The Red Sox, My Cat Floyd, Sun, And The IT Business

Last night I crossed another one off my "list" of things to do prior to exiting this world – I went to my first World Series game. As a tortured Boston sports fan for life, I must first remind all of you that until about 5 years ago, if you remove the Larry Bird era, being a Boston sports fan has been like being Charlie Brown thinking that this time Lucy won't pull the ball away. I was 9 in 1975 and woke up the house when Pudge Fiske hit that homerun, only to lose game 7. I was 22 in 1986 when Bill Buckner permanently implanted a fatalistic outlook in my DNA. I was 39 when Grady Little left Pedro in one inning too long in Game 7 against the Yankees – while sitting on frozen peas post my vasectomy. Talk about a bad day. I went to the Patriots games with my dad in the worst stadium built post Roman empire, only to watch abysmal teams lose in abysmal ways. I went to the Bruins playoff game that ended at 2:30 AM in the Garden on a goal by Edmonton. I know the heartbreak of psoriasis.

So excuse me for using this forum to bask in the wonderment of the other side – kicking butt and taking names. Most have heard my Tom Brady (father of one of my children) stories. The Pats became the best professional sports franchise in the U.S. out of nowhere – even though they had a thousand year history of pathetic failure on and off the field. The Sox have broken more hearts in New England than Frank Sinatra, JFK, and Ben Affleck combined. But not anymore. 2004 was crazy. 2007 is expected.

Because you were successful once does not mean you will be again. Because you failed once, does not have to mean are destined to fail forever. The difference is simple – change the game. Whether IT or sports, it's the same deal. The Yankee's will always outspend you. IBM will always outspend you. Do you want to be the Florida Marlins or the Cleveland Indians? One team stinks and the other came a game away from beating the king. They didn't win it all (thankfully), but they got on stage and played the game. They are a contender – and that means something economically, emotionally, and psychologically.

Dan Warmenhoven, a Dutchman, in Holland, got me thinking about sports parallels to the IT business – or business in general. His contention is that East coast companies represent old school monolithic business which is destined to fail. West coast companies, he contends, have adapted to current market conditions which require nimble decision making at the point of attack – empowering the people at the street to make decisions in real time. It's a good argument – certainly the DEC's, Prime's, Wang's, etc. are classic examples of top run businesses that kept all decision making in the boardroom and then pushed orders down the ranks. They got crushed by those who could react to changing requirements at the speed of "now".

In U.S. Football, we have an exact parallel. Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers were the model of success. Vince made every decision, and then chose players who could execute on those decisions better than everyone else. There was no thinking. Vince did the thinking. That monolithic approach won Green Bay a whole bunch of championships and admiration. Like IT, it also brought copy cats. The reason that model was not ultimately sustainable is because there is always someone who can spend more money than you – who can buy better talent. Someone will be faster than you are. Someone will be smarter. It wasn't until Bill Walsh and the West Coast Offense that things changed. San Francisco didn't try to outspend the competition. They changed the game.

In the West Coast Offense, the "management" doesn't make every decision. They provide guidance and direction – but decisions are made in the moment, by the people who need to execute them – in this case the players. In the monolithic system, the play is the play – each player has exactly one thing they have to do for each play. There is no thinking, no ad libbing. Execute properly and thinks are ok. Screw it up and bad things happen. In the West Coast offense everyone knows the "situation". If it's 3^rd down and 8, everyone knows the 6 plays that may be called. When you get to the line of scrimmage, everyone see's what's happening. The field general (Quarterback) can change things on the fly based on conditions in front of him. Each player looks at their mission, and has options based on what is presented to them. It's far more complex, requires incredible trust, and has many more opportunities to fail – but if everyone understands the goal and is prepared to do their part to achieve it, amazing things happen. San Fran changed the game – took the prize – and everyone else followed. The Pats did it next – 20 years later – faced with even tougher challenges designed to create equality – and everyone follows.

So with no disrespect intended to the great cities of Green Bay and San Francisco, they are examples of both innovators who changed the game and reaped the rewards, and of those who refused to then adapt to current conditions and have suffered ever since. It's not easy to think about change when you are winning – but those who win and sustain do just that. Apple isn't the same company it was 5 years ago, which wasn't the same company 10 years ago, etc. I love Network Appliance, but wonder if they are the 49ers. They changed the game and reaped the rewards but sooner or later the game will change again. Will it be changed by them, or someone else? It's hard to change when you are successful. It is counterintuitive to humans to do something different when what you have been doing is still working.

This gets me to Floyd. Floyd is a 10 pound cat who thinks he's an 80 pound Doberman. My dog, Abby, is a 45 pound hamster. Abby is the super nice, shy, wonder dog who is content to just sit around and be loved every now and then. She's not interested in changing the game. Floyd, on the other hand, is all about swinging for the fences. He's the Dustin Pedroia of cats. He's the Tom Mendoza of cats. Both of those guys are 5 foot nothing, but act 6 foot 5. Floyd has no claws, has been neutered, and is supposed to be a house cat. Instead he waits for a moment of weakness, such as when I come in with groceries, and bolts to the great outdoors whenever he can. It doesn't enter his mind that he is effectively defenseless – that a squirrel would probably mop the floor with him. He will leave for hours or days, coming back when he wants too (typically with a present such as a dead mouse or bird). He doesn't care about my game, he plays his own.

Game changing companies act like that. I don't mean they are arrogant, furry, or necessarily short (though I do find comfort in those under 6 feet tall who kick butt in this business for some strange reason) – but they all have the common trait of forging a new path instead of following the old one. How many companies do we all know that have a better gizmo than the guy who is winning? A zillion. What good does it do? Not much – it's very, very hard to beat someone at their own game.

Game changers have detractors. We love an underdog until they become leaders, then we hate them. It goes with the territory. Look at the Patriots – are you kidding me with all this garf? They re-wrote the book on how the business and the game itself are played, might be the most dominating example of perfection in execution thus far, and all anyone who is on the losing end of the new reality can do is try to diminish their achievement. You hear the same kind of stuff about Google. You will hear it about VMware. Game changers who win tend to win big. Who doesn't know a search player with better stuff than Google? Who hasn't heard a reference to the mainframe when talking about VMware? Who cares? Game over – until the game changes again.

This gets me to Sun. Sun changed the game once. They indirectly killed giants, created wealth, and forever changed the world. They did it with hippy ethics. They were the free loving student protesters who toppled the war machine, man. They also created huge wealth. They are still hippies. They give stuff away. They are nice. Their problem is that they refuse to adapt to the realities of a business world that isn't about free love and sleeping in Volkswagen vans. It's about money. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and chief Sun hippy, blogs brilliantly in the perfect example of what I speak. He spends a lot of time talking about how Sun is defending the homeless and the helpless. He makes "free software" sound like a battle cry against injustice. He says that he does not want to litigate about 34 times. He actually does a good job of making a parallel to Sun of old – noting that when Linux came on the scene there were those at Sun who wanted to sue. Instead, he says, "we joined the free software community and innovated". If you are a Sun stockholder, aren't ya thinking that suing might have had a greater return? Dan Bricklin still has a huge following as the inventor of VisiCalc – the first spreadsheet – but no money. Craig has the pleasure of knowing he invented the most widely used list on the planet, but no money.

What I don't like about Sun is the whole hippy free love thing. Don't get me wrong, I find myself becoming more liberal with age, I care about the environment, I worry about having a national debt that my kids' kids will suffer with, etc. I dig the principals of business liberalism, if they can be combined with practical capitalistic realities. Apple has it. Sun had it.

I hate the entire legal system. I don't like elitist games controlled by elitist players. I'm an entrepreneur. I don't like anyone having to spend time and money on lawsuits – but I understand it. So while I have zero idea if any of it is merited, I respect the fact that Netapp sued Sun because it feels Sun effectively stole and gives away Netapp's intellectual property. If it turns out to be true, then Sun should get knocked in the head. If it turns out to be false, I don't blame Netapp for taking the offensive as clearly it could have dramatic capitalistic negative ramifications – and Netapp is in business to make money, not to save the Bolivian horned toad. In the same blog, Mr. Schwartz tells us that while they didn't want to litigate, they have decided to counter sue Netapp. That alone is not reason to rejoice – but I now see a small glimmer of hope.

"we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the market." That, my friends, is awesome. It might be a ridiculous request, it might get tossed out immediately – but it might not. That is game changing. That shows me that while he spent the first 80% of the message showing how Sun will remain the tree-hugging IT equivalent of Greenpeace, they will also try to put Netapp out of business. That's what Floyd would do. Swing for the fences Jonathan – you might strike out, but at least it will be a memorable at bat. Pedroia hit a monster home run in his first at bat last night – changed the game completely. If a judge grants the injunction, Netapp is out of business. Talk about a game changing event…….

SharePoint: The Back Door Storage Play

We've been a SharePoint user, of sorts anyway, since the original beta. I didn't think much of it, to be honest, as eventually it became a giant pain in the rump just like every other tree oriented file system – once you put a zillion things in it, and you can't find anything.

Anyhow, about 18 months ago it came to my attention that part of the problem was we were still on the beta code and weren't using any of the things that SharePoint something more interesting than a NAS share. So I started looking into the nice little Microsoft stuff, and was pretty blown away by the theory of all that could be with SharePoint. We decided to keep up with the times and get our act together, implement a modern version, stop using the free "services" and go with the full blown server version, and spend the necessary time to architect and manage the stuff the way it should be.

At this same time, I reached out to some mucky muck MS executives I know and let them in on the fact that their favorite loudmouth analyst firm was a Lotus Notes shop. Notes has been fine for us, but it did require us to use a little teeny little company's CRM tool that no one ever heard of, and that has been less than supportable by people not interested in supporting CRM applications. I figured it was time to succumb to the inevitable Microsoft integration story, and fight my battles elsewhere.

Surprisingly (to me, perhaps not any of you), a year and a half later, and I still haven't made the switch. We have held our SharePoint world together with duct tape and ear wax, managed to (very legally) get all of our people up to some semblance of the same level of Office 2003, and slowly planned how to get into the Exchange world. I will share all the sorid details of this later – but I figured little ESG was the perfect test case for someone like mighty Microsoft – a small business who wanted to buy into the whole MS enchilada, and just needed a little help to get there. In 18 months, I couldn't find a single MS VAR that knew what they were doing. Not one. Some knew some things, and others others, (some Office 2007 – which is awesome, even though it's a rip off if you ask me – and some Exchange, no one but one really good consultant from Vermont who knows SharePoint), but nary a one could put the whole thing together. Hell, I can't even find someone who can understand how to license half this stuff. (Note: I swear I'm trying to be legal!). It's infuriating. More on that later.

What we did figure out is that SharePoint is way cool. You can find anything anywhere, you can create automated workflows for collaboration and if you actually care about boring things like finding a PowerPoint slide – which I do, because my pathetic life is based on 11,000,000 of them – then SharePoint is an awesome tool. We are inches away from releasing a whole new set of capabilities because of it. While we were figuring all that out, a thought came to me. This is how Microsoft is going to steal the "storage intelligence" business. Sure they sell Storage Server 2003 R2 (crafty naming, btw) as a low-end NAS OEM offering, but it has had no real success as an enterprise caliber system. The don't play in the archive or corporate search markets. They aren't really a security play except on the bad end normally. So I think MS is doing something really smart – they aren't calling SharePoint a storage server, or a data intelligence server, or anything outside of a "collaboration" tool – but it is.

SharePoint lets you create and store unstructured data, apply security and rights management to that data, apply retention times to that data, and lots of other interesting things – and keeps it all inside a database. Even better, you don't know it's inside a database – you don't have to manage the database. It combines the best of both worlds, in one neat little package. I don't know if they are that sinister, at least by design, but let's give them credit where credit is due – if you are not able to have your way in a market by beating others at their own game, change the game.

So, if you happen to be in the NAS, archiving, discovery, retention, collaboration, security, or data management space – you might want to start considering SharePoint as a threat instead of as just another application to play with. Call me paranoid, but sometimes it seems like those Redmond folks aren't as nice as they seem……..

The End Of The Storage Business........

Where to begin?  It's been a long 10 days or so, so this rant may be a tad longer than most.  First, I ran off to Aruba with my lovely wife and two little ones for a week.  Great place, Aruba.  One happy island.  I had every intention of spending the week under a palm tree with my laptop getting a lot of work done, or actually writing the cancer book I've been promising for years.  I did neither.  I did spend a lot of time soaking up sun, cocktails, and pondering IT issues.  Here's what I came up with:

The storage business as we know it, is over.  I don't mean you won't continue to buy billions of dollars of storage products and services, but we're at one of those pendulum swinging crossroads as an autonomous business.  Who got me thinking this way?  Sun, of all companies.  Only Sun could say something in such a wrong way, for the wrong reasons, to the wrong people, but end up being right without necessarily knowing why.  Right before I left for 'de islands mon' Sun, in typical chaotic fashion, insisted on getting on my calendar for a huge, important, giant announcement they were going to make - "tomorrow, it has to be tomorrow - and no, it has to be Steve, and no, we can't tell you anything about what it might be related too....".  Somehow, our client relations folks, with the patience of saints, were able to move things around so I could get on the phone for 30 minutes, from my car - which is a very loud convertible, to hear the latest revelation from the west.  Their announcement, also known as Jonathan's blog, was to be around the fact that Sun is rolling its storage business back under its systems business.  Whoopdie doo.

So forgetting the fact that it really wasn't worthy of an announcement at all, nor did anyone pick it up, nor did anyone even ask me about it (that is one company that is in serious need of re-inventing how it goes about messaging.  They make HP marketing of the 90's seem downright brilliant sometimes), it did make me think about some things at the swim up bar.

20 years ago there was no storage business.  It was a systems business that used storage as part of the overall platform to execute some applications.  Companies competed on what their systems could offer for application functionality, typically embedded.  The term "peripheral" was used to represent add-ons such as incremental storage capacity, but no one really bought storage independently from the system.  Sun changed the "systems" business - namely it suddenly offered faster, cheaper, better new ways for engineers (mostly) to do their jobs than traditional business systems - minicomputers - offered.  Unix became cool.  Sun changed the game - they got the whole distributed computing thing moving.  Right or wrong isn't relevant - it was entirely "blue ocean".  They didn't focus on "my processor is better than yours, or my O.S. is better than theirs" - until later, and of course, that's when they went amiss. During the game changing era of Sun and distributed computing, people bought storage for Sun workstations from Sun for the most part - because that's how things were done.  Peripherals.

So Sun completely changed the face of the commercial computing game - a well established gazillion dollar a year business with lots of very big companies in it.  At the same time, other external factors were creating yet another game changing market opportunity - to change the way people thought (and bought) about storage.  EMC got people to stop looking at storage as a peripheral check box when you bought your next mainframe or minicomputer (which is still one of the most remarkable feats ever in the history of infrastructure if you ask me).  Two, NetApp looked at Sun's success, and figured out a way to segregate the decision on file server storage.  They solved totally different problems (one for monolithic core computing, the other for the new wave of distributed networked computing), in totally different ways, on totally different coasts - and both have done fairly well financially because of it.  You could argue that in the purest sense, EMC has dominated the block core world ever since, and Netapp the file serving world.  Two halves to a market that didn't even exist at the time, which have yielded both companies outrageous fortune and spawned a huge industry.  Blue oceans.  Both did even though both were a piss-ant size wise compared to the incumbent systems guys they were stealing from, and both had to not only sell against those incumbents, but they had to teach the market an entirely new way to buy.  That's hard stuff to do.

For the next twenty years, the "storage" business has been a 20-50 billion dollar annual love fest - tracked as a totally independent and autonomous market. 

The storage "business" happened because the technology focus and specialization required to optimize that piece of the system function - I/O - had specific problems that were not able to be generalized any longer.  It isn't unique, it happens all the time - we live in cycles moving from generalist technologies to functionally specific ones.  Routing functions ran in the operating system, until Cisco ripped it out and created a function specific gizmo.  Data center caliber storage went through the same cycle.  For the same reason no one ever has taken Cisco down in routers, no one has taken EMC down in the core data center nor Netapp in the file server market, nor IBM in the mainframe space, nor Oracle, and on and on.  All have competition - each having "better" stuff.  It doesn't matter.  Those games are over - so without a new game - a blue ocean, things will largely stay as they are.

So where was I?  Right, no more storage business.  EMC and Netapp, or Compellent, Lefthand, etc. etc. are not storage companies.  They are systems companies.  They run specific functionality on processors to execute applications - that just so happen to be geared to storing, moving, protecting data that will be used by some other processor running some other functionality for some other area of interest.  They build computers - almost identically to those back in the day.  Storage guys used to write their own RAID code, because that was what made them different.  Prime and Wang and DG and DEC and HP and blah, blah, blah used to all make their own processors and operating systems, because that's what made them different.  Nobody buys one guys RAID 5 box vs. another guys because of the RAID code anymore.  99% of the processors used in commercial computing are made by 3% for the guys who used to have their own.  Who in their right mind would build a general purpose operating system today?  No one. Those games are over. 

Sometimes the game is changed because of whole new way of doing something.  Sometimes it's about technological innovation (Riverbed).  Other times its a simple matter of applying technologies in a whole new way (VMware), and other times it's simply kicking some slow, fat, dumb butt out in the market (Add your favorite example here).  When you have all three, you tend to make a pile of dough.  Pure luck isn't sustainable - you have to be able to see the forest through the trees, and you have adapt to the world around you.

Netapp is a neo-classical systems company.  They use commodity components and put their money into their IP, which is their operating system and the applications that run on it.  Those applications happen to be storage applications but what's the difference between them an any other systems company - other than the fact that they don't let anyone else write applications directly to their O.S.?  EMC is the new version of IBM or HP - they not only are a systems company, they are software company, service provider, and so on.   Larry Ellison, in his recent acquisition targeting BEA, said "people want to buy software from one place" - and he's right.  The same holds true for all the other stuff as well. 

So of course Sun should roll up storage under systems.  They might not know how to say things properly, but they have piles of talent and a market built around their processor and their operating system.  Forget whether or not it can or will work for them, but the theory is exactly right.  Sun, IBM, EMC, etc. need to think of themselves as systems companies who delineate their activities by the functionality provided to the individual markets they serve, not as a storage, systems, software, etc. companies.  Those who prosper in the next frontier will be those who understand that we are moving on - it ain't about the micro function or gizmo, it's about the macro.  People simply can't continue to live in the weeds in IT, they need holistic systemic infrastructure to ever hope to bring real value to their organizations.  System companies are going to be what's required to puppet master all the micro gizmo function.  You have to be able to give the people what they want, whether you think it's right for them or not.

Wyeth-Ayerst, the giant pharmaceutical company, makes birth control pills and baby formula.  How smart is that?

For those who don't know, the Blue Ocean Strategy is a book I'm fond of, regardless of industry.

Stuff

Sun cracks me up. They really are the classic example of "it's not what you say; its how you say it". HP used to get the rap as the worst PR/marketing company, but that baton has been passed. Forget about the Netapp lawsuit stuff and let's just focus on this week. First, Sun announces they are rolling their Storage group back under the Systems group. I didn't get one single call on it. Not one. That means no one cares, or people simply assume things. The fact is that it is a good move. Sun has always been a systems company, was forced to spin out a Storage group in order to attempt to compete, learned what that world looks like, and then is rolling it back up to leverage all the good engineering talent/tools, etc. in the Systems group. Second fact is that there is no such thing as "storage" anymore – everything is storage, and everything is a system. Yes, we are going back in time again, but that's the way it is. The lines of demarcation are really blurred with virtualization technologies, and will get fuzzier. A storage device is a specialized application engine containing processors, memory, and physical storage. Sounds like a system to me.

Anyhow, to prove my original point, Sun makes this move and thinks it's big news, but no one cares. They didn't get any accolades, because A: no one cares and B: no one gets accolades for re-orgs. Having said that, this is weird – they released their SPC numbers on the 9900V (big HDS system) – which are stellar – and what system were they run on? That's right, IBM. If you want the world to believe your integration story, you might consider using it yourselves. Yikes. There is much work to be done in Sunville, but I think the rollup can only help, and certainly couldn't hurt.

Speaking of IBM, they made a great decision a few years ago by concentrating on their own server base to reclaim storage share, since their server base was in growth mode. Sun needs to do the same. Plugging into IBM AIX boxes is nice, but if that is your target market, it's time to pack it in.

A few of our guys just came back from an IBM analyst event and said the choreography was superb. I guess they really did a great job of making their SMB blade system really show up HP's variant on everything from noise to power to capacity expansion to ease of use.

Check out what IP.com is doing. People don't realize that intellectual property is critical, and their own employees don't know what is IP vs. what isn't. Why take the chance? IP.com helps folks make sure that intellectual property is protected and defensible. Pretty good idea.

Another thing of complete brilliance is the Data Robotics Drobo personal RAID array (sort of). For $500 bucks you can buy a 4 slot self-contained, completely moron proof system that takes any SATA disk – any size capacity – mixed sizes – and automatically creates RAID like redundancy no matter what disk goes where or which is ripped out and upgraded, etc. It pools all of the total capacity, automatically stripes and places data and parity-like recovery components around, and then changes itself when you remove or add new capacity. If I started with 2x500GB disks for example, and wanted to add capacity, I plop in a 750GB disk and do absolutely nothing else. The system reconfigures itself in the background, moves things around, and now my useable capacity goes from 500GB to 1TB (the biggest disk is always nuked as the redundancy capacity total). Later I add a 1TB disk and now I have 1750GB free to use. Since I'm full on slots, when I want more I just rip out a 500GB disk and plop in another 1TB disk, and so on. So if this $500 box can do all that, why can't my $500,000 dollar high-end array?

Finally, forget the VMware hype – how about the road warrior need for virtualization? RingCube's MojoPac lets me keep my desktop – everything but the O.S. – on a portable drive (or an iPOD!) so all I need to do is plug it into any machine running XP and that machine becomes my desktop. It's secure (encrypted) so when I lose it, no one else can use it, and if my laptop craps out I just plug the MojoPac into any other XP machine. We're in the process of standardizing everyone's desktop, and lord does this make it easy. The stuff is cheap and has worked perfectly. I can't figure out why you wouldn't want to use it, it really is brilliant.

I've got to go make sure the IT community on the great island of Aruba is all OK, so I'll be busy for the next week, and then I'll see you at the Pats vs. Cowboys game, also known as SNW.