan and Ron Marshall.

2. Accounts Activities

• AT&T Canada and AT&T Global Network Service
1. Spent regular hours at AT&T, got insight information about the ongoing projects at AT&T; while attending the staff meeting, addressed the customer’s questions on Sun. Worked closely with their operation planners to plan for the SAP production systems upgrade, which includes hardware, operating environment, and the software.
2. Organized the second Lunch-and-Learn session for AT&T on Solaris and application porting, invited engineers from ACE to help us complete the session. Ken presented Solaris 8, and people from ACE hosted a topic on application porting technique. 25 people from AT&T attended the session, and it was well received.
3. There are quite a few on-going projects, such as the service broker platform (Vitria), web applications (WebSphere), etc. We are not in bad shape in those projects, (Sun is the main application development platform in this organization), however, we are also facing tough competition from IBM, which is pushing the customer from the top executives. John, Ken and I work very closely; meanwhile, SunPS will also get involved in some projects like server consolidation and OS standardization. All of our efforts are to increase Sun’s awareness within the organization, help both the customer and ourselves.

• Rogers
1. While I have good momentum at AT&T, John hopes that I can bring such practice to Rogers as well. The customer promptly responded John’s initiative. Working inside the customer, it is a little bit different experience, they are willing to share the information with me; they treat us as their business partner instead of just a hardware vendor.
2. For Rogers Cable, I am working with the application server technology department; help them validate a sizing draft on Service Activation & Management Platform. This is not just to do a sanitary check for the proposed configuration, but also to build trusted customer relationship, so that to bring more business opportunities to Sun.
3. For Rogers Media and @HOME, there are some good opportunities for us. Ron and Mathew contributes their value, tens of Netra T1 will be deployed to the site. I am going to follow up.

• Sun Life Financial

A very promising account, quite a few activities are undergoing.

1. With Peter Pan and Dave Mason, we had a very good presentation to their Internet Technology group. Dave had an overview on Sun in Insurance, Peter presented Serengeti and I talked what’s new on Solaris 8. The purpose was to help them understand our new production and technology direction, and write a proposal on operating environment from SunLife corporate perspective. Such a good briefing would definitely put Sun Solaris in a favorable position at SunLife.

2. SunLife is Sun Enterprise Service’s golden contract customer, there is a dedicated service engineer assigned to the account. Since there were a few service calls recently, I met service engineer frequently and got the first hand information on what happened. So I scheduled a meeting with the customer, and brought service engineer to the customer (UNIX team, manager and director), Dave joined us. The is the way to build a team and show One Sun image to the customer.

· Spectrum Investments

Identified the requirement for the web applications, promptly responded their questions, and justified the configuration based on the tight budget, and thus help them move forward the project. We will have E420R, E220R, D1000 and A1000 rolled out in the coming weeks, which is good for the sales reps.

· Motorola

With Ken, we did a product update session at the customer site. I took the Sun Fire (Serengeti) part, while Ken presented Solaris and Storage. After the session, followed up the customer’s questions on our product and technology.

3. TRAINING SUMMARY

• IBM Data Management (DB2) on Solaris
• Serengeti launch and SE BTV
• SANstorm by Canatek (SAN makes a lot of noise nowadays, however, the seminar itself was informative.)
• IPlanet portal update

4. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

• Presented JETS (Java Equipment Tracking System) to the team, and assisted Vic while he needed technical support.

5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

• Keep up the momentum at AT&T, Rogers and Sun Life, work closely with Sales Reps. for Q4.
• Participate WWVW (Internet Safety for kids)
• Storage plan for Sun Life, etc.
• Sun Fire launch in Toronto.

6. Others

• Plan to take some training course on High Availability, Performance and Tuning (Q1 FY02), which is critical to my customer’s business (Rogers and AT&T). Meanwhile, XML is still my focus.