Monthly Report: 07/15/2001 - 08/15/2001

Name: Honglin Su, Technology Account Specialist, Central Region

1. SUMMARY

Focus on AT&T and Rogers, it’s joyful to see orders have been put through, systems have been installed, and projects have been moved forward, which I have been following up at the very beginning.

"You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself", it’s really a reward to be treated as a partner instead of just a vendor because of the value-added service. Teamed with John Wellwood, Ken Kembry, Ron Marshall and our SE family, we will set a new record in FY02.

2. Accounts Activities

• AT&T Canada and AT&T Global Network Service
1. AT&T Canada corporate has been affected by the current economic recession. The company was under performance during the last quarters, and announced to cut off 10% of workforce, which are around 500 employees nationwide. Given such a bad situation, AT&T Canada has to move from chaos to value otherwise it can’t survive, nevertheless it is an opportunity for Sun.
2. AT&T Canada is the only company that has nationwide network coverage, the entire infrastructure is there, but the question is how the company enhances its competitive advantage and beats the downturn after the short-term reorganization. I have to work hard and understand what’s going on during this special period.
3. Although many projects have been held on, a database upgrade project was approved and funded recently so that I can help the customer plan for this project from Sun perspective.
4. AT&T Canada has never used Sun enterprise service before. Educated by us over the past year, the customer starts to consider using ES to increase its own service level. For a recent project, the customer purchased the standard Silver service for 2 x E220R. It’s a good starting point anyway.
5. Worked with Ron Marshall to help AT&T Canada IES (Internet and E-business Services, used to be NetCom, which was acquired by AT&T Canada, and will be integrated into AT&T Canada corporate in the coming months) identify the concerns while they are deploying HP OpenView on Sun Solaris (HP is trying to move them to HP-UX). Had a discussion and collected relevant information, sent the questions to HP, and got HP’s feedback. I am impressed by HP’s prompt response in this specific case.
6. Traced a few technical questions that have been answered a while ago (Solstice OSI 8.1.1 / 9.0, patches, server consolidation, etc.), with a proactive approach, let the customer feel that they are being taken good care of.
7. Had a few talks with people at AT&T Global Network Services, investigated how to build a distributed backup strategy with only OS supplied commands.

• Rogers

1. Rogers iMedia project: after a few months’ work, the customer ordered Sun equipment, which are 4 x Netra t1 AC200 and one E220R with A1000, Sun Enterprise Services has been added as well (uplift to 2 hours on-site response). Though it might not be the first order in FY02 (might be), it demonstrated our value and was a nice kickoff in the new fiscal year.

2. Rogers AT&T Wireless has a large engineering site in Montreal. With John and Ken, we drove to Montreal and stayed there overnight. We did a very good presentation, Ken updated Solaris, Cluster and Storage, while I talked about our Sun Fire MidFrame servers. The message we delivered to the customer was how to add our value to their business, and we were not intended to conduct such a face-to-face discussion as a one-time exercise only, and we will have consistent activities to follow up.

3. Rogers Cable IT is considering how to build a strategy for performance management and capacity planning. I initiated a meeting, had an informative talk with their staff, and proposed some necessary steps to take away. The customer expects to have new service broker application release and projects user growth; however, it’s almost impossible to credibly estimate the actual capacity while the target application is not ready yet. With help from Sun ACE, we have done a performance measurement on their current production environment. As an ongoing project, I will work with ACE to meet the customer’s requirement and expectation.

• Sun Life Financial and Spectrum Investments

1. Some activities are happening at Sun Life such as PeopleSoft project and server consolidation. Had talks with Dave Mason and Artono, cooperated with them for their account transition. After that, since Bruce Andersen is the new TAS for this account, made a smooth transition so that Bruce was aware of all current technical activities and issues.

2. During this period, Dave and I also had a meeting with Sun Life Operation management, discussed issues with server consolidation, and followed up with relevant technical documents. SunPS has been invited to help the customer for this project. It has been transferred to Artono and Bruce for further support.

3. TRAINING SUMMARY

§ Registered 2001 JavaOne online training: it is cost-effective, and I can take some sessions that will be beneficial for my work and I can take at any convenient time.

4. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

• Account planning sessions for AT&T and Rogers, build strategy and tactics to achieve goal of FY02;.
• Take some days off for vacation;

6. Others

• Plan to take a training course on Serengeti in September, due to the increase requests from the customers;