Proof of Concept Enterprise Services Division, Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems leads the industry in worldwide service revenues for the workstation market, supporting more than one million systems worldwide through 27 solution centers, and is the leading UNIX training organization. Managing service contracts for such a vast market, is an ongoing challenge. Managers frequently lack the information they require to evaluate the effectiveness, competitiveness, profitability, and penetration of Sun Microsystems service products. There are numerous technical difficulties in achieving this kind of information access and distillation.
Many data sources are difficult to access due to a lack of user-friendly interfaces.
Complex one off queries must be written by database professionals every time a request for information is made. Diverse proprietary data sources may only be accessible from individual proprietary software clients. There is typically little opportunity for the real business information users to interact with the data they are interested in. Limited ad hoc, export and help options for these data sources make extracting relevant and timely conclusions from the data all the more difficult. Finally, while Sun Microsystems has created an abstract gui layer above databases, these tools often can't access multiple databases, flat files, and shape files at the same time.