Sun's CIO Talks Internal Experiences

daria42 writes "This is an interesting interview with Sun's chief information officer Bill Vass, about his experiences as the CIO of one of the world's best-known high-tech company. In particular, Vass talks about corporate blogging (and frustrated lawyers), problems providing IT support to finicky Sun engineers (who sometimes demand Indian help desk support knows kernel details), Sun's programs testing its software internally on employees before it goes out, and how ultimately, his job is like any other CIO's...just with some cool toys."

Comments

Herding Cats

[DanielMarkham]

While the CIO is more businesman than technical guy, his job has to be like herding cats. FTA

In another example, Vass received a mysterious note that a major system had been disabled and had stopped production on a hardware chip. Although Vass had no knowledge of this, he soon discovered the system in question was in fact the desktop machine of an engineer who had recently left the company. The desktop had been reformatted following his departure, cutting off 600 users who had over the last three years depended on it for network services.

I knew a major financial company, which will remain nameless, that rolled out a new customer product a couple years ago. When I was talking to the architect, it turns out the whole thing was running off a computer under his desk! He said that one day he accidentally kicked the power switch, and the whole place went beserk. I "encouraged" him to perhaps move it to the server farm, where it would be a little safer. He declined, saying he "wanted more control" over the application until it was stable enough. And this was on a production product.
I do NOT envy the job of CIO. Those guys have a tough row to hoe. BTW, if you ever want to know how the industry is being perceived by business, CIO magazine is a great read.(but expensive) It's real eye-opener to hear things from the other side of the tracks.

Moore's Law: Not the Only Game in Town

Re:One Point, One Big Problem

[AKAImBatman]

Reminds me when I got my first Sun Workstation. One of the things that impressed me most about it was that the machine could run tons of services AND support my regular desktop usage without the two impacting each other. It was hard to resist the temptation to load the machine to bear.

For awhile I was running nightly Mozilla builds, and even considered voluteering to be the build source for Solaris Sparc binaries. (The Mozilla project had a hard time getting Solaris builds back then.) Sadly, I left the company before I could volunteer. I imagine that if they had that machine plugged into the network and turned on, it would still be building Mozilla every night, automatically. :-)

Not bright? The clue meter is reading zero.

[WidescreenFreak]

I need to clarify I think that price cuts are a good thing for Sun. I didn't realize with my first reply that you were actually criticizing Sun for cutting prices. How cutting prices is a death knell is beyond me.

The FACT is that Sun's hardware has been way OVERPRICED for almost a decade! That's exactly why I personally have seen a number of major, international, engineering firms go from Sun workstations to Dell workstations. The Dell systems were twice and fast at half the cost and the CAD/CAM product that they used was available on both platforms. So, switching to Dell was a no brainer!

The fact that Sun is starting to cut their prices tells me that they finally understand that they can no longer ride the high-price wave just because of the Sun name.

So, you tell me what's worse - selling less hardware at a higher profit margin because it's cost prohibitive, or selling more hardware at a lower cost and lower profit margin? Personally, I'd rather get anything that I sell to more people at a lower profit. It gets a larger installed base; it means that many more people that might upgrade in the future; it means even more potential sales for licensing; it means more people that might spread positive word-of mouth. There are many more benefits that I can see to selling more items at a lower cost than fewer at a higher cost. They might not be realized in the here and now, but they could bring in much better returns in the long run.

Re:The dark side is tempting.

[po_boy]

Stinginess with privileges is kindness in disguise.
-- Guide to VAX/VMS Security, 1984

Re:In the old days

[Anonymous Coward]

If you replace India with Minnesota that sounds exactly like my company--I'm in California.

I think it's typical that as companies expand, the engineers' IT power wanes. That causes frustrating inefficiencies to fester and grow. Before we were acquired--er, merged--(by a certain well-known credit scoring company) our tiny IT staff (a couple guys) handled everything smoothly, and for stuff they didn't have time for, were comfortable granting trusted engineers limited sudo abilities or time-limited root access.

Now that we're part of The Machine, I have to wait two days to get a hung box rebooted because it has to escalate through three levels of bureaucracy operating in different time zones. Once I had to wait three weeks to get a single symlink created on one machine, and when it was finally done, the guy had to do it over again because he'd misread the instructions (yes, ln! I gave him the -exact command line-!).

It's no coincidence that smarter companies tend to be smaller.