Open is the New Cool - Open breakfast with Sun and SIME in Stockholm

I attended the Sun Open Breakfast event that took place at the IVA conference center in Stockholm on April 2. Map of location. This was the first in a series of 'open' breakfast events hosted by Sun Microsystems and SIME. The event was introduced by Ola Ahlvarsson from SIME introducing Stefan Alariksson, the CEO of Sun in Sweden.

Open is the new cool

Stefan explained how and why Sun has moved from being mainly associated with server hardware to an open software and solutions company. Sun has with their packaged solutions of open source software been growing and gaining more customers. Sun in Sweden has about 2B SEK in revenue out of about 200 employees. Stefan also talked about the fact that despite what a lot people think, how can you make any money with open source?, you can, by getting faster and bigger penetration on the market, you classify customers into different segments. The individual user who downloads a copy of MySQL will not want to pay for the software or services but a successful corporate customer needs and wants to pay for qualified professional services. So even if only 10% of the customers pay, Sun is making money.

Open Minds panel discussion

Henrik Torstensson, head of strategy at Stardoll - http://www.stardoll.com a site targetting tween girls and general manaer Piczo, http://www.piczo.com a social networking site where you can easily design your own site, blog, avatars and use games, music, quizzes...

Ulf Ekberg, music entrepreneur from the group Ace of Base and into new business models for the musicians.

Fredrik Runnquist, former IT boss at Swedbank and board member in several corporations.

Stefan Alariksson, CEO Sun Microsystems

Good information was presented, nothing new if you are in this business, but talk about efficient business models, penetration of market share, having real customers, working relations, scalability, value of partnering...

An open table discussion followed. My personal take on this was that there is not enough time to actively start such a discussion, I think for the next event, it would be better if the organizers
focus on a theme and have branch specific people giving their feedback with a possibility to let people participating in the event have a chance to do select networking.

Anders Carlsarv, head of sales, Sun Microsystems, concluded by announcing next Open Breakfast event, May 7 which will focus on Cloud Computing. Monitor http://www.sun.se/breakfast for coming events. Sun has recently published a white paper on Cloud Computing, for more info about this area, see http://www.sun.com/solutions/cloudcomputing/index.jsp

Thanks to the sponsors also for an excellent breakfast.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select reprensentation and management of outsourcing services!

Sun Nordic Software Roadshow Spring 2009 - Stockholm event

I attended the Sun Nordic Sofware roadshow event on Mar. 12 in Stockholm. Ola Ahlvarsson of SIME and founder of Result warmed everybody up and presented entrepreneurial projects and business models. An interesting point made was, no lack of ideas or concepts in businesses today, the trick is how to execute properly and do something with the ideas. Ola also pointed out the importance of building a business with a business model focusing on relations with people NOT just trying to push a new product or service on to a customer.

Thorbjörn Fritzon, Sun Microsystems, presented Sun's roadmap in Open Source and how did we get there. He pointed out that maybe a lot of people still see Sun as a hardware server company. Things have changed a lot within Sun and the last 3-5 years, they have become a software company, with Open Solaris, MySQL, Glassfish (ASP server software), Open ESB (Enterprise services bus), Open SSO (Single Sign-on and ID management) and working on increasing the ecosystem of partners, integrator and professional services companies.

Kaj Arnö who is VP Community Relations at MySQL continued with MySQL and the importance of community relations.

Daniel Fröding from Coss Technologies presented GlassFish, Sun's application server platform that is gaining a lof of traction on the market. Coss Tech provides ASP solutions and professional services basd on GlassFish.

Tickstar is a company focusing on systems integrtion using Open ESB which provides a vendor independent solution of integration of different server solutions in your network. Martin Nyqvist presented how Tickstar is using Open ESB. See Tickstar presentation here.

Thorbjörn Fritzon, Sun Microsystems, presented OpenSSO which is Sun's solution for AAA services and federated identity management. Måns Håkansson then concluded with Sun's solution for Identity access management and the value of role managemnt for rule and policy compliance among users.

Lars Tunkrans, Fujitsu Services then finished the presentations of the day describing how Sun's VDI (Virtual Desktop) is working and projects undertaken by Fujitsu using VDI services. Lars showed differences between different "thin client" solutions going all the way from a thin client application just installed on a regular PC to a diskless client station, no software installed, no power adaptor used (powered through power over ethernet). He brought a proposal project they won (about 250 client stations and server infrastructure) and got to deliver to Värmdö county (just east of Stockholm) which included cost of energy saved as well as very low maintenance and support cost. Since there is no moving parts, no software installed, very small power consumption, about 4W per client station, there is very little that can go wrong once installed. Savings were about 5-6k SEK per client station and year throughout the lifecycle.

Among the exhibitors were; Cortego, who is a systems integrator providing solutions for security and event management. Inserve Technology, a systems integrator and Heimore Group, a solutions provider for security solutions using SSO and IAM

Many thanks to Sun Microsystems for a good event and sponsoring food and beverage.

UPDATE: Find the presentations here

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select reprensentation and management of outsourcing services!