Monthly Report: 02/16/2002 - 03/15/2002

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

1. SUMMARY

Have entered the panic state as the year-end is approaching, diligently driving the opportunities at Rogers, a few orders have been cut in the month (500~600K);

Organized Sun product update session to Infrastructure Design department at AT&T Canada, and I presented the topic on Sun Fire server while Ken Kembry delivered Solaris update.

Proactively approached Sun Life with Dave Mason for the Oracle Financial opportunity, I did a technology and product presentation to the software engineering director.

Leveraged CiRBA, a partner of Sun Management Center, I arranged two SunMC demo sessions at CiRBA for AT&T Canada (Business Support department and Internet Infrastructure department)

Quite heavy workload in the past month, I asked Bob Hazlett to get involved with the continuing support to Kinetrics/OPG SAP upgrade project (Jordan's account, I helped him in December 2001, now Kinectrics/OPG has a new project manager on board).  I can back Bob if he needs any help.

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

2.1     AT&T Canada

1. AT&T Canada has taken the ownership of their data centre (used to be managed by IBM GS), I advised them to use Sun Management Center to better manage Sun environment (around 200 Sun server at long distance telecom business support site), and set up the testing environment. At the perfect timing, CiRBA (Jonathan Rezek and Andrew Hillier) contacted me, and I believe this is the right resource I can leverage to help my customer. I coordinated the different parties at AT&T Canada; arranged two demo sessions at CiRBA, let the customer know SunMC product, its value proposition and the position of CiRBA.

2. Continued to influence the team of Infrastructure Design, this is the department that is supposed to design enterprise wide standard. I organized a half-day presentation, I presented Sun Fire server, and Ken Kembry did Solaris, also invited CiRBA for the topic of system management. It was well received, and I also followed up the outstanding questions from the meeting.

3. Finally the server consolidation initiative has been kicked off. With Keith Goobie (SunPS technical manager), and John, we held a meeting with Gary Lee (UNIX manager) and the relevant business manager. This was to identify the right applications and systems to work with.

4. Cherrystone! This is the right product that will meet the business need at Internet Infrastructure department (ISP, used to be named NetCom). Evaluated the possible path for the customer to go to Sun Fire server/Solaris 8, submitted a loaner request for Sun Fire 280R. So the customer can use the loaner 280R to test Solaris 8/Oracle, and once Cherrystone is available, they can smoothly migrate to Cherrystone.

5. Sun Cluster 3.0 evaluation: NetCom has several flavors of HP Openview that might require it, The backbone and server farm have increased in importance, and true HA monitoring has become a lot more important across the entire company, especially with the talk of ITO Telco Extensions. I will assist the customer for Cluster 3.0 evaluation process.

2.2     Rogers

1. Rogers Cable IT: the manager of Gateway Systems informed me instantly when the re-engineering project was approved, and a PO was cut on that day. Though it is not a big project, a couple of Sun Fire 280Rs, a few Netra T1 AC200s, and some storage arrays to replace PC based Cable Gateway systems, it is just an another success that I have driven the whole sales process to a good outcome.

2. Rogers Cable Network Shared Services: gave the manager a brief product update, and how Solaris 8 and Sun Fire servers fit into their environment. Some of new management tools like BMC Patrol are running on Sun Fire server and Solaris 8, but due to the special requirement of APRISMA's Spectrum (Solaris 2.6), a few more E420Rs instead of Sun Fire were ordered.

3. Proactively work with a few key technical guys at Rogers Wireless OSS, updated product roadmap with server and storage, new storage array D2 is being ordered to feed the extra storage need of V880. I am also evaluating a possible storage opportunity of SE 9960 or SE6960, registered with Wayne Hogan as Sun opportunity instead of HDS.

4. Attended quite a few meetings with senior managers at Rogers Wireless, the customer is looking for solutions to leverage current SMS network. Wireless system architect Daniel Legault from Ottawa is helping us with this opportunity.

5. With John, we had meetings with Lucent account teams of AT&T Canada and Rogers respectively, shared with account information with each other. Rogers is looking for a performance management tool that provides billing/utilization information concerning their new services. As VOD service is rolling out, the newly added set-top boxes are using IP for data communication; besides, the Internet Lite will also increase the demands for IP management and mediation. It is a great opportunity for both of Sun and Lucent.

2.3     Sun Life Financial

1. Have influenced the UNIX managers of Sun Life. There is some uncertainty due to the merger between Sun Life and Clarica, since Clarica is basically an IBM shop, and there is some function overlap in the IT department of both companies. I discussed with Dave, synchronized our approaching strategy: The more business critical applications are running on Sun, the easier the UNIX manager and his team of Sun Life secure their job.

2. An on-going project is Oracle Financial. The total Financial user count is estimated to be 850 total users, of which 285 would be concurrent. We proposed Sun Fire 6800 for the Database Server, the App and Web Servers were proposed to be Sun Fire 280 as of sizing result last year. With Dave Mason, we moved forward with this project quickly. We met the director of accounting and finance, upon finishing the meeting; I suggested another meeting with the project leader (Eric Fayoux, director of software engineering). In the presentation, I conveyed SunONE vision and strategy when I talked about Sun product and technology (to educate the customer).

3. The Internet division of Sun Life recommended Sun servers as the standard web hosting platform, I promptly got hold the UNIX manager Gord Cook. With Dave, we wanted to facilitate their internal communication, and create a pro-Sun atmosphere, and bring more business to Sun.

4. Introduced CiRBA to Sun Life, and hopefully CiRBA can bring some value to Sun Life.

3. TRAINING SUMMARY

3.1 Mainframe rehosting;

3.2 Cherrystone sneak peek.

4. MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

5. PLAN FOR THE UPCOMING MONTH

5.1 AT&T server consolidation with SunPS;

5.2 Identify IP mediation/billing opportunity with Lucent at Rogers Cable;

5.3 Storage/Sun Fire opportunity at Rogers Wireless;

5.4 Mainframe rehosting initial assessment (Ron Marshall) at Rogers;

5.5 Oracle Financial project at Sun Life;

I am also thinking of a training course on Wireless/Telecom in the coming month in Toronto at SunEdu.