Monthly Report: 05/15/2001 - 06/15/2001

Name: Honglin Su, Technology Account Specialist, Central Region

1. SUMMARY

Worked closely with the reps, took the customer satisfaction as the top priority, and have built good reputation at the customer sites. Share the success with the sales rep., glad to know the John can exceed the sales number (roughly 150%).

2. Accounts Activities

• AT&T Canada and AT&T Global Network Service
1. After the successful completion of the SAP production system upgrade (which brought us a couple of new E4500 and some parts), followed up with their system planners and got the first-hand customer feedback. Meanwhile, started to plan for John for the coming fiscal year, initiated our next lunch and learn session on Sun Fire and High Availability.
2. Organized an education session on Solaris 8 at AT&T IES (Internet and E-Business Service, NetCom), Ken did an excellent presentation and it was well received. Thanks to Ron Marshall as well, he was present in the meeting and answered tough questions on the network. After the presentation, followed up any outstanding issues such as new features on Solaris 8 and Sun Management Center.

• Rogers

1. As a continuing effort, I have been working with ACE performance and engineering group to help Rogers Cable evaluate whether they have sufficient hardware platform to support their growing business with the new service broker application. David Collier-Brown of ACE was assigned as the project manager; I coordinated with ACE and system admin. of the Rogers. After collecting some performance measurement (sar), ACE came out a preliminary report on the current environment and raised some questions about the applications, disk layout, etc.

2. It’s a long story about the license issue of SPARC C/C++ compiler 4.2, but finally it was resolved. The customer needs the license to put some applications into the production immediately and the permanent license for any future maintenance, however, 4.2 is an old compiler and has been end of life for a while, and there is no normal channel to solve the permanent license issue. We offered the customer a few options, such as upgrading to Forte 6 by using the compatibility mode, demo license on a monthly basis, or even the permanent license of 4.2 based on a business decision at the cost of Sun (with the help from the product manager and the sales), etc. It is not just to solve a trivial problem at the customer site, but also the way to build the long-term customer relationship and achieve our sales goal. Here comes the quote from the customer:

“ Honglin, I can't thank you ENOUGH for this email. Just now we were putting the finishing touches on three major coding projects and at the stroke of midnight, we lost the compiler. Fortunately your long term planning paid off and I was able to use lit to get the new compiler in and working.”

Note: for the same division at Rogers Cable, more than 1M Sun gears (E420Rs) were book at the same time.

3. Rogers iMedia: a new area for Sun at Rogers. 17 radio stations sites by year-end, sharing a common host/server and common applications. At this point should have 6 or 7, but have 1 site (Kiss 92) which resides outside of a CMS (Content Management System) on an independent server. Issue has been around CMS usability. Eprise selected as CMS. In this case, worked with customer and different partners to deliver a good solution to Rogers, e.g. BlueSpark for the whole project management, Eprise for the CMS vendor, iPlanet suggested as the application and web server, InfoStream is the responsible for Sun equipment (5 x Netra T1 AC200) fulfillment.

• Sun Life Financial and Spectrum Investments

1. Sun Life: did a few quotations based on different sizing information for the customer TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis.

2. Sun Life sent out a storage consolidation RFQ, as a mandatory requirement, it has to support Novell environment. Had discussion with Domenic, it seems that we don’t have any direct solution for Novell. Dave was also looking for some system integrators (Amdahl, Arqana, etc.) to lead the role of the project and compete against IBM, Compaq, Dec, HDS, etc., let’s see if there is any chances for us.

3. Another interesting question on NVRAM the customer asked me, he is a system admin at Sun Life. He read book "Solaris Security" by Peter H. Gregory, which recommends to obtain a spare PROM (NVRAM) for each critical server that serves HostID-specific software for system recovery preparation, and suggests contacting nearest Sun branch office for information. After having done a little bit research and consulted a few service people, then let the customer know that we can replace the NVRAM chip if it fails, but the customer has to return the original NVRAM chip, we will not supply any spare NVRAM with similar HostID, however, it is their own responsibility if they want to buy from the market.

4. Sun Life (Spectrum Investments): the hardware upgrade (E5000: from 4 x 250MHz CPUs to 8 x 400MHz) was delayed for a few months, and it was brought up to the table at this time. The customer wants the benchmark number of their own in-house application, which would show significant performance improvement if they proceed with the upgrade. Dave worked out a solution with 2 x E3500 (one with 6 x 400MHz CPUs and one with 3 x 400MHz CPUs) for try and buy, the customer can utilized the parts of the E3500s, and to build the new production E5000. On the con-call with Dave and the customer, highlighted the benefits of using our service to implement the actual upgrade, such that to guarantee the process control for us, and we don’t want to take back the E3500s. (Note: this is going to happen during the weekend of June 23 or the following week.)

3. TRAINING SUMMARY

4. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

• Assisted Vic for loaner pool on a needed basis;

5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

• Sun Fire presentation for AT&T and Rogers;
• Work with ACE performance engineering group for Performance evaluation and application sizing for Rogers cable;
• Continuous support for AT&T, Rogers and Sun Life;

6. Others

• Plan to take some training on Serengeti in the next months, due to the increase requests from the customers;