Data Migration And Dinner With The Secretary Of State

I was in D.C. today, speaking at Softek's sales meeting.  To me Softek embodies the concept of boring - they solve real, boring problems and get paid for it.  They make money.  How boring.

Data Migration is like the dirty little secret of IT - everybody does, but nobody talks about it.  I'm not sure why.  Big shops have to migrate data all the time from one array to another.  They do it because they need newer, faster, better arrays.  They do it because their old arrays are off lease.  They do it because they need more space.  They do it because they want to "tier" their infrastructure.  They do it because some sales guy talked them into doing it.

They do it all the time.  The average migration in a fortune 500 shop takes about 3 months of planning - and days of praying.  Softek moves data non-disruptively - from anything to anything.  Softek has about 800 mainframe customers - the kind where "let's hope it works" just won't cut it.

I think that boring old Softek is the perfect kind of company to start to preach the real business value of the solutions they offer - like improved return on assets (the non-disruptive nature probably means 5-10% increased application availability - which means my $50,000,000 IT world just got a much higher return), improved lease utilization (big shops role out arrays off lease seemingly daily, which means they tend to either de-commission them months early, wasting money, or months late, wasting even more money), and a seriously improved return on human assets (not planning for 3 months and not staying up all weekend during a move would probably yield a better life to boot).

These are the kind of boring solutions to real problems that don't get talked about enough - because most folks don't know you can do this kind of stuff.  Softek has solved the problem on mainframes, but their own customers open systems world typically doesn't know they also have the answer to their migration issues.

Plus, Sunday night I went to dinner in Georgetown with my wife and some family, and as we're sitting there two big black Yukon's whip up to the front and after unloading all the secret service folks, who hops out but Condoleezza Rice.  Impressive, nice lady.  Very friendly to the crowd.  As an embarrassed republican, it was nice to see a strong, intelligent person such as her to remind me again of why I chose my particular political affiliation.