Date: December 4, 2003

As it comes to the year end, it's time to conduct a review. I have to analyze myself under the microscope. Only after I thoroughly know myself, shall I excel in the future. Here come the questions to ask myself: what is my forte after my six-year's career at Sun as a pre-sales engineer? what are my weak points that I have to improve?

I think that I am really good at execution, which is a high mark while quite comprehensive appraisal of my past experience. Given any projects or opportunities discoveries, regardless the size, I take them seriously. Well planning, I quickly and smoothly move forward toward the goals. Being result and customer oriented, I am proficiently in coordinating internal resources in line with the customers' expectation, while at the same time, I have also well managed the cross functional communication among different departments within Sun and the customers. Meanwhile, I am able to resolve any conflicts in the course of projects in the manner of protecting the best interests of Sun and our customers.

Not even to mention the big wins to which contributed in the past, there are tons of small ones in which I demonstrated such quality virtually every day. For example, when somebody else at Sun delivered a piece of wrong message to the customer and the partner, which caused furor to the customer and made the project stalled, I did take the responsibility to sort the right message out, but not necessarily to blame the person, ultimately we all represent Sun Microsystems; instead, I'll rationalize the message to the person who caused the trouble to realize the best approach to eradicate the problem. e.g. Dexit project, GETS process for Siemens, Jumbo Frame and Trunking tuning at Rogers, etc.

Another good thing about myself is my ability to capture business ideas with appropriate technology solutions. I have the mandate to convey Sun's technology and solutions to our customers' business environment. No doubt, I have to talk speeds and feeds of our products; meanwhile, I have also to take different approach when working with business side of the company. For example, while positioning Sun's x86 offering, I told the customers that we gave your options to meet your business needs. You wouldn't care about the underlying operating systems (Solaris, Linux, or Windows), nor would you care about the hardware (SPARC or x86). But here Sun can work with you and partners, we give you a turn-key solution from product, support, solution and finance. Thus, it sounds appealing

I respect those people who work very hard, and I am the same type of people too. I admire the greatest strategists who use their brains to beat the competition. “Know the enemy and know yourself, and your victory will never to endangered.” said by Sun Tzu over 2,500 years ago. I use the words to motivate myself to think about every scenario and help the sales team to achieve best results. I have regular communication with my customers and Sun partners, consequently, I know what's happening at my customers, and who the competitors are. I will also build the business rapport to nurture Sun's champions.

The other thing I am so proud of is my integrity and passion for technology. This is more toward the personalities. From time to time, the customers would tell me some confidential information, I appreciated their frankness and openness to share the information, so I listened to them carefully and offer my counsel by leveraging my technical expertise. I strictly observe the rules of the business conduct.

My technical background is solid, but I continue to enhance by training, online reading, and so on.

Honglin Su

2003-12-04T18:05:44