I'd be interested to hear if anyone has some insights in to the Sun
Ray product line (which allows for desktop computing with no client
footprint and ability to login anywhere with a card).  This seems like
a good way to stabilize a companies infrastructure and reduce costs in
terms of support.  I work at a company of 30k+ and I know this is
something we are looking in to currently.

First I should say, I used to work for Sun, I own stock.

We had lots of Sun Ray's around, and I have to say, I loved them. It
was pretty cool being able to take your desktop with you wherever you
went in a Sun campus - not just how you'd configured it, but all the
running applications and such. As I left I believe they were testing a
WANRay, which would allow getting your desktop at home (or somewhere
with an internet connection).

I'm surprised they don't have 100x the market penetration they have.
Would seem to be a no-brainer in lots of situations.

-Ben

Sun Microsystems has announced plans to kick-start the development of
its open source projects.

The company will run six contests with prizes of $175,000 in an
attempt to bring new developers into its open source fold.

"Sun hopes that the opportunity for individual developers to be
recognised for their contributions will also drive a wave of
excitement and collaborative energy," said Simon Phipps, chief open
source officer at Sun.

The six competitions will be hosted by GlassFish, NetBeans,
OpenOffice, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC.

OpenSolaris will distribute the money in the form of a $100,000 open
design contest along with a $75,000 research grant for undergraduate
students.

I currently work for Sun/own stock and I use the WAN Ray in the
wfh(work from home) program. It has the vpn built in so I can connect
to the server from anywhere. You do need to have a decent internet
connection(1Mb or greater). It also allows me to pull my card from the
one at home and go across the country, plug in my card on a Sun
campus, and bring up my session right where I left off. The Sun Rays
work this way also but you need to be on the company network. They all
draw less than 10W of power and are silent(no fans). I believe that
they even work with Linux now. I am a big fan of these.

My wife is a Sun employee and over the years we had tried to get her
hooked into the WAN with little success. About two years ago a package
arrives at the house with a Sun Ray with instructions to hook into the
router. I was extrememly doubtful to say the least based upon previous
attempts to get the home desktop to hook up to the WAN. To my surprise
I hooked it up to the router, installed a KVM switch, to share the
monitor, keyboard and mouse with my desktop and it worked great. Only
issue I ever had with it was trying to install a network printer. The
Sun Ray has a floating IP address and the printer software wouldn't
install. I disconnected the Sun Ray, installed the drivers and
everything now works. Great product the wife loves having access to
her desktop at home, now if I can only get her away from it......

In a simple phrase: You could not be any happier!

This is a great product. I have a friend who has the setup in his home
and he literally threw away his PC! It is awesome to say the least.

Good luck,
Mike

Another Sun employee and stock holder who loves this technology.  I
have heard nothing but positive comments form employees who use the
Sun Ray at home.  This technology has come a long way in the past 8+
years.  It is definitely worth checking out and has the potential to
save companies lots of money in a number of areas (power and licensing
fees to name two).

If the housing market didn't fall so hard we would have purchased over
150+ Sun Rays

The Sunray concept including "Secure Global Desktop" is an amazing
technology that any company should look to deploy. The technology is
further enabled by VMwares VDI, allowing businesses to create virtual
MSFT desktops that are housed within a datacentre that can be
automatically provisioned, recreated in seconds and allows for totally
secure information store.

SGD allows for the virtual desktops to be rolled out into a PC
environment and a zero interaction replacement of PC's with Sunrays
when the PC is EOL. You can actually send the mail boy up to a users
desk, have him throw the PC on a trolly and plug in the Sunray. The
User logs in and "presto" their virtual desktop is exactly as it was.

The life of a Sunray is approximately 6-8 years so the depreciation is
minimal between 12.5% and 16.67% per annum as opposed the 33% with a
PC. The cost of the asset is lower also. The depreciation charge in
comparison to a PC will equate to approximately 3.75% of the cost of a
PC rather than 33%.

That's why I believe SunRays could be *THE* technology for a huge
number of companies and organizations. But probably they are still not
ready for the transition, or don't trusting SunRay really works... ;-)

Once adopted you won't need anything else: easy and straightforward
for end users, no more silly excuses or complains for a broken PC or
data loss (this is a non-trivial, concrete saving in terms of time and
efficiency); centralized, secure, with reduced maintenance and backups
times to satisfy the "nerdest" of the administrators; lower power
consumption and asset costs to satisfy also the finance-guys... what
else?

Besides the good feedback I can provide after every day use of this
product; I believe that for a big company is a complete waste of time,
resources and money to *OWN* thousands of PCs each with it's own
administration and maintenance. Consolidation and cost cutting begins
with the assets; Sun Ray is a concrete answer that gives you also the
rationalization.

I' a Sun employee and use the Sunray product both at home (Wanray) and
in the office (Sunray) - I've been using these devices every working
day since 2001. It is pretty amazing technology, all your files are
safe on a remote server and you can take your desktop with you
wherever you go in the world. The new LCD monitors that combine with
the card reader to make the new next gen sunrays use a tiny amount of
power, which I think will be important as power costs may go up over
the next few years.I think you can also run different desktops on them
now, I've seen them running mac and windows in the demo centre.

I too am a Sun employee and a stock-holder.

Above someone else mentioned that SunRays can server out a Linux
session too. Well just to be clear, you can serve up an XP session
too.

Take a look at blogs.sun.com/ThinkThin.

FYI The entire campus I work at has been all SunRay based since it
opened (around 7 years ago). Most of the units are still the original
SunRay 1s. When they do fail we just get the appliance replaced and
carry on with the same session on the same SunRay card. The only
downside is when you forget to bring your SunRay card into work :-(

These things have been market-ready for so long, I'd love to see them
turn into the dekstop-killer they deserve to be!

Carlo,

I work for the Sun Ray product team so feel free to ask me any
questions that you have.
As far as stabilizing a companies infrastructure, there is absolutely
no better way of doing
it then this. Furthermore, it's pretty much the only way you can
actually drive down your IT
costs. If your company is tired of re-inventing their IT strategy ever
three years and replacing
desktops, then Sun Ray's will put an end to that costly cycle. Now
that we've been supporting
Windows on Sun Ray's for the last year and half, our place in the the
"thin-client" marketplace
has grown tremendously.

This is stock market discussion forum. I guess people are more willing
to hear what's going on with SUN's stock, instead of technical staffs.
There are companies which make very good products, but their stock
price is not showing proportionally. I wonder why?

Perhaps the wfh Sun staff should spend less time on these forums
patting each others back and more time genuinely promoting there
"wonderful" product in a more targeted way.  Yes, Sun products are
great, and have been for ages (that's why I bought shares).  Jonathan
has made great inroads into effective product promotion recently but
can't do it alone so go forth, make a shareholder happy, SELL IT.  The
best product in the world is worth nothing if nobody knows about it.

Perhaps the wfh Sun staff should spend less time on these forums
patting each others back and more time genuinely promoting there
"wonderful" product in a more targeted way.  Yes, Sun products are
great, and have been for ages (that's why I bought shares).  Jonathan
has made great inroads into effective product promotion recently but
can't do it alone so go forth, make a shareholder happy, SELL IT.  The
best product in the world is worth nothing if nobody knows about it.

Perhaps the wfh Sun staff should spend less time on these forums
patting each others back and more time genuinely promoting there
"wonderful" product in a more targeted way.  Yes, Sun products are
great, and have been for ages (that's why I bought shares).  Jonathan
has made great inroads into effective product promotion recently but
can't do it alone so go forth, make a shareholder happy, SELL IT.  The
best product in the world is worth nothing if nobody knows about it.

I worked for Sun and used to own Sun stock; and probably never will
again.

SunRay is an impressive technology but it is a technology that have
not seem to take off for the last.. 5 years?? Looks good when you demo
it but when it comes to real life implementation, you better have a
big network pipe or it'll kill any productivity you still have in the
company.

The only good piece of technology in SunRay is the Global Desktop
(Tarantella that Sun bought a while back).. again.. good purchase,
poor integration and relatively no marketing efforts to sell the
product.

Sun has great products and they used to have the best engineers (they
might still have) but they suck at selling. Comms and MBO are paid out
in such a way that they are mostly delivered with a  "I Love You" note
attached to it. Waste is all over the place with almost zero control
on spending.

In my opinion, Sun should fire all it Senior Managers and start hiring
real sales people instead of their families and friends.

The Sun Ray model has been premoted by Sun since 1998, so it's been on
the go for over a decade. I know, i was working for Sun back then. At
that time the main factors holding it back where that the infra/staff/
licences required to support it reliably basically ate into any
savings you got from the lower priced client hardware. As PC's were a
known model and Sunray an distinct unknown, it was very difficult to
get anyone to be a guinea pig outside of menlo park.

As i see it now, some of those support factors that held it back are
now reduced, ie. improved network speeds, reliabilty, and some
external factors that would elevate it as an option now exist, ie. TCO
upgrading to vista, green issues and regulatory concerns SOX etc with
regards to offsite data security, particularly in the banking sector.

However there is still that hurdle of getting people to adopt the
network computing model. Maybe with a little push by Sun we can see it
getting traction, but at the moment i don't see anyone out there
prepared to take the risk on an expensive and potentially career
limiting experiment.

M.

I actually work for Sun, and I work from home on a Sun Ray. I love the
Sun Ray concept and I have been telecommuting for over two years with
various Sun Ray models. I love it. The power consumption and space
saving attributes are phenomenal. I can also login with my card at
home (or not-- you don't have to log in with the card). However, if
you take your card out at home, travel to a campus for a meeting, just
stick in your card and your desktop comes up right where you left it
at home....all programs running. I dig the SunRay. All companies
should have them. They save energy and space.