[osol-mktg] BayLISA Presentation Report

[Ben Rockwood]

I presented on Solaris/OpenSolaris last night at BayLISA (baylisa.org).  
It was the annual "Short but Cool" evening, where a variety of 
presenters are present and each get about 20 minutes to speak.  We ended 
up having 6 preso's ranging from 'DragonFly BSD MP kernel mechanisms' 
which was highly technical to  'Novell and Linux' which was pure 
marketing. 

Given the audience and time time span I was really constricted on what I 
could get into, so I opted to do a presentation entitled "New Directions 
of Solaris in an Open World".  I highlighted features in Solaris10, a 
brief history of Tonic/OpenSolaris, highlighted features of OpenSolaris, 
and then tried to demystify all the various ways to get Solaris 
(Solaris, SX, SX:CR, OpenSolaris Source, OpenSolaris BFU's, Distros) and 
pointed to resources.  There was a liberal amount of segue in the course 
of it.

The presentation flew by.  The 25 minutes that I was up felt more like 
10 and we covered very little ground but always stayed focused on the 
audience, System Administrators, and the deep level of community 
involvement that we have, including the fact that I, their humble 
presenter, was a community member, not an employee of Sun.  They really 
seemed to respond well to the talk.  The message I got was that most of 
them were jaded by the Sun marketing speak and didn't want to hear it 
and really opened up to everything I had to present with an open mind.  
I even made sure to remind them that they all, as Sun users and 
customers, were members of this community as well, whether they 
participate or not is their choice.

Because of my time constraints and because I don't have a laptop I used 
my wifes Apple PowerBook and did the slides in Apple KeyNote.  Since the 
meeting was at Apple I thought that was probably OK.  I'll redo the 
slides in OO and put them up for those interested.

I've been asked to come back some time later in the year and give a full 
2+ hour presentation.  When I do that presentation I'll be doing a very 
targeted "OpenSolaris for System Administrators" where I put focus on 
topics that are of direct interest to all sysadmins regardless of skill 
level, such as SMF, Zones, and ZFS, and try to focus a little less on 
DTrace which goes over the heads of some sysadmins.

Thank you very much to Teresa for providing me with a swag kit.  I was 
the only presenter with swag, and the audience loved it.  I gave out S10 
DVD's (6) to the few people in the room that hadn't used S10 before and 
gave out shirts (2) and hats (2) to the most worthy souls.

The crowd was good, I'd assume we had about 50'ish people present.  All 
the seats were full and several people standing.

benr.
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