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Sun's CIO Talks Internal Experiences

Posted by Zonk on Thu Jul 14, 2005 09:57 AM
from the learn-from-a-man-who's-been-there dept.
Sun Microsystems IT
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."
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  • For example, he said Sun president Jonathan Schwartz -- who keeps a public blog -- was frustrated when April Fool's day came around, because he couldn't use his blog to play a practical joke.

    "A few times, he's said things like 'maybe we should acquire Novell', and it changed the stock price," Vass said of Schwartz's blog. "You have to be careful ... if ever he's writing anything controversial he has to get the lawyers to look at it."

    Sun is buying Novell? Ack! I need to go call my stock broker!
    • Honestly, if the SEC outlawed April Fools Day altogether I'd consider it a net win.
      • It means that Schwartz made a joke, and it had a very real effect on Sun's stock price. Even if Sun really was actually acquiring Novell, the executives have to be very careful about what they say. The wrong thing could be seen as stock manipulation, thus placing the exec in very deep legal trouble.

        Half the point of getting an MBA is to learn how to avoid situations with the SEC and other regulatory commissions.

  • One Point, One Big Problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by teiresias (101481) on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:00AM (#13063117)
    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.

    Reminds me of a guy whose leaving our company right now. We're probably not going to delete his homespace since lord knows what will break if the things in there are gone.

    It'll take us awhile to get that stuff into a common place. Probably took Sun a lot of time to get that one system back up and running.
    • 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. :-)

    • Re:One Point, One Big Problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chill (34294) on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:33AM (#13063388) Homepage Journal
      Reminds me of a guy whose leaving our company right now. We're probably not going to delete his homespace since lord knows what will break if the things in there are gone.

      This is why workstations should be workstations and servers should be servers. Allowing users in a client-server environment to share resources from their workstations is bad network design/policy. Add a cheap server and give them space, but sharing should be disabled and disallowed on workstations.

      -Charles

    • Re:One Point, One Big Problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lumpy (12016) on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:46AM (#13063505) Homepage
      this problem is typically management's fault. or caused by management.

      I am the guy who just replaced one of those engineering guru guys. he has crap EVERYWHERE running critical systems and data collection as well as processing. someone powered off his PC and crashed the billing system.

      After digging in his notes and code as well as his old email I discovered that he wanted to do things right, he had a subversion server set up and a development as well as a production server in the server room.

      But, management did not allow him to do his job right. I saw endless emails and messages about needing X Y or Z right now! did he finish Z yet? why is Y not in testing? who told you to stop working on X?

      it was endless so the poor guy had to half ass everything because management refused to hire him any help, refused to accept realistic deadlines or adjust importance... everything was top super critical!

      I was promoted to this position, I was able to find out most of this before accepting the promotion and told them that I work very differently. I use project management, refuse to work on 5 things at the same time as that creates 5 crappy, broken things as well as makes the process 10 times longer. I explained my concerns to the divisional VP that interviewed me and he agreed that that working atmosphere was not acceptable and told me that I have his authority to tell my superiors that they have to sort out priorities themselves and that EVERY new project request will come in at the bottom of the to-do list unless it has been signed off by the VP of operations to deserve to be escalated above everything else.

      The origional mess was cause by management. and until someone in management gives a peon engineer or programmer the authority and protection to tell other management "nope, sorry." it will never get any better.

  • Herding Cats (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DanielMarkham (765899) * on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:00AM (#13063119) Homepage
    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 [cio.com] 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 [whattofix.com]

    • The dark side is tempting. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer (103300) * on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:24AM (#13063321)
      When you are CIO of a technical company it is tempting be lax with policy and give the employees more access then they should have, it seems like a decent policy, first you save money because the desktops that people use anyways are also the servers so you don't need expensive servers, the technical people can administer their own system, and whatever they are serving.

      But being a CIO you need to be a Dick every once in a while and make sure the technical people have the only the access they need to do their work properly. Have the IT department put buisness level servers in the server room and have them properly managed.

      While the first way seems quicker and easier and has less personal conflect. The second way is better to manage and reduces of mission critical mistakes. It also allows for proper upgrading for the future.

      Sure the employess can do the work themselvs but they rairly consider the big picture and end up with a spread of services which are hard to track and manage. It also creates a situration where an employee cannot be moved to a different position because they have the information that others dont.

    • Re:Herding Cats (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When I was talking to the architect, it turns out the whole thing was running off a computer under his desk!

      Posting anon to avoid any affiliations...

      But one of my co-workers (we're an ISP) was running an aggregation router for about 10000 xDSL users - in his room. It was quite hot in there, but he preferred it that way because he could access the console (via serial port) with just a simple cable from his laptop. Suggestion to move the router to a rack with a terminal server was not accepted because it
    • 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.

      Why would a CIO have problem ordering this person to move the service? Are they not given enough authority to can people not working in the best interests of the company (within reason)?
  • >However, some unusual problems did surface sometimes, he said, citing the example of a Solaris engineer who contacted Sun's IT help desk in India and subsequently sent Vass a note complaining the help desk member who assisted him didn't know intricate kernel settings for the operating system he needed help on.

    Can you imagine that call, "I am so happy to be helping you, however, I am sorry to be informing you that... pause...I am not being the Dammed premier kernel support line! " SLAM!

    lol

  • Sun lost its Sparc. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jellomizer (103300) * on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:08AM (#13063189)
    I would be angry too if I called up technical support and I couldn't get kernel level knowlege. Most administrators know or at least use to know enough about the platform they are admistering to handle most of the problems and then for other things the search the web and blogs, for more help. If this fails them they have a good question for technical support. And having to go threw level 1 then 2 then 3 technical support is just annoying, and a waist of time. Technical support should be able to quicly figure out the complexity of your problem and move you to the aproprate level. If I am adding a user the person who answers the phone should give me to level 1, but if I am configuring the system kernel options then I should be placed on a higher level support.

    • Re:Sun lost its Sparc. (Score:4, Funny)

      by frodo from middle ea (602941) on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:31AM (#13063376) Homepage
      I remember a few years back when we had problems with one of our 0r@c13 Database. One of the tables had about 10 million records, and we had to run a complicated query that required a range scan.

      The query was quite complicated, but analyzed and tuned to the best of our DBAs ability.

      THe query would hang the listener every once in a while and then no connections could be made to the DB over that listner, the only solution was to bounce the DB all together.

      When we called them for this problem, instead of looking at our query /db schema, all they said was try running the query with a few 100 records.

      This was the response when we were paying them for a level 1 support and the problem was rated severe.

    • Re:Sun lost its Sparc. (Score:5, Funny)

      by AnalogBoy (51094) on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:40AM (#13063449) Journal
      This is my newest pet peeve. Tech support, outsourced, gets a crash course it seems in provinding support. They never do it well. I've had the fortune of calling Microsoft's professional line several times, and i always get someone who is 1) difficult to understand, and 2) not any more knowledgable in the app than i am. I don't call tech support for the "Two heads are better than one" approach, i call tech support to hear "Yes, we've seen that before, here's how to fix it." Unfortunately i haven't heard something like that since my Sun days. And another thing - when they start troubleshooting at a step you tried 3 hours ago and say "we have to try this sir"... grrr.. i get angry *instantly* at that. 0 to pissed in one processor tick.

      Disclaimer: I have nothing at all against Indians - however, i do believe if i call tech support i should be able to clearly understand you. I've worked in a call center before and clarity was an important benchmark - i guess if you can get people to work for small wages your standards go down a bit too. Unfortunately it looks like Outsorcing for tech support is here to stay, as unappealing as that may be. Sprint, Dell, Microsoft... grr. I call upon Shiva to bitch slap them all!

    • Escalations (Score:4, Informative)

      by British (51765) <british1500@gmail.com> on Thursday July 14 2005, @11:31AM (#13063939) Homepage Journal
      Here's how escalation works...

      1. Customer calls tech suppport(level 1)
      2. Level 1 can't fix it. Fills out an escalation form to level 2. The unseen beings of level 2 are supposed to call back. A "trouble ticket" is made to great detail by level 1 tech, apologizes to customer.
      3. Time passes by
      4. The unseen overlords of level 2(or escalation department) forget about the trouble ticket, hoping the customer and level 1 forget about the trouble ticket
      5. level 1 prays customer never calls back, since he/she heard nothing from level 2 about it, and never will.

      That's at least what happened when I did tech support for an ISP. I think I later checked on the customers with escalations, and they, well, weren't customers anymore.
      • This isn't AOL new user tech support. This is commercial technical support that professionals use. Most of their callers know the basic admin stuff. They call tech support when they have an actual problem.

  • Grammar... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hugonz (20064) <hugonz AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:17AM (#13063255) Homepage
    ...who sometimes demand Indian help desk support knows kernel details

    I, for one, welcome our new Indian poor grammar kernel hacker overloards...

  • But the CIO doesn't really get it yet (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mparaz (31980) on Thursday July 14 2005, @10:42AM (#13063469) Homepage
    His blog is empty [sun.com].

      • FUDding Troll.

        I love posting sarcasm and seeing how it gets received. Sometimes people with a clue see it first and it gets Teh Funnae. And sometimes... not.

        Another thing, which part of my post is FUD? The main article blurb speaks about the useless Indian help desk workers. All I did was joke about it.

        Sounds like you actually knew the people in question and their abilities so you are the authority to speak on this.

        And sometimes Dilbert's boss sounds just like my boss. Why? Because Scott A

    • 1)Lowering the price on their machines by 40%. Clearly this is the death rattle. A company operating at a loss is a company which won't be operating for very long.

      Sheesh! First Sun is criticised for producting overpriced machines, then criticised for cutting the prices!

      2)Sleeping with microsoft.

      Er. There was legal action against Microsoft by Sun. Sun won, because Microsoft settled. Part of the deal was that Sun got access to some Microsoft technologies. It's not sleeping with Microsoft - it is be
    • 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.
      • We are seriously interested in their Opteron offerings. We have been testing the W1100z and W2100z, and I am in love. Sun needs to improve Windows support for that project, since our need requires dual-booting. However, as a Linux workstation, they are astoundingly good.

        Not to mention that compared to the less-than-spectacular Dell offerings (they're supposedly coming out with improved workstations soon), they are cost-competitive.

        I can't wait to try the new "Ultras" (considering I used an Ultra 1, bac
        • I used a Sun IPC!

          Yeah, those lunchbox systems were cute. I just recently sold my whopping 50 MHz SPARCstation LX on eBay. Fully loaded with 96 MB of RAM (the maximum), too.

          Now people are starting to appreciate the lunchbox format of mini-ITX systems like Shuttle. Once again, Sun was just a bit too far ahead of its time.

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