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Life is weird, thankfully.
Months ago I shot my mouth off to IBM storage mucky muck Andy Monshaw about something or another, and the outcome was that we would go break bread, drink drink, and solve all problems. If that didn't work, we'd do the former and I'd listen to him bash EMC. Andy has an almost worrisome, deep-rooted hatred of the Hopkinton folks, and it's good fun to get him spun up on something they did or didn't do. Or might do. Or might think about doing.
So after endless schedule massaging by poor people on both our ends, a date was set for last Thursday in Manhattan. Wouldn't you know that day was also going to end up to be Game 2 of the Franklin Little League National League playoffs - and the Dodgers, of which my 12-year old Jason is a proud member of, were up 1 Game to nill. I was bumming that I was going to miss the game, but a date is a date. Plus, we were up one already.
I arrived via train (which is a far more civilized way to get to NY until one can rake in enough dough to fly private) right on time, and headed off to 590 Madison ave, where I was shuffled off to the 17th floor of some ridiculously expensive real estate. Upon exiting the elevator, I was greeted by a lovely receptionist who sat seemingly alone amongst pieces of art that probably were individually worth more than my entire collective being. There were no people anywhere. Quite a lovely spot, however.
Andy appeared out of some hidden wall somewhere and we got down to business. I won't tell you what was discussed, but suffice it to say that the conversation turned lively and interesting - not adjectives typically used when describing anything IBM. We were joined by Mary Coucher, VP of Biz Dev for Andy's group - a downright smart, passionate, and non-standard cookie cutter IBM'er. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Prior to dinner we stopped at some roof top hangout where one of Andy's "comms" people was having a going away party. I don't know what a "comms" person is, but there were lots of them. While Andy was kibitzing over a Jameson or two, Mary and I worked on solving world peace. We got onto the subject of next generation storage applications like video surveillance and the home media market, which got us to what each of us watches on TV (recorded, of course). She has Desperate Housewives, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Soprano's, and 24. As she is saying this my phone rings, but I don't answer it. A few minutes later I take it out, and on the screen is John Slattery's number. Slats is my college roommates bro, who I happened to call the day before as he lives in NY to see if he could hook up for a beer. He is also "Dennis" on Desperate Housewives and has been making out with Eva Longoria for the last few months. I was curious to research just how hard work that was. Plus, he's married to George Clooney's X, and that alone is worthy of discussion. I've known him forever, and even though he's been in a million things, no one really knew him that much until this gig. Now he's a regular in People and my 15 year old daughter is trying to hook me up with her.
My phone rang again, and this time it was my wife. Mary was chatting with someone and Andy continued to kibitz with his whiskey, so I answered. She proceeds to tell me how Jason just hit his first home run - a monster 3-run shot to spark a slow rally to tie the game and send it to extra innings. I was psyched, and completely horrified that I missed it. They ended up losing in the 7th or 8th, but Jason didn't care. He spent 10 minutes describing the whole thing - clearly out of his mind happy. Made me feel like crap.
Anyway, I was knee deep in IBM sport drinking by then, and still had dinner to attend, so I left well enough alone. We all went off to some Mexican place (that was out of this world, but of course I can't remember the name of it nor where it was) and argued everything from CMOS to Salsa. It was entirely refreshing to engage in debate with very smart IBM folks who weren't just pushing their tired old "we're IBM so we are right" rhetoric. Andy, Mary, and Carl (Andy's "ops" guy, whatever that means) were definitely willing to listen - and not automatically assume they were blessed with divine correctness. I've had IBM executive discussions that have been wildly irrational - the kind that end up sounding like a business version of the Black Knight scene in The Holy Grail. This, thankfully, was not one of them. Perhaps there is hope for the mighty Blue Knight after all. The way they were talking, I can't wait to see what they come up with, as they were downright giddy with how "un-IBM" some of their impending moves were going to seem.
So I leave the joint and am about to jump into a cab when Carl, the Haitian French speaking Andy Ops guy tells me that I just need to walk up a block or two and over a block or two and I'll be back at my hotel, The NY Palace. 43 miles of poor shoe walking shin-splint inducing hard labor later I found the hotel. It was still early, and I wanted a nightcap. The Palace is a beautiful hotel, but one that tends to frequented by 80 year olds with zillions of dollars who must head off to bed by 10 because the 6 seat bar from the Shining tucked into the corner was all closed up. Figuring that this is NY I just popped out to find a watering hole with a bit more zip to it. I rounded the corner and ran into the W on Lexington - which is a modern joint that caters to 20 year olds with zillions of dollars. Upon entering the Whiskey Bar, I realized that I was too old, too ugly, and too lazy to fight my way to a glass of wine. I gave up and went back to the Palace. When I got there, I asked the doorman why the Shining shut down at 9pm? I half expected him to call me Mr. Torrance. He told me that the real bar - Gilt - was on the second floor, and that was open and ready for me. I found it, and it was perfect. Neuvo, Ian Schragerish joint without a big crowd, and with the best per glass wine list I've ever seen. With the exception of the art deco purple chunk of art that made one end of the bar look like you were inside a golf ball, the place was great. I drank my $35 glass of a nice Barolo and headed off to bed.
I headed out early to catch the 8am express to Boston. As I'm walking through Penn Station I notice this guy leaning against the stand where the cops and soldiers are always hanging out - right outside the Acela express club. It was Jeff Garlin - who is Larry David's manager in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In an amazed state (this was number two on the list of discussed TV shows the previous evening), I say "Hi Jeff, I love the show", because A: I do - it's one of the funniest shows ever put on TV, and B: because you say that even if it weren't true, because that's just what you do. An hour later I'm in the cafe car on the train (and I don't care what anyone says, that train food, nuked in a plastic bag, is fantastic) talking to my wife on my cell about seeing Jeff, and doesn't he walk right in and stand in line 12 inches in front of me. Not being shy, I say "hey Jeff, say hi to my wife" and make him take my phone. My wife has no idea what I've done, happily continuing her tale of how the dog ate the curtains or something. He patiently listens to this, until he gets a chance to say hi and introduce himself. My wife loves the show as much as I do, so it all worked out. He couldn't have been a nicer guy. He also lost about 50 pounds and had wiffle instead of his big curly hair. I almost gave him a show idea based on my real life battles with the recycling people, but figured I had worn out his hospitality.
Friday night the Dodgers (our squad) won the first series. Every person there felt compelled to tell me what a great hit my son had. Too bad you weren't there..... Sunday we played game 1 of the NLCS. Trailing 5-4 in the bottom of the 6th (we only play 6 innings, so it's really the bottom of the 9th), our superstar Kyle draws a walk. Our #3 hitter, Frenchie (a 2 handicap - which is supremely annoying), smacks a double and brings Kyle home to tie the game. Our cleanup hitter strikes out. Now it's Jason's turn. My son, god bless him, inherited all of my genes, the poor bastard. He is smart and funny, but short and stumpy. He makes me look tall. He is slightly faster than a large office building. He is good looking though. Anyhow, Jason rips at the first pitch for a strike. He looks at strike 2. He fouls off the next pitch. Even in Little League, you don't want to throw a strike when its 0-2, and this guy just got away with one. He grooves the next pitch, and Jason belts it over the fence for a walk-off home run and team victory. As he goes by me at first, he says "happy fathers day. I didn't get you anything else".
How cool is that?
In last month's Storage Magazine article I explained my theory of why we are so screwed up infrastructure-wise, or at least how we got to this point. Now I'll give you the way out. Then, I'll talk about cars.
Forget everything you know for a few minutes, or at least everything you think you know. Accept my argument that most everything we’ve done in commercial IT has been done based on transactional requirements. Open your mind. Breathe through your eyes, Danny.
There are two distinct types of data – dynamic and persistent. Dynamic is data that is in flux – this is where transactional data begins. Persistent data is just that – fixed. It doesn’t change. It is what it is, and will never be anything else.
Just because data is dynamic doesn’t mean it starts and dies within an RDBMS. Structured database data certainly starts as dynamic – but at some point it becomes a non-changing record. It’s persistent. You may have reasons to keep it inside a database forever (although I doubt they’re valid ones), but those records are still persistent – they are what they are.
Rule #1: Don’t confuse how something begins its life with how it will end. Everything begins dynamic and ends persistent. Stop delineating between structured, unstructured and semi-structured. All types live dynamically for some period, whether it’s a Word document, a movie, a credit card transaction or an email. It all ends up as fixed digital content.
Rule #2: The attributes and requirements for each type of data are vastly different – in most every sense. Read/write performance, throughput, redundancy, protection, disaster recovery, etc., count more in the dynamic phase of data life – but we’ve extended all of those philosophies to data that stopped changing, which causes 90% of our operational issues. Building data redundancies and protection schema’s to handle real money transactions is good business – backing up a non-changing data element a thousand times isn’t. Keeping your bullet proof transaction system capable of handling all the dynamic money events thrown at it is good business. But adding processing power, capacity, network infrastructure, etc., to keep it churning away rather than removing the 90% of the data that isn’t dynamic or possibly even relevant that can interfere with the real transactional stuff isn’t. Thinking you can’t make this happen is wrong.
Rule #3: The ratio of true dynamic data (and data being “treated” dynamically) to persistent data is about 1:10 – and that ratio will rapidly evolve to 1:100 and beyond. Dynamic data just doesn’t stay dynamic for very long.
Transactionally oriented systems are all about doing things fast. Perform the transaction fast, store the data fast, load the data into other systems fast. If it sits in a database, it’s easy to find – which is the point of the database. If we could, we’d have everything inside a database, but they weren’t designed for that. The persistent data world is all about finding things. That means you need to know where to look. Having stuff everywhere, inside and outside of the building, makes this task all but impossible. The whole categorizing/classifying/indexing/search thing going on today is designed to add structure so we can find things. It just seems to me that if we created two distinct “virtual” places to look for each distinct type of data, it would be a heck of a lot easier to find what we want in either. If all our dynamic data sat in one place designed to handle things like that – no matter if it’s Word or big dough – and then was moved (based on business rules) into the persistent digital content store, we’d be able to architect this store entirely differently than the dynamic store.
If the dynamic store is about speed and redundancy, then the persistent store is about infinite dynamic scale, the ability to find things easily and quickly, autonomous self-managing/self-healing infrastructure--and it should be really, really cheap to buy. If the dynamic store requires knob-turning specialists, the persistent store requires the occasional dusting. Stop trying to turn the dynamic store into the persistent one – and stop trying to make the persistent store dynamic. If you think differently, you’ll act differently. If you act differently, you’ll realize you can get back to making IT a competitive advantage.
And Now For Something Completely Different....
If I had stupid money, I'd buy a Mercedes SL65. The car wouldn't get noticed at the shopping mall, but it is a 700HP rocket ship. Silly, really. It is the very same car my girlfriend, Lindsay, just smashed while being smashed, out in L.A.
I stumbled across this thing called "Supercar Life" (www.supercarlife.com) in one of the high end rich folk magazines I read and drool over. It turned out (in a very legal, tax deductible way) that one of my biggest customers is a car freak, so as a purely business oriented gesture, I took him to this. The owner, Joel, a guy with way too much dough on his hands, figured out that there are a lot of "men" who still act like they are 12 when it comes to cars. So, for a piddly $5,000 you can fly to Pittsburgh where he rents an entire race track (Beaverun), and only lets 10 folks on it. He has (2) of each - brand spanking new - Ferrari F430, Lambo Gallardo, Porsche 911 Turbo, Astin Martin DB9, and the SL65 (Joel had his $450,000 Porsche Carrera GT sitting out front, but didn't offer to let me drive it for some reason). There are about 6 or 8 real race car driver guys - not local car club pro's - real dudes that race really expensive cars really fast that teach you how to not destroy the very nice cars that you don't own. Every few minutes, you swap cars. By the end of the day, you have driven a million bucks worth of cars really, really fast. It was awesome. If you are thinking of buying one of these rocket ships, why not spend an entire day test driving them first, and learning how not to "Lindsay" your ride? It was really first class - they put you up at the Marriott Resort and Coal Mine, feed you well, and were just terrific folks. My customer may have had to have surgery to remove the smile from his face. Now I just need to find some other car crazy customer who gives me piles of dough to justify my return trip.....
This "Since You Asked" article is about the outrageous growth rates of digital content and other fun stuff. At the end of it, I was speaking of libraries which reminded me of a recent shindig in Vegas that I attended with my lovely wife and a few other ESG'ers for a library fund raiser. For some unknown reason (place sarcasm here), my noble and supremely patient editor, Lucas, elected not to include that part.
Therefore, I add it here.
Speaking of libraries, I had an interesting weekend recently. I was invited (actually, my checkbook was invited, I was just baggage) to attend a charity fund raiser in the great city of Las Vegas, by ESG's own Taya Wyss - who is one of those people who hangs around with professional football players for some reason. Taya's pal, a big giant person (literally - a lineman for the NY Giants) Grey Ruegemer has adopted a bunch of public libraries in Vegas (yes, they apparently do have actual libraries in Vegas - who knew?) and held a Bowling fund raiser at a way off the beaten path hotel - The Suncoast. Being one who loves Vegas in small doses and a huge football fan, I happily agreed to be a sponsor. I paid for Tony Dorsett to bowl with the west coast ESG squad, but he didn’t show (don’t worry, I stole his gift bag). Fellow gigantic human Marco Rivera – a 3 time pro-bowl guard -became our teammate. I have significantly more in common with his lovely wife, who is roughly 210 pounds lighter than Marco, and just an awful bowler. Bowling is hard. Even without drinking, I had to really focus on not hurting myself or someone else. My wife, of course, was brilliant at it. She even looked like she knew what she was doing. I just tried not to fall down.
There were all sorts of giants hanging out bowling that weekend, lowering the average age of this particular hotels’ occupants to around 80. I looked like a six year old standing next to these guys. I had trouble holding a 12 lb. bowling ball which looked like a ping pong ball in their hands. I did wear Joe Andruzzi’s super bowl rings, and almost couldn’t lift my arm up. Joe, Grey, and Matt Chatham were all former Pats, all with rings, and all OK in my book. Nice people, those giants, though Joe A. did push me in the pool, and Marco did comment on the abundance of “fur” on my CFO’s torso. I told them to watch it since my lawyer was bigger than theirs. I don’t think I intimidated them.
FYI, they have actual penny slots at the Suncoast, which is apparently why their average slot player is approaching 115 years of age. How you make money on a penny slot machine is beyond me, but what do I know? I bet they have an exabyte of pennies - and cigarette butts.
If you would like to bowl with giants next year, or be a good egg and send some dough to this cause, you can do so at www.ruegysreaders.com/
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.
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.
In order to combat the mind numbing success of Gartner's Magic Quadrant, I am working on the ESG Circle Of Irrelevance.
In case you are not an American, and happen to be seeing what appears to be bizarre American reality TV programs in whatever country you reside, let me be the one to let you know that yes, we are one seriously messed up country.
Anna Nicole Smith or Brittany Spears - I'm not sure who's grabbing more TV time or who's more absurd. Neither deserves more than 8 seconds of attention, but I haven't heard any legitimate news since these two started dominating the good old U.S. airways.
So, if anything is happening with the war(s), the earth, the global economy, or any other boring news stuff, please let me know.
Tomorrow I will focus on real hard hitting issues - like how Lawyers are invading IT, another wonderful gift the U.S. has donated to the world.
Thanks
The biggest little state in the Union, Rhode Island, is about to enter the TJX fray with an investigation regarding proper disclosure - a criminal action is possible (and proper, if you ask me). Things aren't getting better. I think big Ben's quasi-apologetic mostly ridiculous public letter irritated more folks than just me. I'm also hearing that the hacks go back as far as March of 06, and it's possible that TJX knew or suspected problems earlier than December, as first reported.
TJX uses every big IT vendor there is, and those guys have security practices. I've already heard from one big one (anonymously) that they have been pitching security measures as well as encryption to the company for over a year - and I believe the company has several proposals on the subject on file. That means there are others out there as well, and I'd love to know about them. I'm dying to find out the real cost and effort it would have entailed to prevent this from happening.
On Pillar, who I mentioned in a recent blog as having a bit of an "eccentric" (nice sounding word for raving lunatic) CEO, Mike Workman. Apparently Mike was OK with my portrayal as he sent me two bottles of his homemade wine - Weeners Leap (Syrah and a Cab). Mike's dog is Clams, a weiner dog, who has become the company mascot (and who picture you can apparently see as take off from San Jose Airport as it sits on a huge billboard on Pillars building I'm told). Anyway, both bottles are superb, and wine is something I don't take lightly. Really stellar. And gone already......
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.
EMC needs to fire thousands of folks. I think maybe 5,000 or more. I realize this isn't a nice holiday thought, but it is true. They have too many, which is natural due to all the acquisitions, but it has to happen. They haven't had a big reduction in years and unfortunately the time is now. They have too many folks at every level - so VP's need to go to.
The good news is big moves like this mean politics inevitably become part of the selection criteria - which in turn means some very talented folks will be on the street. The better news is the industry is doing extremely well overall right now, so competitors will snag the real talent in a snap. EMC has notoriously brutal non-compete agreements, but if they can you there won't be much they can do about it - unless people take extra compensation when leaving. Be careful about that decision no matter where you work. If you are good there is always a home for you. If you aren't, then take the dough.
Why do they need to do this? Several reasons. First, they simply have too many folks with too high a cost for their business model. Second, the stock hasn't appreciated at all even though the company has been putting up tremendous numbers - so the only way to appease the street is to attack from both a revenue growth perspective as well as a serious cost reduction one. This isn't the only reason the stock hasn't appreciated, but it's one that is understood universally. Third, and this is perhaps a bit out there, is that if I'm EMC, I'm seriously thinking about all the private equity money out there and taking the company private. Shareholders would get a nice pop, and then EMC becomes private for a while, loses the microscope of the public entity and can really decide how to monetize all the stupendous assets it has acquired. They might spin out some pieces which have had huge appreciation like VMware and Documentum. There are lots of areas of technology they can exploit, and it would be easier without the microscope and not being able to be as long-term strategic as they could be, simply because they have to live by the quarter.
There is outrageous amounts of private equity sitting on the sidelines looking for very big deals to do. This isn't as crazy as it may seem. Shareholders could take a 20% premium on a flat stock and be happy, and two years from now EMC could re-emerge publicly, whole or in pieces, where the sum of the parts is a heck of a lot more valuable market wise than todays whole.
I am fairly smart. I have reasonable math skills and spatial relations abilities, yet I can't wrap a Christmas present to save my life. I spent well over an hour wrapping only 5 presents - and I really tried to do a nice job. I wasn't drinking. The results would have been better had a drunken, one-eyed pirate with a hook for a hand did it. It was ridiculous. 2 of the presents required a second piece of paper, after careful measuring the first time. I swear my dog was even mocking me. I'm going to tell my wife that the little kids helped me, but I'm pretty confident that she knows they would have done a better job.
Does Harry and David shut down on Dec. 26th and re-open at Thanksgiving each year? And why must they use big shiny cardboard boxes in their big fluffy baskets that are filled with small shiny bags of pretty crappy stuff? Why not just use the shiny bags? It's not even Christmas yet and I need to rent a dumpster.
I bought every present either on-line or on the phone (my wife's jeweler doesn't wait for me anymore, she calls after thanksgiving to tell me what I'm buying - I'm all about efficiency). I was going to pop into the mall last weekend since I was driving my daughter and her two friends there (ever notice your daughters two friends are always nice and polite, and your daughter isn't? or is that just me?) I figured I'd go on in and buy a pan or something. I am absolutely enticed by giant newspaper ads that say 70% off. I'll buy anything at 70% off. The good news is the mall was so mobbed I got irritated not finding a parking spot and dropped the girls off. The bad news is while on-line I think I bought more stuff I don't need for myself than anyone else. I did find a lovely blazer for $9. Can't wait to see how it looks.
My wife is in superb physical condition. She works out pretty much every day with a trainer who kills her. She is stronger than anyone I know. She walks or runs more than I drive - yet she'll spend an endless amount of time driving around a mall looking for a parking spot close to the door. I don't ask.
I find it funny that power has become a hot selling point in things like switches and even blade servers. My switch only uses 237 Watts and there's uses 324. I appreciate we need to do all we can, but did anyone consider that the switch is connected to 12 giant disk arrays each sucking more power than the Hoover damn can generate in a day? Unless you are still running VAX 11/780's I'm pretty sure the disk and tape you have on the floor is your real problem.
Hate to say it, but I love Internet Explorer 7.0 and if you aren't running Spybot spyware killer you really should. It's free and it's great, and enormously necessary if you have kids. You'd think sites like Nickelodeon or Disney would frown on spyware hiding in their nice kid games but oh no, they are the worst. AOL is awful also, I've had to banish AIM from my home, which really irritated my kids, but such is life. Plus, once I can not understand any of the codes they use, I feel its time to squish the system. My daughter had this as a line to a friend "Hmpooo r cclp" and the kid replied, equally as cryptically. Had this been my three year old, I would have thought it cute, but knowing my daughter, I felt it was possible she were conspiring to steal my financial identity and buy her friends an Abercrombie store.
I couldn't be any happier for the folks at Isilon, who successfully launched their IPO and are sitting on a market cap of $1.45 Billion smackers. Sometimes nice guys do finish first.
I'm digging all the football that is going on this weekend. Two games on Christmas? That's just awesome. That is a well run sport, unlike Basketball, which I can no longer even watch. I do enjoy the occasional full fledged mele of thugs who make more money in a one day than social security pays out - to play a game. I'm all for getting what you can in life, but really, all that money to play a game and you start a brawl? I'd spend all my time making sure I never got hurt, less I upset my gravy train and have to start a Rap career. Baseball is a tad better, they don't seem to kill each other anywhere near as often, and those fights are much more entertaining to watch. I love watching a beer bellied pitcher throw a glove at an oncoming steroid raging psycho as a defense, knowing the poor catcher will tackle the clown if necessary. I also love a sport where 87 year old coaches can get into it, a la Zip Zimmer and Pedro a few years ago. I haven't watched a hockey game since the strike. How anyone can skate let alone stand on 1/8" metal blades while both throwing and receiving monster haymakers to the head is beyond me. I never say anything bad about hockey players. They don't make huge dough, and still do this. That's just crazy. Oh, and for my international friends, I didn't mean to omit the other football. Most of the ESG folks went to watch the world cup at lunch every day this year. I will admit I almost enjoyed it, but not really. I do remember the head butt incident for some reason. I think Americans would like it a whole lot more if instead of penalty kicks, each team put one guy in the circle and they beat the hell out of each other to determine a winner. Just a thought.
Have a nice holiday everyone. Enjoy some time off. Turn off the pagers, there will be plenty of stuff breaking next week to deal with.
Cheers
My latest CW rant.
I should have added that my wife did wish for the breakup of Tom Brady but since that has already happened, I didn't include it. He is the father of one of my children, after all.
I've already had a comment re: Mark Hurd as the Red Sox manager - asking if I had opened a trouble ticket with them recently, implying that they stink in this area - at least at this site. While the answer is no, I was really speaking in the context of how he was able to somehow take a massively dysfunctional batch of prima-donna's with no holistic view of the mission and get them refocused on the team concept. I don't even think he could keep Manny Ramirez from making an ass of himself at least twice a season, so there are always some areas that remain bad. $160 million bucks and the guy almost misses a play because he's peeing in a bucket inside the Green Monster. Just "service being service, man".
I knew I was old because I have 658 kids, but I never felt old career wise. I still sort of felt like the 24 year old punk who joined EMC in 1845 - and while I have watched many grow older year to year, (and occasionally noticed that the industry started hiring 11 year olds some point back), I never really felt like I was one of the aging.
Until last night.
I met EMC technoids Mark Lewis and Mike Feinberg for dinner to wax ethereal about all things that interest geeks. (The three of us couldn't have attracted a female if we plopped a million in cash on our table). I always thought Lewis was about 20 years older than me (he's 1) and Feinberg at least 10 (he's 6 years younger). That sort of made me think - but then the killer happened.
Lewis grew up inside DEC. I spent some time as a DEC reseller a thousand years ago. In our conversation about something I now forget (age), I drew a parallel to some application of today as the "Ask MAN/MAN" of yesterday. Both cocked their heads and looked like I just spoke a foreign language. I thought they were kidding. They weren't.
ASK Software was huge - bigger than Peoplesoft (who probably didn't exist yet), bigger than Oracle even (I may be making that up, but I think so), and there was no such thing as SAP or JD Edwards ERP stuff. MAN/MAN was the ERP/manufacturing software package, and besides All-In-One, was what put DEC on the map for commercial mini-computing. It also ran on HP3000 MPE machines, if I'm not mistaken. (In case you didn't think I really was old). Funny thing is both these guys knew of MUMPS, which was run by 27 hospitals, but neither had any idea about MAN/MAN, which was run by every major manufacturer on the planet for a while. CA bought it a long time ago, which is the only justification I can think of for not knowing about it.
By now you've already heard about the infamous Mr. Foley goes to Washington foibles, and probably a few of the jokes.
What you haven't heard is that they guy who is going to take his job is Tim Mahoney. What else you don't know is Tim is a storage guy, which makes him obviously qualified to lead the nation, or at least the great state of Florida.
Tim was VP of Sales and Marketing at Tecmar, and then Rodime, and then SyDos (the aftermarket division of SyQuest).
Joel Reich, iSCSI overlord at Netapp, worked for him for 2 years at Tecmar and then about 4 years at Rodime. It looks like Tim left the storage business in the mid-90's. I asked Joel if he'd vote for Tim if the Foley scandal never happened. He said he would still vote Foley even after the issues. I laughed.
If Tim can become a U.S. Congressmen, then maybe I should run for President.
Tim's site says there are "0" days left before the Nov. 7th election. It's Nov. 6th today. Nice.
Here's my latest CW article, which brilliantly illustrates my contention that most of the problems we have in IT are due to our inability to communicate with each other.
It seems James Rogers was in a session I did last week and wrote a Byte and Switch article on one of the issues I raised. Then David DeJean wrote this article arguing with James' position. It looks like they are disagreeing but they really aren't, they just didn't hear things the same way. I love this example. Interpretation and translation - that's where we all fall down.
On a much more serious note, last evening I entered the Hilton in NY as I had a keynote to deliver this morning (which was 90% the same presentation I did at SWC last week which caused the aforementioned ruckus). I took the train down with my brother Greg, had a nice dinner, and went to the hotel around midnight. I, as always, ran into some folks I knew who, as always, were able to convince me to have a glass of wine prior to heading to bed. While I was kibitzing with folks, the bar lights suddenly came on, and last call was called (which I didn't think happened in NY, especially with a very crowded bar making lots of money). I tried in vain for 10 minutes to get a bartender to acknowledge my existence when I happened to look across the bar and noticed two lovely young ladies who appeared "professional", if you get my drift. The bartender, however, was hovering over them, so I made my way over and asked the blonde young lady if she would mind getting the bartender's attention. She said "sure" and within 8 seconds I had a glass of bad red wine. I thanked her and was heading back to the hundred or so IT and IT industry people (all of which were now looking at me, mind you) when "Charisma" (no lie, her real name, not even a stage name) started chatting me up.
Now, I may be a lot of things, but I like to think one of them is that I'm a realist. I know I'm not rich or handsome, I know I'm not really interesting except in very small, very odd niches, and I know that I'm married to a six foot goddess who I adore, and who could kill me in 4 seconds if she wanted to. Therefore, I simply assumed Charisma was beginning the sales pitch, and I'm trying to get out of Dodge. I turn away and start chatting with someone (by now a bunch of semi or full on drunk vendor marketing guys have made it to this side of the bar under the guise of really needing to ask me something) and have every intention of working my way back to safety, when my brother yells to me, "hey, Charisma's a porn star". Well, that is one business I know absolutely nothing about, and as you know, I love to learn. She was very forthright and gracious in answering a slew of questions I've always wanted to ask but never had the opportunity, and she wasn't at all disappointed that I wasn't familiar with her body of work - making her a much better person than I, since I get really irritated when people don't know who I am or just how darn important I am.
It turns out she was in town for the Howard Stern show (I love Howard). I was able to satisfy many curiosities during the 30 minute conversation, and then I ran away. I'm not sure what happened after that, but the drunken marketing pack kept edging closer and closer.
Bizarre little things like that always seem to happen to me, and really does make life interesting. In the last week I've met a secret service agent, a district attorney, a few CEO's, and a porn star. I almost can't wait for next week.
P.S. the showering at the Hilton was entirely uneventful.
Cheers
Not that Frankfurt is not a fantastic place, but having been a few times, I decided to come early and spend the labor day weekend in Paris, where my lovely wife and I have not spent all that much time. We are staying in Versailles at the suggestion of fellow ESG'er and world traveler, Paul Myerson.
Versailles is fab. Perfect French suburb. Outrageously expensive. One cannot get a taxi to save ones life. Tres bien.
Not to sound absurd, but the French fries are magnificent. They come with pretty much every meal we have had (and while I did see 2 McDonald's today, no, we have only eaten in places where there have been no burgers, at least that I can tell) and they must do something to the oil, because they are really good. I know it sounds stupid, French fries and all, but they are really something. I can't wait to try the French dressing.
Observation - apparently the French are cold. Everyone either is wearing a sweater or a scarf, or has one draped around their neck (males only, apparently). It must be 75 degrees here. Sweater and scarf stores must make a ton of money. I have yet to see a beret, except on someone who clearly was from New Jersey. Today, Sunday, every other person we saw had a straw basket with a loaf of bread sticking out of it, and i'm fairly confident they were not doing it simply because I was in town. You are apparently supposed to get wine with every meal, including breakfast. Rose is preferred prior to the afternoon, and it's good. It's not the Gallo gallon of pink sweet crud, it is really quite dry and tasty. Provence is where they make it, which must be in this country somewhere. The cheese has been quite good also, though I feel it could become a problem shortly.
Service is a tad like Italy, where the only one in a rush ever seems to be me.
I have witnessed more Lamborghini's and Ferrari's as every day street cars today than in any city I have ever been in. They must have a lot of dough in France.
The Louvre is magnificent, but way too big. My feet are killing me. The Eiffel tower is really, really, tall, and it's brown, which I didn't know.
My wife, who is a 6 foot blond stunning lady, has had more traffic stopping stares than when we were in the middle of China. My international ego is now immense.
More from Germany soon, and some might even be IT related. Au revoir.
Here we go again. Apple comes out with an innovative, perfectly good, cool looking, easy to use (kind of) computer gadget and Microsoft decides it wants a piece.
So what will happen? Microsoft's gizmo will come out, will not be as good, will not be as easy to use, will cause factions to occur, and will ultimately own 95% of the market. In three years only those "artsy" folks will be walking around with iPOD's while everyone else will have their MicGizmo, bitching and moaning about how they have to reboot it every twenty minutes, but buying a new one every time the capacity gets bigger.
I started complaining about my Treo 700 phone three days before I even got it. I was right of course, it completely stinks, and while I don't know if that's because of Palm or Microsoft, I do know that the guys who run the Palm OS version tend to be far less bitchy.
Maybe we are just acclimated to complaining about Microsoft because we've given up. I know I'm buying Microsoft. I have 5 iPOD's in my house, but read the Boston Globe today and discovered Microsoft is joining the game. I have already mentally come to grips with the inevitable fact that shortly I'll have MicGizmo's all over the place, and will look at my defiant 14 year old daughter wearing her iPOD like she's some sort of 60's hippie tree hugging VW van driving anti-capitalist. Of course, hers will most likely work......
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