Last Weeks Trip Report

Sorry for the delay, but I've been woefully behind.  It seems I never catch up anymore.  Anyhow, I made it worse for myself by deciding to get on a plane and head out to Silicon Valley last week, which I have been able to successfully avoid doing for over a year.

First, the trip started poorly.  Sunday evening I was forced to watch Peyton Manning finally beat the Pats in a game that mattered.  I like Peyton, so it isn't about that, but to watch him come back on us in such a way, and to see that Mr. Brady is human every now and then was a mongo bummer.  Even worse, I had a house lined up in Miami for the Super Bowl - and if you have ever attended said event, housing is the hardest thing to find.  So I limped off to bed at 10:30pm with a buzz and a belly full of really bad (for you) food.

My alarm went of 8 minutes later (4AM) so I could make my 6:30 AM United to SFO flight.  There are no longer any flights between Boston and San Jose, two of the major business capitals of the country.  I hate airlines, and truly wish the bad would die.  Who would want to go to San Jose?  Only anyone who sells too or buys from one of the 18 zillion tech companies along the 101.  Was there ever an empty flight to San Jose?  Maybe American felt the planes were getting too heavy. Fortunately, I was in first class - which is a nice way of saying I was in a slightly bigger, really cruddy uncomfortable seat with only one person to have to climb over to go to the bathroom vs. two.  The good news is I was in row 1 so even my 14" legs had to be bent in half to sit.  There had obviously been well over one billion other rear ends in my seat previously, as it was about as padded and comfy as my driveway.  I don't have a rear end, per se.  Big gut, no butt.  I was in pain after 25 minutes.  5 hours later I was almost a cripple.

We landed on time, and a car was nicely waiting to pick me up to bring me to my first meeting, with Data Domain.  DD is an impressive group - they invented the whole Data De-Duplication gig and have ridden that wave brilliantly.  Now everyone and their brother is trying to catch up, but these guys have some great stuff and a big, impressive list of customers.  Best of all, their CEO Frank Slootman, is Dutch.  Therefore, upon meeting him, I immediately had to steal the line from Austin Power's Dad and say "there are two things I cannot stand - intolerance, and the Dutch."  Frank looked at me as if I were insane, as apparently he hadn't heard that one before.  We worked it out.  I chatted with a bunch of their smart folks theorizing about where other implementations of this technology could really affect change in the world, and found quite a few.  What if you could get the performance attributes required by a high percentage of today's applications on a primary store that happened to get 40 to 1 compression rates?  Imagine the economic advantages and the consolidation potential.  What if everything were stuffed into one place?  Seems it may be easier to find things if it were all in one place. 

Which got me to thinking about the fact that this is really the first time in this industry in a long, long time where so many "emerging" players have become legitimate, going business concerns.  Historically there have always been start ups trying to become the next big thing, but most focus around a new technology or building a better mousetrap, and less about a getting to market and solving a heretofore unsolved problem with that technology.  It is very rare indeed that someone comes around with a new new thing and be able to reach financial critical mass.  Normally those companies are acquired along the way, or die trying.  Rarely do they affect the incumbents, either positively or negatively.

I look at the landscape now and see folks either at or rapidly approaching ciritcal mass ($100,000,000 for hardware, $25M for software) in revenues - in a market long dominated by just a few big guys.  DD, Pillar, 3Par, Equallogic, Lefthand, Compellent, SANRAD, Copan, CommVault, Isilon, Riverbed, BlueArc, and a host of others, and I wonder why.  It has to be because of two factors - the first is the market requirements have changed - i.e. the nature of the business itself has changed because this industry was developed on the fact that transactional data was where all the value was.  Today, most of the data created is not transactional, it's fixed or persistent.  It doesn't change.  Even transactional oriented data can start as fixed - it may be an event for example, but eventually even if it is changing initially, it becomes fixed at some point.  Treating all data the same at creation until we eventually nuke it is illogical.  Therefore, the second element required for newbies to have real businesses is that the incumbents simply are not providing solutions with the attributes to address the new world order.  No IT person wants to buy from a newbie, no matter how cool the stuff.  There is too much risk, and lets face it, too much work to do to justify doing it.  So if a risk averse, already overloaded IT dude is going to go to bat for a newbie company, it only makes sense that the newbie must be solving a problem the others don't.  I find that interesting.

I went to dinner with Dave Hitz and Kris Newton of Netapp that evening, at one of the two meat joints in the Valley.  Why are there no restaurants, nor hotels in Silicon Valley?  It's the tech capital of the planet, there is TONS of money there, and yet there seem to be 3 hotels, a motel from 1948, 3 restaurants, and 12,000 Starbucks.  Dave was kind enough to bring a bottle of his brother's wine - Chateau D'hitz (pronounced "ditz" of course).  It was a fresh 2005 Meritage named Screaming Priest (I didn't ask), and it was darned tasty.  Dave and I spent hours talking about the world of IT years from now (I can almost feel the boredom on my childrens faces).  He is one of the best people on the planet to talk about ethereal IT concepts with.  I was in town to speak to Dave and some others for a book I'm finally writing (it is one of six that I've been threatening for years).  He's a fascinating guy and a superb human, inside of a complete weirdo genius (which I mean entirely complimentary, I could not have more respect, admiration, nor flagrant envy for the man).  He is worthy of a book all on him, so maybe I'll make it seven.

I spent the next day with various mucky mucks I'm not telling you about.  I did have a nice dinner that evening with Mike Klayko, Tom Buiocci, and Dan Crain of Brocade fame.  They had just received their FTC approval a few hours previously for the McData acquisition, so all was well.  I was a tad nervous that our government was going to make the wrong call on that one, which would have not only really irritated me as a tax payer, but would have been the cause of McData's death - the very thing they supposedly were trying to prevent.  Without disclosing confidences, Brocade's integration efforts behind the scene are about the most thought out and complete as I've ever seen.  The proof will be in the pudding, as they say, but from a planning and contingency perspective, they have their act together.  Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation, unfortunately, came about during some tangent on Cancer - of which I'm a survivor.  Mike shared that his daughter (Christina) in-law is going through some tough stuff and dealing with a harsher dose of treatment than I went though - and mine sucked.  Her link tells her story, which everyone should read - and donate twenty bucks to the cause.  Puts the problems of IT into a different perspective.

Speaking of Pillar, I spoke at their sales meeting.  I get asked to do this stuff a lot, which is flattering, but i refuse most, as I really do hate to travel.  Since I was there, and I've been following the company since it wasn't a company, I said yes. (Really - my first trip to Israel in 2000 - I end up in my hotel after a brutal day of meetings, tired and semi-loaded, when on the way to the elevator a small man stood up and said "excuse me, Steve, may I speak with you a moment?"  Too stunned to be terrified, I'm thinking oh oh, the Mossad.  They aren't kidding when they tell you everybody knows everybody in that country.  I never did find out how he knew I was coming, or when, or where I was staying, or how long he waited.  He introduced himself as someone working with Digital Appliance, and asks if I'm familiar with them, which I am not.  He explains how Mr. Larry Ellison had DA started to create the ultimate scaleable database machine - to support all the thin clients that were going to happen.  That didn't work, but they stumbled upon a storage architecture that did.  He wanted to know if there might be a business in what they had.  I thought there was. Now I figure if this hits, Larry owes me a billion or two.) 

Being a veteran of a million years and a million sales meetings, I thought I'd seen it all.  Two things occurred that were very new to me.  First, the evening before as I was heading into the Santa Clara Marriott (which is the interviewing capital of North America in case you were wondering), I heard a loud ruckus.  It was Pillar.  I popped my head in only to witness the most organized U.S. vs. Great Britain beer swilling contest I've ever encountered.  There were two lines facing each other and one person on each team guzzled their beer to completion prior to turning it upside down and putting it on their head, and the next guy would go.  It was quite exciting, and the Americans won, but I'm fairly confident cheating was involved.  Tough to out drink a Brit, I've found. 

The next day I went down to do my thing, and walked to the back of the room to first listen to CEO Mike Workman's speech, which is where I witnessed the second unique thing of the sales meeting.  Mike was on stage wearing a WWII jacket and helmet, in front of the Pillar version of a giant flag.  Mike was doing his Patton thing, which is fine, except Mike makes me look like Bill Walton - the man is seriously short.  His speech was hilarious, albeit loaded with profanity.  (Yes, I said that.  I was no longer concerned with my content.)  It says something when your leader can have some fun and do semi-insane things in an almost public setting.  His act was funny - but his messages were deadly.

Pillar isn't ashamed of the fact that they have been put on this earth via Larry Ellison to single handedly alter the entire economic and operational landscape of storage within IT.  Their mission is to build storage for the new world order - simple, scalable, Q of S, unified storage that is smarter than you are - and cheaper than lunch.  Why you ask?  My theory is that Larry doesn't like all the value that is placed on something as mundane as storage infrastructure.  Larry wants the value to remain entirely at a higher place - namely the Database.  If he can help move storage the way that IP networking evolved down an inevitable standardized commodity curve, he can grab more of the higher value dough.   Larry has spent well over a hundred million bucks on this so far, and that's just what he found between the cushions of his couch.  He can be patient.  He isn't a VC who needs this exit to save his portfolio.  He's got all the time in the world.  That's a pretty good advantage, since I've always loved saying that all problems we face can be solved with enough time and money.

I don't mean to imply that the Pillar folks aren't trying to solve real problems with real engineering - they are - as are a lot of others.  They have what looks like a brilliant story around their unification story, the data center efficiency improvements and their ability to optimize the cost per performance per measure of space. The difference is that they are pursuing this goal knowing that they have a seemingly endless pile of money to get it done.  These guys will be around for a long time I think. This could very well end up being book number 8 - maybe with enough intrigue, suspense, and violence to be a movie!

I took the red eye back, which might be the worst overall traveling experience one can do.  The airport is closed, and there is no one around except the living dead of the IT industry trying to get home.  It looks like a B-grade hung over horror movie. The only planes that ever arrive early are the red eyes back from the west coast - so if you were going to be able to sleep all cramped up and wildly uncomfortable, forget it, because you just landed.  The good news is I didn't drive, I took a car service, so being early was of absolutely no value.  The better news is it was approximately 2 degrees (Fahrenheit, which is roughly 1100 below zero Celsius) out, and I had nothing but a sport coat, which I clung too while tromping by the endless line of limo clones, none of which had my name misspelled. 

I'm looking forward to not getting on a plane next week.