OPENING a new Wellington office is a testament to the growth Sun Microsystems has experienced since it re-entered the country in 2003, says country manager Peter Idoine.
He says the company has taken on 15 new staff in the last year and is now close to 60 strong and still hiring.
The new office near Wellington’s Lambton Quay aims to accommodate this growth.
Idoine is unwilling to speculate by how much more staff numbers will grow, saying the final tally will depend on how much Sun’s channel expands.
“We do not want to do what partners are capable of doing. The more the channel shapes up and adds value, the fewer people we need,” he says. Sun’s partner community has grown by more than 50% in the past two years, and includes the likes of EDS, Unisys, Alcatel, Lucent, Siemens, Datacom, Eagle and Axon.
Idoine says Sun’s new employees have helped it develop better relationships with partners and clients, while improving its professional services, project management and marketing and delivery logistics capabilities.
The new office not only boasts great views across Wellington harbour but also Sun’s latest thin-client systems. Each desk is equipped with a SunRay console, the vendor’s thin-client desktop terminal and an LCD display. Workers access the consoles using Java-based authentication cards, which also provide entry to the building. All applications are hosted on back-end servers and users can access all their documents from any SunRay terminal.
Sessions can be transferred from one terminal to another without disruption and remote access is gained through authentication code tokens.
Idoine says this technology enables Sun to support more employees from its office than traditional desktop PC-based systems would allow, resulting in lower operating costs.
More remote workers can be supported with this model and it allows employees from other Sun subsidiaries to base themselves in New Zealand temporarily, he adds.
“This means we constantly have access to international expertise locally.”
