The Silver Lining

Yeah, Wall St. has collapsed. Yeah, I can't retire, again. Yeah, things are crappy. Therefore, I feel it my responsibility to point out some less than crappy things, if for no other reason than I'm doing it while on a plane to China, waiting for the next bout of a stomach bug to hit me. It's sort of "find a bright side or take 48 sleeping pills" moment, not that they would last long enough inside of me to do anything.

If you have built a business on selling to the cool cats on Wall St. and looked down your noses at the requirements (and validity) of the real world, you are currently bumming out. If you have either been forced, or were smart enough, to look elsewhere then things probably don't seem as bleak.

Data Direct Networks has been waiting for the public market to come back so they can get out. The market isn't exactly cooperating, so instead of feeling bad for themselves, they have instead recorded never-ending positive growth and profitability. In the middle of the financial meltdown they had another record quarter – to the tune of $40 plus million bucks – and I'm pretty sure none of the 23 Petabytes this quarter were sold to Wall St.

Silicon Alley is the new Wall St., at least from a "who buys lots of stuff" perspective.

Glasshouse is in the exact same boat. Their S1 filed long ago, they just keep on executing. Wall St. firms are "too smart" to use them usually, so they have had to build what is now a big, smart business by selling services to real companies, who need real help, especially when times are tight. Smart companies use belt tightening to get better at their operations. Dumb ones believe their own b.s.

Ever hear of InMage? Most haven't. The crazy little company founded years ago by Brocade founder Kumar Malivali and friends is a quiet player in the mid-market disaster recovery/CDP software space and without anyone seeming to notice, is about to finish the year north of $10M – in software. That's fantastic.

This sounds absurd, I know, but Microsoft even gets kudos' here. Hyper-V is going to change the world – at least in terms of making boring interesting for the next decade. Virtual desktop consolidation is going to dwarf the overall size of the VMware boondoggle of the last few years, and who better to reap the rewards than the Redmondians – who get paid on churn no matter what. There will be a lot of folks who ride the turbulence and make a pile of dough while this one takes off.

In the collapse of 2000 IT people were forced to learn how to make wine out of water – and they did. In 2008 they will have to be alchemists, but I'm confident this is really just another evolutionary necessity and we'll come through it.

Which reminds me – things like this are not new and should not be so surprising. Evolution is real, no matter what Sarah Palin thinks. It happens all the time. Seeing it has been mankind's issue. We think that what is will always be. The dinosaurs' lived only under water for a few million years, until one crawled out onto the beach and stayed. Looking back we separate those eras's as hard delineated times, each lasting zillions of years. Fast forward a few minutes and we see empires that lasted thousands of years (not millions), from the Chinese to the Romans. Those ended too – and not in a bang. They just evolved away. Fast forward again to the French revolution, which seemed like a long period, but was a speck on the timeline of history. The American "revolution" or the industrial revolution were not instant meteoric moments, though in retrospect they seem that way. They were evolutionary. No one saw things changing in the moment. The Soviet Union? The Berlin Wall? Wall St.? Nature has a way of washing out imbalances of power.

Like always, those who can see outside of their own way inside an evolutionary revolution are the ones who end up on top of the next wave. This will be no different. If you are an IT person, the changes have been happening right in front of you for almost 20 years. Distributed computing and that little thing called the Internet have made massive changes in our worlds – and change never stops. Data is changing because people are changing the way they use it. Insisting on forcing new data types and uses into old operating strategies is why Wall St. now sounds like the Black Knight in Monty Python yelling "but I'm Invincible!!" with no arms nor legs.

There are more species on earth today than ever before in history. Adapt or perish, baby.