Four Years of Passion, Commitment, and Accomplishment
The conclusion of FY09 is a milestone for the university technology outreach efforts in China in that we have just completed the four year commitment to train and support thousands of university teachers in China.
This commitment, which is formally called “University Teachers Training and Teaching Assistance Program”, was initiated in 2005. The goal of this program is to (1) train 2000 university professors with the latest advancements in Sun’s product and technology so that they are capable of delivering Sun’s product and technology through university curriculum; (2) provide technical and incentive support for universities and teachers that are teaching Sun’s product and technology such that they have confidence and preference in Sun’s product and technology over other alternatives; and (3) provide a set of textbooks and technical publications that can be used as reference by the university teachers and students.
The first set of these trainings got started in the second half of 2005, with the first Java teachers training during the week of 2005.05.23, and the first Solaris teachers training during the week of 2005.11.28. During the past 4 years, we have completed a total number of 47 training sessions (each training session took 3-5 days) for university teachers across China, covering 871 university teachers in Java and NetBeans, 1034 university teachers in [Open]Solaris and Sun Studio, and 25 university teachers in WSN and Sun SPOT. The total number of university teachers being trained through this program is 1930 (70 less than our original goal).
The impact of this program is tremendous. We are seeing about 5-10 new books on Sun’s product and technology being available in local bookstores every year, covering a wide range of subjects such as Java, NetBeans, [Open]Solaris, and Sun SPOT. We are seeing hundreds of universities and research institutes switching from JBuilder or Eclipse to NetBeans as the standard IDE for their Java classes, installing [Open]Solaris operating system into their computer labs, using Java / NetBeans / [Open]Solaris in their student research projects, setting up WSN labs with Sun SPOT as the reference platform. Because of the popularity of NetBeans among university teachers, the National Education Exam Authority (NEEA) formally appointed NetBeans as the required IDE for the Java subject of their National Computer Rank Examination (NCRE). By the end of 2009.05, their have been 34K students certified on NetBeans through the NCRE/Java exam. We are also seeing a rapid growth of NetBeans market share in China, from a mere 2.4% in 2004 to 23.8 in 2008 (with a peak of 27.6% in 2007). We understand that there are many factors contributing to this significant growth, and we are proud of being part of these efforts.
Technology outreach takes a lot of passion, commitment, and patience. This is usually not measurable by days, weeks, or months but by years. Likewise, the result of technology outreach does not come in days, weeks, or months but in several years later. In an era when people are not willing to wait for 60 seconds for a web page to be fully loaded, this kind of passion, commitment and patience is extremely valuable. I am proud of being part of a team that look into several years in the future rather than a 12-month goal. I am even more blissed to see these efforts bear fruits that are meaningful for both Sun and the university teachers and the academic institutions that we have work with.
I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to many people who helped shape, promote, support, and execute this program, although many of them are currently not with Sun Microsystems, Inc. They are
— Joey Guo, Roger Dong for initiating the program
— Matt Thompson, for his endless championship and sponsorship
— Anderson Wong, for his firm support (with doubt for the outcome) for the first Java teacher training session
— Sin-Yaw Wang, for his encouragement and support
— Laurie Tolson, Jean Elliott, Jeet Kaul, Jeff Jackson, Reggie Hutcherson, Naveen Asrani, Tim Cramer, Jim Parkinson, Ian Murdock, Jan Chalupa, Octavian Tanase, Nandini Ramani, Laura Hill, Teresa Giacomini, Kudip Oberoi, Micheline Nijmeh, Gary Serda, Roger Meike, Jason Tong, Fang Li, Mike Hayden, James Hughes, Melanie Gao, James Bai, Gary Wang, Wang Yang, Kevin Song, Jim Grisanzio for providing financial, technical, and engineering support
— the entire Technology Outreach team under Matt Thompson / Reggie Hutcherson for providing guidance, content, and engineering support
— the Solaris x86 Engineering, MDE (now ISV-E), AGC, Storage, Java, and Open Community teams in Sun China for providing engineering support for the various training sessions, book authoring and book translation projects
— the ex-ERI-University-Program under Jason Tong and Fang Li for their partnership and friendship (Jason Tong, Fang Li, Joey Guo, Fiona Duan, Ricky Zhou)
— and many other names that can’t fit into this short email message
And finally, the SDN China team (Michael Li, Joey Shen, Ye Liang, Alex Peng, Ada Li, Rita Zhang, Zhen Tao, Qixun Yang) for their tireless passion, commitment, and execution.
Best regards,
Qingye Jiang (John)
Senior Manager
Sun Developer Network, China
Themocracy
Great work!
Well… It is a little blue. Any change on the team?
四年不长，但也不短。能用四年的时间做这样一件有意义的事情是值得骄傲的！相信这对很多人来说都是难忘的记忆！
First time in my life to receive acknowledgment after I have left the
company. Thank you, John and Jason, for the thought and
for remembering.
China out-paces the world by nearly 10% in GDP growth every years for
the past decade or so. China’s engineering population is among the
youngest in the world and also the largest. Lastly, a very large
portion of China has not yet crossed the “digital divide.” When
they do, they will use the Internet.
Any company wishes to be anything in Internet cannot ignore China and
would be better off having a China strategy. Sun had one: capture the
future developers starting from the schools. The effort will bear
rewarding fruits.
I am glad that I participated and, hopefully, helped. It was even more
rewarding to have crossed our lives for a while.
I hope that Oracle will share Sun’s vision.