[osol-mktg] LinuxWorld Report

[Sara Dornsife]

Ben - THANKS!
This is the best show report I've read in ages. You did an amazing job 
of evangelizing Solaris and OpenSolaris. Sounds like we need more DVDs 
next time - and kilts are required attire.
Sara


Ben Rockwood wrote:

> Well, LinuxWorld is over.  Here's the wrap up as it applies to 
> OpenSolaris marketing and evangelism.
>
> On Tues the booth was manned by Stephen Lau, Dan Price, Eric Schrock, 
> Derek Cicero and myself.
> On Wed it was Stephen and myself.
> On Thurs it was Jim and myself.
>
> Booth attendance was exceptional.  We only had two problems to speak 
> of, we didn't have enough DVDs and dehydration.  During all three days 
> we never went more than 5 minutes without talking to someone, and in 
> fact an overwhelming amount of the time we were talking to 3 or more 
> people at a time, which is remarkable given that we were somewhat 
> buried in the middle of the booth.
>
> Demo's tended to revolve around DTrace, Zones and SMF.  Having a 
> non-Sun system there (mine) proved exceptionally useful in 
> illustrating the massively improved driver support in Solaris10.  
> Having DVDs on hand (although not nearly enough) was enough to blow 
> the minds of several attendees.  Providing the source, access to the 
> online source browser, access to developers via the communities, and 
> free access to Sun Studio also perked up a lot of ears.
>
> Folks coming to the booth fell into 4 categories:
>
> 1) Leeches: People who didn't run Solaris... didn't run Linux... I 
> think were homeless, and just came with their hands out (literally) or 
> simply grabbed goodies off the cabnet if I forgot to put them away.  
> Some very bold people.  It didn't help much that each pod had Puzzle 
> peices that attendees were supposed to collect to get stuff, and lots 
> of people only wanted the piece.  In some small number of cases I used 
> the puzzle peices to my advantage, but often they just interupted 
> truely interested people.
>
> 2) Long time Solaris shops: These users had Sun systems and Solaris 
> deployeed already and loved them, but were migrating to Linux 
> (generally RHEL) due to cost.  These were my favorite folks.  The 
> first part of the discussion was almost a confessional, where they 
> whispered that they hated Linux and so far have just had massive 
> problems with reliability and the support was terrible if they could 
> get it at all.  They were desprate and hurting... hurting bad.  Just 
> having someone to talk to that understood their problems seemed to 
> really help them quite a lot.  Then we would start talking about 
> features in Solaris10, since most of them had Solaris8 or older 
> deployed.  They were blown away.  Then things would come back to 
> cost... they knew that the Sun TCO was lower  than RHEL, but they 
> couldn't convince their powers-that-be... so I'd put a Solaris DVD in 
> their hand and tell them that they were free to run it in production, 
> no strings, no BS, call us when you'd like a support contract.  At 
> that point some of them almost started crying.  It was great.  I 
> talked to one guy that had RHEL deployeed, couldn't tolerate the 
> reliablity problems they were having, and were paying more than 
> $22,000 for support... and that didn't include priority phone support, 
> just access to the Red Hat Network.  I talked to a gentleman at 
> Siemen's who was desprate to stay with Sun and really left ready to 
> fight.  I had almost two dozen people like this.
>
> 3) Folks that knew of Solaris, used it here or there, but needed 
> convincing: These users either had some Sun system deployeed or had 
> played around with it to varying degrees.  For these people we just 
> start talking about features that they don't have anywhere else, talk 
> about standards, about portability, debunk all this "only on linux" 
> BS, talk about reliability and scaliblity, talk about driver support, 
> storage functionality, development tools, what OpenSolaris gives them, 
> Sun support, Ultra20's, SunFire's and Niagra, Sun's partners.  I'd 
> tend to start with "Let me show you something kool." and go from 
> there.  Lots of "wow" and "thats kool!" whispers were heard.  And 
> these guys were fun because I just kept the kool stuff train 
> a-rollin'.  SMF blew minds.  DTrace wow'ed people.  Zones got people 
> thinking of new possibilities.  Again, with these people when I'd get 
> to a point where they were literally speechless I'd pull out a DVD and 
> put it in their hands and say "There you go.  All that we've just 
> talked about, there it is, in your hands." and they'd just be blown 
> away.  About the only thing at that point they could ask was "How is 
> Sun going to make money?"  And I had an answer for that too.
> 4) Open source developers:  Enlightenment was a good draw from the 
> real geeks in the crowd.  They'd walk by and see my desktop and become 
> interested.  They'd get close and get excited when they saw it.  (a 
> good amount of the hardcore open source crowd has been waiting for 
> Enlightenment 17 for years...  seeing it running on OpenSolaris wasn't 
> something they expected).  With these guys I had instant credability 
> and we started talking about choices, and that OpenSolaris was an 
> amazing choice, and then we'd talk about the code, the tools, Sun 
> Studio, Ultra20's, etc.  With these guys we got to talk about some of 
> the other killer features most enterprise folks don't care about like 
> GRUB and being able to smoothly dual boot Linux, BSD, or whatever they 
> wanted.  All of these guys left with information they didn't 
> previously have and weren't looking for, but were excited to get home 
> and check it out for themselves.
>
>
>  So, things went, all-in-all, really well.  We didn't really have any 
> trouble makers, just lots of leechers.  A couple of times the puzzle 
> peices helped me engage a user that didn't even want to think about 
> Sun (but wanted the shirt) and I was able to make an impression on 
> them.  If I thought they looked sensable I'd hold the puzzle peice in 
> front of them firmly and start asking questions... they didn't want to 
> listen, but I made sure they got some facts before the went on their 
> way.  Some of these turned into case #3 above, others just grinned and 
> nodded untill I released the puzzle peice to them.
>  I had three aces up my sleeve: 1) the kilt drew interest.  2)  
> showing off a non-Sun workation running something other than JDS that 
> was used for real open source development appealed to people and show 
> the versility of Solaris.  3) people loved the candor.  If someone 
> wanted to badmouth Sun I'd give them 2 or 3 more that they hadn't 
> heard of and then straighted them out.  If they felt that something 
> wasn't implemented well in the past (like Solaris 8 sucking on X86) I 
> shared their pain, appologiesed, and then showed them what we'd done 
> to fix it.  Just being natural and unstuffy was welcome to just about 
> everyone.
>
>  BOF attendance was poor.  We really should have had handouts or 
> fliers.  Next time I do something like this I'm going to have to 
> remember to at least bring post-it notes or something... we were just 
> writting things down for people on the back of the puzzle pieces.  We 
> had a handful of people at the BOF but every other BOF did too.  I 
> think people by-and-large were just worn out and hungry.  Tues is 
> typically (and was this year) the biggest day of the show.  Never the 
> less, those that were there left interested and eager.  Several of 
> them came back to the booth in the following days to talk some more.
>
>
>  There is my report.  Let me know if anyone needs further information 
> or anything.
>  benr.
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> opensolaris-mktg at opensolaris.org


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