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If you really want to get folks to get all nuts about something, involve politics - or not even - all you have to do is mention political figures and kazaam! The whole world goes nuts.
I wrote this article in CW about the lost emails of White House staffers a few days ago - and if you haven't read it, please do and make sure I'm not the crazy one here. The article is about lost data, not politics - but judging by the comments posted on-line, and the hundred plus emails I've received (on every conceivable side of this non-issue) have taught me that I have found a way to stir the pot! I love a good controversy, but this one has taken on a life of its own, and it's not a rational one.
Some folks got a tad personal, assuming that I must be a crazed liberal Democrat as I mocked the administration around the whole notion of "losing" emails. I am a (albeit disillusioned) Republican - I even voted for Mr. Bush (twice). Calling me an idiot is fine, but please, get your assumptions in line! My vote has nothing to do with the fact that the White House "lost" data. Oh yeah, threatening to cancel your subscription is a nice touch, but for a free publication? What's next, a self-imposed twenty minute sit-in?
So, if you are able to read the 1200 or so words without automatically moving to any extreme position, you should find that the article is an accurate representation of the real issues - privacy and data retention. I don't care if it was Bush, Clinton, or my aunt Louise who was losing the data, I would have written the same piece. Data retention, protection and privacy issues transcend politics and yes, even religion - at least in my book. I'd rather listen to Paris Hilton discuss 18th century literary influences than engage in a political or religious debate via the media.
So, the deal is I promise to only call a spade a spade - and only in areas that I belong in. I don't, and won't, start non-IT related arguements just for sport - there's plenty of places you can do that without my help. For those who are lathered up on this one, re-read it as if you were not looking for a spot on Crossfire.
Now to really make you lose your mind - I worked at TJX one summer during college, and yes, I inhaled.
On a positive note, it appears activism is not dead. Why can't we put some of that mental energy to use getting our tech issues resolved? I really have to believe that if you used the same level of zeal on your backup vendor, the stuff would actually work by now.
Finally, one last thought for all of you regardless of political affiliation - if you went to your boss and told them you couldn't find data deemed critical, what would happen? Would a political action committe come to your rescue? I'm guessing no because in the business world, when things matter, politics and religion are secondary to economics - and that data will cost somebody a lot.
Remind me never to complain about being in Orlando again. The weather has been stellar, and back in Boston it is 35 degrees and raining a foot an hour. Glad I'm not a marathon runner also (I'm not, though that may surprise you), as they discussed canceling the event for the first time ever. They elected to go forward, which is ridiculous, but should make for entertaining video on the news. Why I continue to reside in the great Northeast is becoming a better question all the time. Arizona seems nice.
Orlando must the U.S. leader in cheesy gift shops, surpassing Vegas in my humble opinion. Middle America is frightening. It is hard to imagine ourselves as the tech whizzes and global super power extraordinaire when in line at a drug store behind four non-related (seemingly) people with full-on mullets, and supremely bad facial hair - and those were the ladies.
I've already begun to receive the usual bulk batch of press releases since SNW starts today. Emulex announced an independent company validated their performance is superior to Q-logic in a VMware environment. The only problem is I've never heard of the company (Demartek) and the full report link doesn't work, not that I'm insinuating anything. So yes, of course I am biased in such things, I don't think anything worth proving should be done by anyone other than ESG Labs, so take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, testing aside, the play is brilliant. Why wouldn't you attach yourself to VMware in any way you could? I'm surprised that more folks haven't figured that out - creating parallel branding to VMware is a very, very smart thing to do right now. It will be interesting to see how many of the vendors at SNW have overt VMware programs under way.
In this morning's USA Today, the front page banner is "25 Stocks You Should Have Bought". People pay for this? Why not pay the hotel staff to sneak into my room and hit me in the head with a hammer instead?
Speaking of VMware, the story they tell is one of the best you'll hear. I'm having trouble figuring out how Microsoft or Xen, etc. will be able to catch up. This game may be over before it starts and others will have to figure out how to play above (or below) that line. Second, EMC really has to be commended for leaving VMware alone - though now I think they have no choice. I'm amazed at how separated they really are - you would think that there would be much tighter integration with the EMC product set, but if anything, it's the opposite so far. EMC might be being a bit too nice in all of this - words I never thought I'd say.
I forgot to post this article - my bad. Here's a CW one on more Green IT.
This is a good blog by Rich Corley of Pirus fame, who started Akorri.
This is my latest in Storge Magazine - I particulary enjoy the X-Wife reference.
Darwinian forces are at work in the storage industry, and users stand to benefit the most.
Last month, I explained why the storage business works the way it does. This month, I’ll talk about who’s benefiting from the evolutionary changes that have occurred in this space.
Revolutionary events cause rifts in the atmosphere, creating holes of new opportunity. IBM caused the great computer rift—enabling machines to perform business tasks—and it propelled them to historic levels of greatness not seen since the industrial revolution. The firm’s success caused slower, evolutionary changes that enabled new holes of opportunity. Apple did it with iPod. Microsoft did it. But as IBM became more successful, the forces of evolution took hold and the problem shifted from “How do we get more leverage out of our high-priced math-whiz actuaries?” to “How will we keep all this electronic gadgetry up and running?” to “How do we do much more with way less?”. Enter EMC, a fledgling memory company that saw an opportunity with a cheaper, faster, better play—namely storage. This one has even more revolutionary attributes because not only did the mighty IBM have to have woefully inferior products, but the entire market had to alter the way it bought those products. Disk was just a peripheral. Nobody ever made independent disk decisions before; it would’ve been like buying a car and adding your own transmission.
With evolution, EMC is now part of the status quo in the market it effectively created 20 years ago. EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM still rule the “core” transactional world, but that world has changed. Those changes have forced new economic and operational realities to the forefront. It isn’t okay to have infrastructure purpose-built for bullet-proof transaction processing all the way through forever. It’s too expensive and difficult to manage, grow, change, etc. We can’t validate the required expertise that we could on the transaction system because we can’t point to the dollar-per-transaction element that made it easy to justify. It’s hard to put value on an email, PowerPoint or two-year-old event log—until you need it to stay out of jail.
Trying to convince a small slice of the market to take the hard route and be a rebel, a whole bunch of folks may have started building better mousetraps. But they suddenly find themselves relevant not because their technology is cheaper, better and faster, but because the market dynamics evolved at the right time. 3PAR has been preaching “utility” computing and delivering quality of service favoring one I/O against another for a long time. It was cool to talk about, but now it’s sold hundreds of millions of dollars of gear because enabling IT to run as a legitimate sub-business with known deliverables is no longer just theory—it’s the difference between IT relevance and extinction. EqualLogic didn’t get 2,000 customers because people were dying to use iSCSI. It got them because it built systems that scale dynamically and because a system the size of Montana can be managed by someone as clueless as my ex-wife. Yosemite Technologies isn’t selling tons of backup software because it has continuous data protection; it’s winning because it took all that high-end stuff and completely hid it from the SMB guys who would rather chew tin foil than invest in something built for an enterprise. They know there are more companies with fewer than 100 folks than any other slice, and those folks care as much about their emails and accounting apps as the big banks.
Dozens of companies are building real businesses today because of luck, opportunity, and the inevitable fact that time will erode what was and expose what isn’t. Firms like CommVault, Double-Take Software, Isilon Systems and Riverbed Technology have found riches in them thar hills. But even more are lurking, ready to grab their place in history—and I couldn’t be happier.
The Dutch, Data Domain is also run by a Dutchmen - Frank Slootman. And yes, he is also tall, and about to be able to buy a lot more Amstel's. DD is on the path to their IPO which could happen in short order. At the market caps of other recent tech IPO metrics such as Riverbed, Isilon, and Commvault, It will not surprise me that DD comes out big. They sell a lot of stuff, and have the luxury of really being the first and broadest in the whole data de-duplication space - which today is used primarily for backup targets but that kind of technology will have a play in all aspects of storage. They settled their differences with Quantum over some patents, so I think it's show time.
Speaking of IPO's - has anyone ever quantified the business impact of a company pre-public and post? It makes sense that prospects on the fence about buying from a smaller private company suddenly feel their investment is worthy if a company is now public, but I wonder what happens to things like the average length of a deal. I assume it becomes a shorter time from prospect to customer, but I've not seen any data on that. I guess I'm wondering what other real business value is derived from the IPO exercise, besides the obvious. What I do know is that once you are public, life doesn't get easier if you are the CEO and management team. If anything, the pressure becomes far greater and forget about privacy. Being a mucky muck has always been hard, but being one with all the scrutiny that comes from being public is whole different ball game. It would be interesting to analyze data on how CEO's have faired in the post Sarbanes-Oxley era of going public. I bet it's a good time to buy Mylanta stock.
Speaking of stocks - has anyone paid attention to the bizarre coincidence that EMC's stock is up about 10% since there has been a bunch of press about how Joe Tucci and others are paid? Joe's good, but not good enough to suddenly make the price of the stock go up just for the heck of it. Most of his compensation is already tied to stock appreciation, so I'm pretty sure he's on board with the whole "raise the stock price" issue. It doesn't seem reasonable for shareholders to be able to vote on compensation, because only a B player CEO would ever take a job in that circumstance. I want a CEO making a fortune if the compensation is tied to the right metrics - like increasing shareholder value. The last thing I want is some nitwit dumb enough to take a job where stockholders and employees get to vote on their pay. There is a reason why big successful companies are what they are, and to think you can get a quality chief on the cheap is just plain dumb.
Last week I went off to do a speech for Network Appliance in Amsterdam. I used to do this kind of stuff all the time - the money is great and I get to go to really super places - but I rarely do it anymore. After a million flights, I found that a few years ago I became a white knuckle flyer - the kind normal flyer's hate to have on their aircraft. Doctors and shrinks tell me its natural, after my bout with cancer, but I don't think that's it. Anyway, I see no point in interjecting fear and terror into my own life, after all, I have a 15 year old daughter to do that for me.
This time I said yes, partly because I really needed a few days out of town and partly because, well, it's Amsterdam. I took my lovely wife, Jess along, figuring I couldn't get in that much trouble if she was with me. A six-foot blond tends to draw attention away from me in most situations.
I have several observations; first, the Dutch are giants. Being statistically average in many ways (5 foot 7 inches is exactly statistically average, though tall people disagree) I never really stand out in a crowd. In Amsterdam I was an oddity. Every Dutch male was at least 6'3". Jess was average - words I never thought I'd say. Everywhere you looked, there were tall, gangly Dutch folk peddling away on their 1943 looking bicycles. All of them looking at me and seeming to say "Look Hans, a little person..."
The Dutch ride bikes. Lots and lots of bikes. Unlike Beijing, or Rome, where bikes and scooters also outnumber cars, in Amsterdam the cohabitation of bikes and autos seemed to work. I couldn't figure out the rules, but it wasn't "just go" as it seems is the rule in the other spots. I didn't see any flattened Dutch while there.
I took the red eye to Amsterdam, landed, got changed at my hotel, and went to the event. My wife went to sleep. I enjoyed a fine lunch with a handful of Netapp customers - two of which stood out; a gentleman from Phillips asked the most intelligent questions of my Dutch host around the areas of data center virtualization and another from @Home, who apparently either didn't go out of business in the bust as I thought, or no one told the Dutch. The Phillips fellow knew that adding virtualization for utilization and operational benefit at the server level was mandatory - but recognized that once that occurs the ability to see end-to-end from a virtual server through virtual storage was all but impossible. I couldn't agree more. The @Home dude was explaining how Holland is a wired country - effectively the Verizon FIOS equivalent of the Dutch - and that they were able to pump outrageous levels of bandwidth direct to the household. (I'm dying for FIOS, but of course can't get it. They have to dig up my street, which means it will be years. My buddy has it a mile away from me, and thinks that now that he gets HBO he is a power user. My kid is playing interactive video games with others around the globe while I pipe video all over the house through my MCE and am dying to get into IPTV, but I have to wait.)
My speech was entitled "How Transactional Systems Are Killing IT" - which is a darned good one if you ask me, though I'm not sure how my logic translates. I'm also quite certain I was ridiculed by the hired Dutch MC. (I know he was hired due to his outrageous paisley jacket). My premise, which I'll explain in my next Computerworld article, is that our entire industry is based on the commercial computing success spawned by transactional systems, and that ever since then we've tried to come up with more and more products based on that same architectural principal. It was OK until lately, because now the nature of data itself has changed. What was valued upon being dynamic or transactional is now static or fixed digital content, and yet we continue to attempt to apply the same methods as always in dealing with it. It won't work.
I then had a Heineken and returned to my hotel, to find my wife all dolled up and ready for dinner. We were invited to attend a small dinner with some Netapp folks and their local channel partners. We were graced with the Big Gouda, Dan Warmenhoven (oh yes, a name as Dutch as they come) and his lovely wife. Suffice it to say the poor channel folks didn't get to say too much. (However, it is important to note that one of the very tall Dutchmen at the table had apparently spent a significant amount of time attempting to pick up my wife right in front of me, which of course I didn't notice. I don't think it was until the cancer story that he really gave up.) I had a great time applying sports metaphors to business concepts with Dan while our wives discussed everything from the Red Light District to tulips, and the channel guys tried to figure out just what was going on.
The following day Jess and I goofed around, saw all that was to be seen, and then we left the country before I got into any real trouble. I can't wait to go back.
Cisco made multiple announcements yesterday about their investments into the SMB space ( SMBs Move Center Stage--Become New Growth Engine of the IT Industry and a release, Cisco Raises SMB Commitment To A New Level) - really talking about initiatives and investments Cisco is bringing to market to this explosive area of the world.
They also announced the completion of the their acquisition of Neopath - an IP based, file virtualization platform who is geared right at that same SMB space. While details were not disclosed, the dollars were small - presumably sub-$50 million (I do enjoy saying things like that - putting the descriptor "small" in front of $50 million dollars, though I probably don't have $50 in my pocket or bank account), the principal appeared sound: put value into the IP network that Cisco owns, take value out of point products and manual labor that they don't. I had no issue with the deal, and thought it very cheap and very smart.
With Cisco, or anyone really, the issue is "if" they can make a ton of hay with a technology or a product acquisition, it's "will" they - or more importantly, will it get enough attention to ever live up to its opportunity. Sometimes its yes, sometimes its no.
This is a new one. This morning I open up my email to find this story from Beth Pariseau that blew me away - "Cisco's Move To Kill Neopath Shocks Users, Analysts...."
Cisco issued an EOS (end of sale) announcement that effectively kills all products and services that it just bought.
Now in no way do I consider myself as smart as the folks pulling the strings over in Ciscoville, so what am I missing here? Isn't some shareholder going to wonder why the company just gave some people $50 million or so and then told them to pack their bags and head on home - and oh yeah, take your crummy stuff with you? Maybe there is some very sane, rational explanation for this, but if so, don't you think they might have told someone what that was?
Things like this make me re-evaluate my position on Cisco eventually ruling the universe. Thank god I can still put my monopolistic hopes and dreams on Microsoft.
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