Monthly Report: 11/16/2001 - 12/15/2001

Name: Honglin Su, Technology Account Specialist, Central Ontario Region

1. SUMMARY

Good to be working on Sun Life with Dave Mason again, received warm welcome from the customer.

Thought seriously how to bring value to our customers; Besides Sun’s knowledge, I also spent time to enhance my expertise in the Telco industry. Reading broadly from the net, magazines, books, and so on, offered some insightful information to John from time to time, how we can better approach AT&T and Rogers (from customer buying to solution selling).

2. Accounts Activities (AT&T, Rogers, and Sun Life Financial)

2.1 Rogers Cable IT Application Services

Cable IT is the IT support division for application services such as provisioning, service broker, etc. The customer is using various platforms from E450 to E4500. Closely worked with their senior people, recommended an upgrade for the existing 3 x E4500, also added new Sun Fire V880 and F280R, which brought 400~500K revenue to Sun.

2.2 Rogers Cable Gateway System

Gateway system of Rogers Cable acts as a protocol hub for information exchange (such as cable billing) between IBM mainframe and other systems. While the current hardware is based on PC, we are pushing it to migrate to Sun/Solaris platform. Frequent discussions were conducted (even in late Friday afternoon or Saturday), help the customer architecting the whole migration solution. Netra T1 or Sun Fire 280R is the potential candidate for the communication server, and high availability (Cluster 3.0) was also considered as well. It’s not a big project, however it is chance for us to demonstrate how Sun brings value to the customer.

2.3 Rogers Wireless storage opportunity

With Domenic and Ken, we had an interesting meeting with Francois Noel and Bernard (con-call). 1 TB usable storage plus 1 TB archive (would be 3TB raw space), and SE9960 is being considered currently. It is for budgetary planning of next year.

2.4 Rogers Wireless J2ME opportunity

We held a half day seminar on SunONE and Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) for Rogers Wireless system developing division, which was a kick-off point for mutual understanding: what Rogers Wireless is doing and how we can offer any help to them. Sun Software Rep. (Hugh Gale) and SE (Scott Stillabower) in Ottawa were involved.

2.5 AT&T Canada Server Consolidation Initiative

I had some very informative talks with operation planning people (Madalin Popa and Josephine Chan) at AT&T Canada, they gave me much good information, such as what's going on with different projects; the big DSL project may be canceled, however, the major component Vitria is still alive; etc. The concerns from their perspective are how to effectively manage so many systems and heterogeneous platforms, keep the server/storage inventory up-to-date, and so on. Thus we come to a common goal: The server consolidation is actually what the customer wants in the near future, definitely it will help them: save the cost and increase their service level. Those old ways at AT&T Canada may be gone, that is: whenever a new application is needed, a production box and a standby testing/developing box will be ordered. AT&T Canada definitely needs to implement some new strategy. And the customer also felt that our Sun Fire Midframe server bears the idea of server consolidation and centralized management (e.g. DR and Dynamic domains). The next step may be how we engage Gary Lee (senior UNIX manager) to follow the right direction. Only after the initial server consolidation assessment and proof of concept, can we create a foreseeable opportunities in the coming months. The good news is that we ARE in the direction to the server consolidation initiative.

2.6 AT&T Canada (Service issue)

Introduced the “new” service rep. Maureen Ziccardi to the customer. To help the customer increase their service level, we have to engage Enterprise Service for the budgetary planning and every significant project.

2.7 Sun Life Lotus Notes project

Reviewed the configuration and clarified some technical issues such as rack, remote control (RSC), etc. The proposal architecture would be 4 x V880, 2 in Canada and 2 in US; 2 x V880 for disaster recovery purpose.

2.8 Sun Life Financial/HR project

The software has been chosen, and Oracle is who they are now negotiating with. The project will only include the Financial Modules, the HR project was not approved. The financial modules to be installed include, GL, Consolidation, Financial DataWarehouse,Budgeting, Purchasing,Cash management, etc,etc, No decision has been made on a hardware platform, Sun will definitely be in the running for this business, HP and IBM as well. We can expect to get involved again, 2-3 week of

January.

2.9 Misc. Technical Support

Help the customer (Kinectrics, Jordan’s account) plan SAP systems upgrade. Offered the customer 3 options to think about. Worked late into night to deliver a prompt response.

Solution 1: Trade in all old E450/E250, use UltraSPARC-III based V880 (4xCPU and 8GB memory) and Sun Fire 280R (2xCPU and 4GB memory). CAD$369,078.50 (list price)

Solution 2: Keep all the existing E450/E250, add more CPU/memory to them, and add new E250 for new DEV and BPR servers. CAD$89,040.00 (list price)

Solution 3: Only upgrade E450 to V880 (4 CPU and 8GB memory), still keep the existing E250 by adding more CPU/memory, and add new E250 for new DEV and BPR servers. This also utilizes the extra memory and internal disk drives of E450. CAD$163,537.50 (list price)

For each solution, gave them comments on the advantage or disadvantage.

3. TRAINING SUMMARY

3.1 Had an excellent training at Sun Education Woodbine training centre on Sun Cluster 3.0. I am glad that we have such a wonderful training facility in town, such that I can take care of the customer’s while in training.

4. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

5.1 Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

5.2 Continue to enhance industry knowledge in Telco (especially in Mobile Business); Start to build some kind of blueprints of AT&T and Rogers’ infrastructure on both system platform and business applications.

5.3 Server consolidation at AT&T Canada (plan to take a training course on system performance management to prepare for it, also in Woodbine centre)

5.4 Follow up Sun Life Notes and Financial/HR project