Sun Microsystems Sees Significant Value in Providing Its
Global Workforce with an Online Research and Learning Venue.

A world-class technology leader, Sun Microsystems, uses the power of technology to increase its employees’ productivity and knowledge by providing them with on-demand, online access to thousands of technology and business books, reference materials, training videos, learning tools, and more—all accessible online anytime from anywhere in the world.

Sun Microsystems, along with its core partners, is renowned for delivering products and services that influence and shape today’s network environments for consumers, commercial industries and government entities worldwide. Sun’s technology is used by nearly every sector of society and industry, and powers some of the world’s best known search, social networking, entertainment, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, news, energy, and engineering companies.

Key to Sun’s competitive edge in the global marketplace is its team of creative, knowledgeable, technology professionals—researchers, developers and engineers—who are continually searching for the emerging technological trends and innovations that will drive development of Sun’s next generations of products and solutions. To remain competitive, Sun must provide its engineers, developers and technical teams with the resources and learning tools that they need to fully explore the constantly evolving technological landscape and to acquire the new skills necessary to build and deploy advanced technologies. And, Sun must provide those resources and tools within a framework that employees can easily, effectively use on a daily basis.

Sun’s engineering, development and technical groups consist of thousands of people located in 100 countries around the planet. Sun’s librarians realized that maintaining only brick-and-mortar libraries of books, periodicals, and research material for such a globally distributed workforce was logistically impractical and expensive, would not keep pace with the needs of the employees, and would not provide sufficiently fast access to essential information.

For Sun’s knowledge-hungry techies, the Internet offered a rich source of informational sources but, as studies have shown, there are hidden costs and drawbacks associated with reliance on Internet searches. There are hours of productivity lost while employees sift through thousands of search results and, if the retrieved information is erroneous, the company can suffer potentially debilitating costs for reworking, missing deadlines and delaying mission-critical launch dates. The challenge for Sun was to leverage the strengths of a well-stocked physical library joined with the power of the Internet to get information and learning tools into the hands of its global workforce.

Sun’s Learning Services organization, which provides e-learning and training content for the company, saw that offering digital resources would meet its needs and fit its learning and development model. To determine which publishers were most frequently referenced and which provided the most reliable content, Sun surveyed its primary users of technical material. At the top of the preferred reading list were Sun’s own SMI Press and O’Reilly Media, with titles available in online format only from Safari Books Online, a Web-based provider of publications for technology professionals. Safari Books Online was the obvious solution for Sun’s digital book and reference content.
In 2004 Sun purchased a subscription to Safari Books Online Premium Library and rolled out a pilot program providing 1,000 Sun engineers with access to the thousands of books in the Safari Books Online database. Soon after the pilot program launched, hundreds of other Sun employees began clamoring for access to the content in the Safari Books Online library. The following year, Sun added another 1,000 seats to its subscription and, today, Safari Books Online is deployed throughout the enterprise and integrated into key sites and learning tools.

Safari Books Online has become an essential resource for Sun’s technology professionals. With the subscription to Safari Books Online, Sun’s workforce can keep their skills current and remain at the forefront of technology’s ever-changing environment. Sun’s deployment of Safari Books Online has been successful because the company has purchased a resource for information that’s truly valuable to employees, because Sun has properly promoted it within the organization, and because Sun has made it easy for a worldwide workforce to access. And, it’s successful because it improves the company’s bottom line—and the employees’ day-to-day work experience.

In an annual cost analysis project conducted jointly by Sun and Safari Books Online, the two companies are able to illustrate significant cost savings attributed to Sun’s subscription to Safari Books Online
Premium Library.

Increased Productivity
Value of Time Saved

Of the Sun employees using Safari Books Online during the analysis project timeline:

At Sun’s current annual subscription rate, this means that Sun employees who use Safari Books Online at a moderate to heavy rate will pay for the cost of their service in less than one month, and those who use the service casually will take slightly longer to see their ROI.

Cost Avoidance
Sun’s technology workers purchased an average of five books per year, expensed to the company. By providing employees with access to the entire Safari Books Online library, the cost of purchasing books is drastically reduced, or eliminated entirely. During the most recent cost analysis timeline, more than 6,300 unique titles were accessed in Safari Books Online. With Sun’s subscription, the company eliminates 100% of the cost of providing hard copies of these books.

Additional Cost Savings
The Safari Books Online library is filled with information, tutorials, and on-demand learning capabilities that give organizations options to more costly off-site, e-learning, and instructor-led trainings. In challenging economic times, Safari Books Online provides a comprehensive, one-stop source for world-class information from technology’s leading experts and thought leaders, ensuring that an organization does not fall behind due to current availability of funds for such initiatives.

Employees at all levels and all disciplines of technology can be assured that they have access to the critical information, answers, certification needs, development opportunities, etc. that will allow them to excel
at their jobs.

Note: Actual savings results may differ by company. Please ask a Safari Books Online representative for details about how a Safari Books Online subscription can help your company.
According to a 2008 Forrester Research report on learning strategies, training and educational resources are most effective when employees are comfortable with them and use them at work on a regular basis. Sun has taken extraordinary steps to integrate Safari Books Online within the company’s internal learning portal and key Web sites so that the entire workforce has easy access to the knowledge, information and tools it needs to be successful every day.

1. Integrated with Google Search Appliance. In the course of deploying the Google Search Appliance, Sun’s Learning Services group decided to integrate the Google product with Safari Books Online. Working directly with engineers from Safari, the Learning Services group developed a module that’s part of Google’s Search Appliance and allows search queries to return results from Safari Books Online.

2. Integrated online resources with key internal Web sites. Sun’s Digital Libraries and Research group put links to Safari Books Online on internal Web sites geared toward the employees who use Safari Books Online the most. One of the Web sites used by engineers has an RSS feed from Safari that lets the engineers know when new books are available. Within Sun’s MyLearning site, a single location for all learning information for employees, they included a widget for eBooks which includes an RSS feed that shows new Safari titles.

3. Integrated with search visualization tools. Sun uses Grokker to make sifting through voluminous amounts of search results faster and easier for employees. Working with Safari Books Online and Grokker, Sun was able to make sure that Grokker search results also returned information from Safari.

4. Developed easy access for users. Since Sun engineers use content from Safari Books Online to solve technical problems, they need anytime, anywhere access to Safari’s content, whether they’re working from home or in an off-site office. To make access easy, Sun’s Digital Libraries and Research group set up Sun’s Safari Books Online Web site so that it’s public. It’s outside of Sun’s network so Sun employees only need a user ID and password to log into Sun’s Safari Books Online subscription.

5. Promoted the product and trained employees how to use it.
To get the most value out of Sun’s subscription to Safari Books Online, the Digital Libraries and Research group promotes the service through a variety of efforts—webinars, e-mails, blogs, Intranet, podcasts, virtual worlds, Twitter, RSS feeds, and wikis —that demonstrate how to use Safari Books Online, provide tips for taking advantage of Safari’s features, and announce new titles.

6. Maximized value of product across company. As an information services team, the Digital Libraries & Research group also use Safari Books Online in their learning, research and information consulting projects for teams and individuals at Sun.

7. Leveraged the product to expand value-added services. Sun has begun to include product documentation on Safari Books Online which benefits Sun’s employees as well as the worldwide technical community. With Safari Books Online, subscribers have access to documentation on Sun’s products.