Change

I find it interesting that the older human beings get, the more resistant to change they become - even when it is clear that change is necessary.  I'm sitting in our mid-year off-site meetings with people who I respect and trust implicitly - that are highly intelligent, highly motivated people of unquestionable character talking about all things ESG.  Even in that crowd, and even with an ADD infested leader who simply can't stop changing things, the natural reaction to thinking about things differently is "whoa".

What's most curious on the subject is that we are wired to adapt.  Darwinism is real.  Even that age old belief that the human brain stops changing in late childhood has proven to be completely wrong - in fact, the brain never stops changing.  80-year olds can re-wire their brains with practice and training.  The Dali Lama and his merry band of Tibetan monks have been participating in tests in Wisconsin of all places, proving that meditation - specifically around compassion - physically alters the brain.  The study contends that even miserable people can change their brains to become happy people.  What a fantastic study.  What would all those salty old bastards in this business do if they could hum for an hour and ended up smiling?  Dick Cheney happy? 

That kind of change might actually upset the balance of nature and cause global flooding.

My point - nothing is forever.  The only time to not consider change is when you are winning and nothing - and I mean nothing - in the environment around you is changing either.  Then its ok to milk it as long as you can.  Otherwise, for the other 99.9999% of the time, you are best to at least consider change.

My advice is to discuss how you could give everything that you currently sell away for free, and still make money.  As a matter of fact, give it away and make more money.  And no, I'm not losing it.....

Brocade buys Foundry

$3 billion clams, or about a 50% premium, which seems really high to me if I'm reading it right. Foundry seems to have a ton of cash and short term investments so that takes the real buy number down to roughly $2.3 Billion – which is below the afterhours cap that has them close to $2.5 as I write this.

Makes sense at first blush – both in the core data center, both need to fight off Cisco. Foundry has core Ethernet switching stuff, Brocade sits in all the big company SAN's. Combined company will be about $1.8 Billion, which isn't too shabby.

Interestingly Foundry has a 3.2X revenue multiple vs. Brocades 2.3X, so why not have called it a merger, saved some dough (instead of the big premium) and positioned it to drag Brocade up in multiple vs. Foundry down?

After an extensive 11 minute analysis, I like it.

My Mother and Disaster Recovery

"I think many people will be interested in having a secondary copy, either for disaster recovery or for remote access," said Jonathan Huberman, an EMC executive quoted in today's Boston Globe article about Mozy Home backup service for consumers.

Are you out of your mind? Consumers don't use terms like Disaster Recovery or Remote Access. Disaster Recovery to my mom is surviving a spilled vanilla shake. Remote access to my dad is finding the zapper to change the channel. I bet EMC gets a lot of calls from people like my dad – if you charged $4.95 a month and could find the zapper, I think a lot of people would pay for it.

EMC is a big IT company, clearly not a consumer brand company yet. Had the quote been more like Lauren's, people might have some idea what they were talking about. "You have a ton of pictures of your kids that mean so much to the family, the peace of mind of knowing that even if your computer blows up you and your loved ones will be able to access them anywhere in the world is what we are all about…." That would have had folks lining up with tears in their eyes begging for this service but instead my mom keeps calling Hopkinton asking if they have any baking soda to help absorb synthetic vanilla stains.

This is a lesson for all tech heads even if you are a big B2B company. I don't care about backup, I care about recovery. I don't care about archives, I care about discovery. I don't care about "searchability", I care about "findability". (Stolen from my friends at the AIIM (or something), and I still don't know what it stands for, but it's a great line).

Has anyone noticed that all these backup services are great for the consumer (although I never get mine to work) if you need to protect 4GB, but what is a small business really gonna do? If you have a few TB's of data and a fractional T1, you're shipping media around no matter how you slice it.

Vampire Weekend is my new favorite band. They remind me of a cross between Talking Heads and They Might Be Giants.

Here's the link to the paper I wrote on the universal data lifecycle. You should read it, as it is simplistic and correct.

I just read the draft of Dave Hitz's book, "How to castrate a bull" (no lie). It should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares at all about anything about business. It is an outstanding read with piles of lessons to be learned – without any pretense or preaching. It is definitely NOT one of those 'billionaire ego needs more people to think they are brilliant' books that annoy me to no end. I intend on writing the companion book, "Picking up the balls" shortly. While Dave gives my effort no ink, the fact is that I had the east coast competitor to the hippy NetApp movement, almost the exact counter really (we emphasized selling things, while Dave emphasized cool hippy technology stuff – unfortunately for me, Dave's stuff actually worked). I need to believe that people will learn just as much knowing what didn't work as they will learning what did – it's all I have. If I ever actually write it, I really think it would make an interesting counterpoint. Of course I'll probably be drunk doing it in order to get through the depression it will cause, so it may not end up as poignant as I believe it to be.

Kudos Diane Greene

Diane Greene is gone from VMware. It had been rumored to be coming for many months and semi-not so great numbers being reported seemed like a good time to end the show. The woman took a lot of rumor mill shots for a long time, but in the end, she went out a champ.

First of all she has to be given credit for her accomplishments. She made a lot of people rich, made "virtualization" acceptable (after many years of storage virtualization failing to find its "need to have" raison d'être), and has been at the helm of one of the great success stories of the modern era.

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment has been to not only survive, but thrive, in the macho male world of EMC. Joe Tucci is an intelligent, honorable human being – I know firsthand – but it will take a long time before sexism no longer exists in this industry. Diane Greene beat the odds and thrived in an industry stacked against her, in one of the more good ole boy male dominated companies in a male dominated business world.

She leaves owing no one anything, and quite the contrary, is an exemplary role model for the next generation of female mucky mucks. She didn't inherit her title, she earned it. Sure she had a little help with EMC and all, but anyone who thinks that made her role easier is nuts.

I wish you well Mrs. Greene. You done good.

So I spent the 4^th of July celebrating as any good American should – in a British colony (Bermuda). A fabulous place, Bermuda. The whole silly long knee socks could go, but those Brits are one to cling to tradition. I'm a big fan of Dark and Stormy's (Ginger Beer and Black Rum). The highlight of my young son Michael's life, at the ripe old age of six, is now the memory he holds of us sitting in a salt water pool with Bailey the Dolphin. Bailey provided the perfect possible set of six year old boy thrills – first she let him feed her a fish, then she made fart sounds out her blow hole one foot from our faces, and then as if via divine intervention, she pooped. There is nothing in life as fantastic to a young boy as natural gas. I'm fairly sure he will now dedicate his life to teaching animals to pull his finger.

Summertime Thoughts…..

Twenty years ago I was at the San Diego super computer center. Their mega-machine of the day was a twenty foot long three ton flashing light box that looked stunning like the "whopper" from War games. Anyway, what's interesting is that the demonstration they showed me was how the 1000 or so processors in the whopper could work together to create a 3D rendering of a person's face and head from a photograph. To prove this point, they had a sealed lathe type machine connected to the whopper that cut small pieces out of a block of paper for 9 hours until a bust of W.C. Fields became apparent. I can remember how cool I thought that was. At the time, forward looking animation companies such as Disney rented time on the whopper to do cool stuff like that at a zillion dollars an hour.

Last week I went to the dentist to have my 84^th (or so) crown shoved into my mercury filled mouth. A crown is a fake tooth made from ceramic. I was stunned when the dentist (Dr. Guyle Morris, dentist to the stars – and one of those guys who absolutely insists on asking you questions – mostly about cars – while you have 14 things jammed into your mouth along with a totally numb face) took some funky pictures and started "crafting" my tooth on a 3D workstation. Ten minutes later, a water cooled gizmo the size of a microwave oven starts cutting up a block of ceramic – exactly like the W.C. Fields bust. Ten minutes after that, I had a new crown.

It was a good example of the lifecycle of technologies and how eventually they end up in the dentist office. The whopper probably cost $50,000,000. The 3D workstation and water tooth lathe gizmo probably cost $200,000. The fact that I was able to get my crown in one appointment vs. two – priceless. More interesting perhaps is that there was most likely more CPU power inside the dentist workstation by an order of magnitude then in the whopper. I wonder if he could have made a W.C. Fields face on the crown. You know that will be the next "bling" thing. It will be like scrimshaw on your teeth – pictures of Tupac and Biggie on your choppers. Sweet.

Speaking of high-tech advancements that take way too long, I finally got to see and hear the Steve Sicola story. Sicola was a DEC storage engineer from the Mark Lewis, Richie/Ellen Larry genre who went to Compaq and ended up at Seagate. Sicola and team wanted to build a bigger "brick" than just a disk drive – a sled of disk drives where failure of one (or more) became a "who cares?" moment and where all lower level function could occur autonomically (like RAID). Surprisingly (I say mockingly, as I told him et al 53 years ago that OEM's would barf on the idea), OEM's barfed on the idea. Seeing how Seagate makes roughly 100% of its revenue and profit on those OEM's, it didn't take a genius to figure out a new play was required. Enter Xiotech, who was owned by Seagate and subsequently spun out for pretty much the exact same reasons, as a perfect place to take the Sicola project to some commercial level.

Now the stuff is out and it's way cool. The brick has 12 disks (I think, might be 10) – and they have figured out all the vibration, airflow, etc. problems that plague SATA disks, internal error checking, etc. They stripe across all the disks so they can get the performance consistency and linear scale folks like, in a pretty much disposable package (you chuck it after 5 years or so). A package like this ends up being even cheaper when you consider that you almost always will toss out your investment well before it's depreciated, and as such you have to write it down. This method makes it kind of time-proof since you know the exact expected performance/availability capabilities on day 2000 that you do on day 1. In the wild and wacky Web 2.0 world, that's a good thing to know.

I think I'll be attending the Trusted Infrastructure Technologies Conference in October in China. Cloud computing and data infrastructure is a way cool wave right now – but I've been wondering how it ever really garner true corporate success without the ability for those using it to be able to prove the security and integrity of the data assets that exist in the cloud. This initiative is built around that concept – how do you prove multi-tenancy infrastructure outside of your control is doing what it is supposed to be doing? Even in internal/intranet based cloud initiatives, you should still be concerned about being able to prove that your multi-tenancy utility is meeting all the assumptive functions it should. When you can do that the entire issue of "I want my own infrastructure" can go away finally. If we can prove it in the cloud, we can certainly prove it on our intranet. At that point, we can really start building utility infrastructures and stop stove piping everything. It may not matter to us if someone can hack into the pictures of my kids pet turtle, but it will if you want my 401K data housed out on your shared site……

The categories displayed in research for the last 25 years or so that help us delineate between "customer types" are another example of "things we still use because that's the way we've always done this" – that no longer makes any sense. In a recent internal research review our team presented their finding by "accepted nomenclature" – i.e. companies with more than 5000 employees = X and companies with more than $1B in revenue = y.

The reality is those are meaningless metrics today. If you are trying to understand and categorize a market for IT products or services, the only company who cares how many employees someone has is a company who sells individual seat licenses or products – so it might be good for Microsoft or Dell, but it doesn't tell you jack about 98% of the things I care about. There are plenty of companies with less than 100 employees and little to no revenue who are massive consumers of storage and servers. How does one characterize MySpace or FaceBook in the old way of looking at things? Is Google considered the same type of IT shop as the rest of the Fortune 500? I think not. If you are going to sell IT stuff to the world, then the only legitimate way to make comparisons is to get very basic – and I suggest that means servers. It doesn't even really matter if it is physical or virtual (as more and more will become virtual) – servers support applications that support users, processes, and other applications. If you understand server growth, you get a better picture of the company's growth. We know when a company goes from 25 servers to 200 over two years that that should be a company on our radar screen. If their employee count went from 50-200 in that time frame you probably wouldn't pay attention.

Enterprise Search Still Sucks…..

This is absolutely brilliant. This is what makes my (pseudo) job worth it.

 

I just opened an email from Beth Mayhew, Director of Marketing for AIMM.org that says this:

 

"Enterprise Search Frustrates and Disappoints Users

69% of respondents report that less than half of enterprise information is searchable online

Silver Spring, MD – June 17, 2008 – In a new study on Findability to be released by AIIM, 49% of survey respondents "agreed" or "strongly agreed" that it is a difficult and time consuming process to find the information they need to do their job. The new survey of over 500 businesses conducted in May 2008, suspects that a prime culprit for the failings of Findability in the enterprise is the admission that 69% of respondents believe that only 50% or less of their organization's information is searchable online. Given the ready access that users are supposed to have in this "Age of Google" – how is this possible?

"Findability has been a common source of frustration in the enterprise for decades," states AIIM Vice President Carl Frappaolo. "As information has become more and more digital, from it's creation through to management, the pain of finding enterprise information has moved from the piles of paper on the desktop and in storage cabinets, to the digital landfill of file servers, e-mail inboxes, digital desktops, and content management systems. Despite the advances made in search on the internet, enterprise search leaves most users frustrated."

Finding content digitally is only possible if pointers to content or the content itself is in native digital format, made available for indexing by search, and/or accessible by information organization and access techniques (such as navigational structures, taxonomies, bookmarks, etc.). The lack of such functionality in the enterprise is at the heart of user frustration.

But fault does not lie with technology solution providers. Most organizations have failed to take a strategic approach to enterprise search. 49% of respondents have "No Formal Goal" for enterprise Findability within their organizations, and a large subset of the overall research population state that when it comes to the "Criticality of Findability to their Organization's Business Goals and Success", 38% have no idea ("Don't Know") what the importance of Findability is in comparison to a mere 10% who claim Findability is "Imperative" to their organization.

The lack of strategic understanding, implemented plans and technological pros and cons to address Findability in the enterprise continues to cause pain in most organizations, although slow progress is being made."

.

Several Points:

1. Duh. You can't find diddly in an enterprise or out. When does 2 zillion responses to search end up being helpful? It's ridiculous how much internal corporate knowledge is totally wasted because your own people can't find what they need.
2. "Findability"?
3. Not one to nitpick but "from it's creation" should be "its creation".
4. Perhaps best of all – try to find out in this press release what AIIM stands for! The irony is superb. Better yet, go to AIIM.org – it still isn't obvious. When you search AIIM in their search bar, it takes you off site to Google, who promptly displays 326,000 results, none of which actually define AIIM as far as I can find.

So the organization assembled to deal with the issues associated with finding information does a survey that tells us that users are not happy when they can't find information, but uses Google to not find information that its members (or me) might like to find. I almost don't want to ask, but where do they keep these survey results? Have you seen 'em? Nope, have you?

You can't just make this stuff up. It would have been much better if they slipped in something like "48% of all data is entirely fabricated, but 98% of the time we can't prove it because no one knows where any of the information is".

So if this little brilliantly perfect example doesn't get you to realize that without an entirely different data-centric approach to categorizing and classifying data – ideally at creation – you are completely and utterly hosed, nothing will. E-discovery my butt.

Data Growth is the Problem, Simple Categorization is the Solution (or at least the start)

Most IT operational issues can be pared down to one common denominator – data growth. If it were not for endlessly growing volumes of data demanding equally endlessly growing amounts of infrastructure we would have solved every major hurdle to creating a stable, predictable service based utility model within IT.

In short, data growth strains and eventually breaks every single process within IT. Data growth:

• Causes the need for more and more infrastructure, which in turn causes:
  • Greater likelihood of infrastructure failure/outages
  • The need for additional IT staff to manage the additional infrastructure
  • Increased levels of interdependencies between infrastructure elements
  • Larger footprint, power, and cooling requirements within the data center
  • Increased difficulty in problem isolation/resolution
  • Increased likelihood in missing SLAs, being outside governance parameters, etc.
• Causes process failures and magnifies downstream issues
  • Backup/Recovery – more data requires more time, more horsepower and more precision to ensure adherence to established SLAs (RPO/RTO)
    • Further exacerbated by multiple copies of primary data used for various reasons
    • Requires more media, more off-site vaulting expense
  • Disaster Recovery – more data requires more time, more bandwidth, more infrastructure in order to ensure recoverability SLAs continue to be met
  • Application slowdowns – more data to comb through requires more infrastructure to maintain application performance. Data grooming/archiving may fix performance burden but simply shifts the burden off of production environments, rarely eliminating other downstream negatives.
  • Delays new business applications and initiatives – more data/infrastructure/processes require more planning and downtime associated with rolling out new applications.
  • Data migrations, infrastructure rollouts/replacements further complicated with growing data – equates to slower overall IT response time to business
  • Negatively affects Compliance/Governance or simply finding the right information becomes harder as the volume of information increases. Having more than a single place to look for data creates more opportunities to have data fall through the cracks – and makes it far more difficult for organizations to derive incremental benefit from an information asset after the primary use.
  • Creates increased opportunities for security issues, lost information, unprotected data, etc.

Without data growth – or at least the meteoric compound rates of data growth we have experienced over the last several decades, most every popular problem discussed in IT would have been solved. Processors, storage, and networks get faster, cheaper, and easier. Management and automation tools are more than adequate – until data growth creates an unforeseen dynamic. We would have mastered the required processes to protect, deliver, store, manipulate, move, and access our data if it weren't for the never-ending growth.

The Realities:

Data growth is not going to abate – it is going to accelerate. More people connected more ways have more ability to create data than ever before and whether we like it or not, they will do so. The usage, size, shape, and requirements of data will change as well. Faced with these realities, it is apparent that continuing down a dysfunctional path can only end in failure, and as such something needs to change.

The Solution:

Since you cannot really impact the growth of newly created data, you have to deal with elements that do reside within your control. For the point of this blog, we assume that not allowing data to be created is not a realistic alternative. Therefore, there are only two fundamental control points that can reduce the burden of data growth which you can affect; the number of copies of data which exist at a given point in time, and the treatment (processes) of that data at a given point in time. Focusing on these two metrics will give you valuable insight and enable you to add predictability to your entire operation.

In order to best frame the suggested methodology, we have devised four (4) simple stages of "life" to consider for any type of data – and for each stage there is a common set of questions you should answer which will result in a conscious understanding of what is currently occurring and the ramifications of that, and provide you with an opportunity to alter those results.

The Basic Lifecycle Stages of Data:

Stage 1: Dynamic Active Online Data

Stage 2: Persistent Active Online Data

Stage 3: Persistent Inactive Online/Nearline Data

Stage 4: Persistent Inactive Offline/Deep Archive Data

Definitions:

There are two primary data life forms – Dynamic and Persistent. Dynamic data is any data that is living in a change state – where fluidity and changes occur. Persistent data is non-changing, fixed, or static. A change of data in a persistent state creates a new data object.

Both definitions are subjective – they are not hard and fast rules. While true there is most likely an exact time when some piece of data stops all changing and becomes persistent, that is not the point. Eventually all data becomes persistent – when you deem that occurrence to have happened – and what you do about it – are entirely up to you. It is the consideration that is important – reflecting on the state of data and the treatment of data at that state is where value is to be realized.

If you do nothing else, recognize that while you don't have to do anything differently – you should take the opportunity to think about whether you should do anything differently each time some major set of data evolves to a new stage. You should ask yourself two simple questions when that occurs:

1. Should the data itself remain on the same physical infrastructure required during its dynamic phase?
2. Should we alter any of the process requirements associated with the data at this stage?

My guess is most of the time the answers to both of these questions will be "no" – but the answer to the question of "are you going to do anything about it?" is probably also "no". If you at least stop to consider it, however, you provide yourself a ray of hope.

More to come……

Weener Works….

Mike Workman, CEO of Ellison's Pillar Data Systems, is as much a lunatic as I previously mentioned. Check this article out in Forbes - Article

If you don't feel like reading it, allow me to paraphrase: Mike blows things up. He makes fireworks, bought "Weener Works" – which is some land in a desolate area of an Arizona desert – so he could go make heavy explosives and watch them blow up. How cool is that?

As a male, I'm also stricken with bizarre fascinations with cars, big trucks, and blowing things up. I buy silly cars. Mike makes bombs. I think I'm saner but who's to judge?

Funny thing is, in real life, while he can certainly be volatile, for the most part Mike is about as serene and passive as one can be. He listens, thinks, and listens some more. Maybe going to the desert and blowing things up keeps him from doing so in a staff meeting. It might be good therapy.

Speaking of blowing things up, I had one of the more interesting – and only outdoor – briefing of my illustrious career recently. ioSafe is a California company who builds fireproof/flood proof packaging for disk drives and systems. They showed up with an oven connected to enough propane to make Mike Workman happy, and proceeded to take a normal 3.5" disk and one of their magically packaged disks, copy some photo files onto them (mostly of Brian Garrett who you just can't fake photographically!), and blow them up. They got the thing up to 1100 degrees (they wanted 1500 but the New England wind was blowing) and cooked the disks to death. They then dumped the magic disk into water, seeing how if your computer room blows up eventually you'll need water to put it out.

It's pretty cool stuff. This package costs about $300 bucks (with a 2.5" drive) and when it gets hot, gaskets swell up to seal the disk off as it shuts down to keep flames and eventual water out of it. After the wreckage, you take the disk, send it back to ioSafe, and they rip off the enclosure (the SN of the disk is stamped into the metal, as paper labels would be toasted), pull out the insulation, and plug the disk into a reader. I saw it work in 3 minutes. For a small company who doesn't do any disaster recovery, buying/building an array using this technology might add $1000-$1500 bucks to the cost of the storage – but what piece of mind! They make bigger self-enclosed systems (NAS and USB) for mid-market plays, but why wouldn't even big shops want this? For a pretty paltry sum you can add a whole new layer of insurance to the game.

So now when Mike comes to blow things up, you might lose a limb but you won't lose any data…….

Mendoza

You gotta love this guy....and with all due respect to my intellectual engineering friends who think sales guys are the root of all evil, think again.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121251528966441919.html?mod=yahoo_hs&ru=yahoo

State of the Union

At the 5 month mark in the year of 2008, I find myself thinking about how upside down things are. The general mood remains pessimistic, but most IT companies are hitting their numbers. There are budget cuts across the board, but for the most part the first five months of 2008 along with Q4 of 2007 have been rock solid. IT departments are cautious, but continue to spend.

You sort of expect EMC and NetApp to be kicking butt, if for no other reason that we are conditioned to it. I didn't see Symantec's big number coming, but come it did. You would have thought the great depression of 2008 would have crippled the smaller guys, but Isilon, 3PAR, Data Domain, CommVault, and Compellent have kept on keeping on.

No one gives any attention to Double-Take, but they might be the most consistently performing one of the bunch. Boring yes, but putting up killer results. The company has completely (and almost instantly) turned around under Investor turned CEO (again) Dean Goodermote and hasn't looked back. Replication is good after all – especially if it pertains to good numbers.

I would have probably kicked you in the shins, or worse, had you told me a few years ago that I'd spend actual time thinking about power, packaging, and cooling in 2008, but alas, I do. Green matters, for the wrong reasons mostly, but it does matter. People spend money on "perceived" relevant green IT. Mark Peters knows more about Green realities than anyone else in the space. Good thing he works for ESG.

Guys like Xyratex have a pretty killer play when people start rambling about power, packaging, and cooling. They get no credit for where they sit in the food chain from Wall St., but they should. They ride with the core market – which is in hyper growth mode – and are in prime position to take advantage of the stratospheric growth that Web 2.0 presents. Why should Google, et al, keep building science project/erector set infrastructures? If you want to be your own OEM, eventually you need to act like one – which means you need to package things up to be supportable, tested, etc. In the Web 2.0 world, inexpensive capacity in professional packaging for short dough is going to rule the day, so who better to ride that wave?

Mark Hurd stole the big-deal show buying EDS, but Andy Monshaw's storage business at IBM has done the most interesting and most out-of-the-box deals in the sector. I would have never believed anyone in that job would ever buck the outrageous "not invented here" attitude that has been the hallmark of that group. It remains to be seen if the infusion of outside talent will have the desired effect or the anti-bodies and big company politics will push out the new blood. No matter what, you have to give Monshaw due credit for doing what few ever thought could be done by lighting a fire under the group and making IBM storage interesting. By the end of 2008 we should be able to get a feel for how it's going – death or glory, if you will. Maybe both – with glory usually comes some death.

5 months ago DataDirect Networks was about as exciting to talk about as processed cheese, but former HDS marketing madman Steve Zivanic joined the ranks and immediately began to tell a much more interesting tale. DDN just so happens to sell into the sweet spot of the media, entertainment and Web 2.0 worlds. DDN was used to create the new Batman movie trailers and effects for The Dark Night (way cool, those Batman movies). Zivanic leverages play's like this and finds ways to get attention, where in the past DDN might have added a Pacific Title & Art (the post-production house) logo to their list of customers and hope you might somehow know who that was (you wouldn't) and why they mattered (ditto). If you aren't a multi-billion dollar player you need to be different to be noticed. Look for more interesting things out of DDN and Zivanic, he does things that make me pay attention.

Finally, the only thing more boring than storage, packaging, and IBM historically has been the analyst business. Apparently there is such a thing as the "Institute of Industry Analyst Relations", or IIAR. I cannot tell you exactly why, or who these nice folks are, but bless their hearts for ranking ESG in the top 10 firms globally (out of over 100) and in the top 5 in the U.S. in the "Analyst Firm of the Year" category. We came in at #7 in the "Most Important Firm of the Year" category globally, but heck if I can tell you what that really means. Congrats to Brian Babineau who made the top 10 in the global "Analyst of the Year" category, out of 191. If 191 were nominated how many does that mean there are in the world? Yikes. Thanks to all the folks who took the time and effort to put this together and to those who voted. It's nice to get recognized even though we are boring.