Throughput Computing

In February 2016, I undertook an exercise to copy as many as made sense, of my original blog articles across from the oracle site to my/this wordpress blog. This article represents the highlights of the original record of my day.  The Oracle blog has now gone, as have the all the pointers to Sun resources, including the presentations. I rescued and rehosted Andy Ingram’s, Workload based Systems Design 2005 which I have rescued and reposted because it was important then and remains so today, well maybe, maybe not in 2019.

Sun finally launched it’s chip multi-threading systems, promising a revolution in throughput and cheaper MIPS/Watt. This was done at a synchronous event in New York & London with a webcast for those who couldn’t make it in person.  Jonathan Schwarz travelled to London to speak to his European customers, as did  I. I recorded this on my sun oracle blog in several articles.  …

More about managing the professional services firm

For some reason there are two copies of this in this blog, this one is the older and more original. Mike Habek after reading my last article, kindly sent me a copy of Geoffrey Moore’s article “Just Shoot Me!”, which was published in Under the Buzz, Nov 2002. The article is subtitled “Managing the Services Function inside a Products Company”. Moore believes that the service functions of product companies are trapped inside a life cycle inimicable to optimal service strategies, but that by understanding the cyclical nature of these factors, management can build valuable and valued service delivery companies. …  …

Managing the Professional Services Firm

This article was written in July 2004, and is a manifesto for change in Sun. In passing the article reviews and borrows from David Maister’s book, “Managing the Professional Services Firm“. I copied it across to this blog in 2015. It still reads as a manifesto, which was ignored.  I suggest, its remaining relevance is based on insights I hope still stand to be repeated. In summary, Consultants offer Expertise, the ability to invent and solve problems for the first time, Experience, the promise of having done it before or Efficiency, a cost promise based having done the thing many times. These propositions have different values to customers, overselling is hard and will be resented. Organisations will find it hard, Maister argues impossible to optimise for all of these propositions. …