Technologist Challenges Customers and Employees to Think Differently.

By Al Riske

15.Apr.08 - Dan Berg is the chief technology officer for Global Sales and Services and VP of Systems Engineering in the region known as EMEA -- Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

So he travels. A lot.

"I actually spend 25 percent of my working day, on average, in the air," says Berg, who is based in the U.K. "That's not going to the airport, not coming home from airport, that's in the air."

He knows this because he sticks to a time budget.

"I know I need to be spending this much time with customers and this much with organizational matters and this much with employee development, to make sure I'm staying focused and balanced," he explains.

His biggest challenge?

"Articulating the value Sun has," Berg replies. "I know this has been said before, but I've been at Sun 15 years and this is the best lineup of technology, products, and offerings we've ever had. Yet when I go talk to customers, one of the first things they say is, 'Oh, I didn't know you guys did that.'"

He's not really surprised, though.

"It's interesting. Sun has gone through these three births -- from workstations to servers to now more massive scale solutions on the Internet. People have this perception of us as either a workstation company or a server company that died in the dot-com downturn. So it's a matter of convincing them: You know what? We're not what you think we are," he says.

It can be discouraging, he says, but also exciting.

Hamming it up on stage with fellow CTOs Hal Stern and Jim Baty

A customer might say, "Great! You guys have good stuff there [in virtualization or energy efficiency or high-performance computing]. Too bad you don't do anything in identity."

To which Berg will reply, "What do you mean? We lead the market in identity management."

A big part of his job is working with the system engineers across multiple countries, "making sure we're having the right conversations with our customers."

"There are a number of areas we're pushing -- from virtualization to eco to HPC to thinking about Redshift and how to identify new opportunities," Berg says.

Although the term "Redshift," coined by Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos, has gained some traction in the press, Berg notes that it hasn't really caught on with customers yet. Which is okay. It's just the way we at Sun grok things.

"As geeks inside Sun, we recognize that, yeah, we need to go find those markets that look like high-performance computing, that look like large bandwidth applications, that look like big, Web-scale social networking sites," he says. "But fundamentally what that means is looking for hypergrowth opportunities. And they don't always come from the Facebooks of the world. They come from the most traditional businesses in the world that now are generating exponential data growth and they need a tape system that can grow exponentially."

In other words, the right conversation to have with a customer might be all about Redshift -- without ever using the term.

A bank, for example, might think of itself as a traditional business looking for efficiency from it's information systems, not necessarily hypergrowth.

"Yet you look at the guys doing financial modeling and they're building some of the largest HPC environments. They're huge," Berg says. "It's an area we need to understand and map the technology [particularly Sun's highly scalable systems] to what customers are valuing."

When he's not with customers, Berg spends a lot of time thinking about the widely dispersed engineering community under his direction as VP of Systems Engineering in EMEA.

A Distinguished Engineer himself -- best known for his work in mutithreading, concurrent programming, and development methodologies -- Berg now spends much of his time mentoring other promising engineers.

"I've always posed this question to other engineers: Is it more important for an individual who does some really great stuff to do it again or to find other people who could do it as well? In other words scale," he says.

A couple of years ago Berg and others noticed that the vast majority of Sun's Distinguished Engineers were in California and none were outside the United States.

"We have these engineering centers in India and China and Russia and the Czech Republic and they were in what I call catch mode. We would throw things at them, they would catch them and do a fantastic job of doing what we asked, but we weren't necessarily setting up a culture that would allow them to throw stuff back and say, 'No, that's wrong.' Or, 'Have you thought about it this way?'" he recalls.

"So we went over and said, 'Let's consciously share the culture. Let's let them know it's okay to push back, it's okay to challenge the current thinking and come up with new ideas.' That's why we wanted the diversity in the first place. It's a couple years on and we have DEs now in the Nordic countries and in the Czech Republic, so hopefully we're building a pipeline to get more diversity of people with different perspectives and different ideas."

The key -- "It's easy and hard at the same time," Berg says -- is to help people expand their network.

"If they knew two people in the U.S., how could you introduce them to 20 more? How could you build these networks and connections and ways for them to express their value? When they do that and start sharing more ideas, great things come. But when they sit there and feel like they're just doing their job ... no one likes to just do a job. They want to do great things," he says.

Fortunately Sun is all about network computing and has been quick to adopt new social networking technologies -- blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds -- to build stronger communities.

"Social networking is one of the projects I'm helping to steer. We're putting this together for the field, but we're also looking at it across Sun -- ways to build virtual communities and make it easier for people to share information," Berg says.

The pilot project is called CE 2.0, short for Customer Engineering 2.0.

"Just like we can tag a document that tells us about the content of that document, what if we could begin to tag people in a way that tells us more about the content of the person -- their interests, expertise, and skill levels?" he says.

"Can we then use social networking to say, 'I'm going to inject myself into a community. I know who's in the community. I know who the experts are. I know the content that's in the community because that's been tagged as well.' And just like LinkedIn, could I then say, 'I have a need to know more on this topic and I don't know who knows it, but I do know this guy and he maybe knows the guy who knows.' So can I find a connection and get introduced and form a much stronger community?"

Berg describes the pilot project as a mashup -- Facebook meets LinkedIn with a content-management system thrown in for good measure.

"Mix them all together and you start to define communities now by who's in, who's out, who's contributing, who's commenting, and not by a bunch of email aliases," he says.

"It's looking at how we talk to the 10,000-plus technology folks in the field across the world. If someone in Russia comes up with a great idea on how to do a particular solution for telco, then someone working in the U.S. should be able to benefit from that."