Twenty years ago I was at the San Diego super computer center. Their mega-machine of the day was a twenty foot long three ton flashing light box that looked stunning like the "whopper" from War games. Anyway, what's interesting is that the demonstration they showed me was how the 1000 or so processors in the whopper could work together to create a 3D rendering of a person's face and head from a photograph. To prove this point, they had a sealed lathe type machine connected to the whopper that cut small pieces out of a block of paper for 9 hours until a bust of W.C. Fields became apparent. I can remember how cool I thought that was. At the time, forward looking animation companies such as Disney rented time on the whopper to do cool stuff like that at a zillion dollars an hour.

Last week I went to the dentist to have my 84^th (or so) crown shoved into my mercury filled mouth. A crown is a fake tooth made from ceramic. I was stunned when the dentist (Dr. Guyle Morris, dentist to the stars - and one of those guys who absolutely insists on asking you questions - mostly about cars - while you have 14 things jammed into your mouth along with a totally numb face) took some funky pictures and started "crafting" my tooth on a 3D workstation. Ten minutes later, a water cooled gizmo the size of a microwave oven starts cutting up a block of ceramic - exactly like the W.C. Fields bust. Ten minutes after that, I had a new crown.

It was a good example of the lifecycle of technologies and how eventually they end up in the dentist office. The whopper probably cost $50,000,000. The 3D workstation and water tooth lathe gizmo probably cost $200,000. The fact that I was able to get my crown in one appointment vs. two - priceless. More interesting perhaps is that there was most likely more CPU power inside the dentist workstation by an order of magnitude then in the whopper. I wonder if he could have made a W.C. Fields face on the crown. You know that will be the next "bling" thing. It will be like scrimshaw on your teeth - pictures of Tupac and Biggie on your choppers. Sweet.

Speaking of high-tech advancements that take way too long, I finally got to see and hear the Steve Sicola story. Sicola was a DEC storage engineer from the Mark Lewis, Richie/Ellen Larry genre who went to Compaq and ended up at Seagate. Sicola and team wanted to build a bigger "brick" than just a disk drive - a sled of disk drives where failure of one (or more) became a "who cares?" moment and where all lower level function could occur autonomically (like RAID). Surprisingly (I say mockingly, as I told him et al 53 years ago that OEM's would barf on the idea), OEM's barfed on the idea. Seeing how Seagate makes roughly 100% of its revenue and profit on those OEM's, it didn't take a genius to figure out a new play was required. Enter Xiotech, who was owned by Seagate and subsequently spun out for pretty much the exact same reasons, as a perfect place to take the Sicola project to some commercial level.

Now the stuff is out and it's way cool. The brick has 12 disks (I think, might be 10) - and they have figured out all the vibration, airflow, etc. problems that plague SATA disks, internal error checking, etc. They stripe across all the disks so they can get the performance consistency and linear scale folks like, in a pretty much disposable package (you chuck it after 5 years or so). A package like this ends up being even cheaper when you consider that you almost always will toss out your investment well before it's depreciated, and as such you have to write it down. This method makes it kind of time-proof since you know the exact expected performance/availability capabilities on day 2000 that you do on day 1. In the wild and wacky Web 2.0 world, that's a good thing to know.

I think I'll be attending the Trusted Infrastructure Technologies Conference in October in China. Cloud computing and data infrastructure is a way cool wave right now - but I've been wondering how it ever really garner true corporate success without the ability for those using it to be able to prove the security and integrity of the data assets that exist in the cloud. This initiative is built around that concept - how do you prove multi-tenancy infrastructure outside of your control is doing what it is supposed to be doing? Even in internal/intranet based cloud initiatives, you should still be concerned about being able to prove that your multi-tenancy utility is meeting all the assumptive functions it should. When you can do that the entire issue of "I want my own infrastructure" can go away finally. If we can prove it in the cloud, we can certainly prove it on our intranet. At that point, we can really start building utility infrastructures and stop stove piping everything. It may not matter to us if someone can hack into the pictures of my kids pet turtle, but it will if you want my 401K data housed out on your shared site......

The categories displayed in research for the last 25 years or so that help us delineate between "customer types" are another example of "things we still use because that's the way we've always done this" - that no longer makes any sense. In a recent internal research review our team presented their finding by "accepted nomenclature" - i.e. companies with more than 5000 employees = X and companies with more than $1B in revenue = y.

The reality is those are meaningless metrics today. If you are trying to understand and categorize a market for IT products or services, the only company who cares how many employees someone has is a company who sells individual seat licenses or products - so it might be good for Microsoft or Dell, but it doesn't tell you jack about 98% of the things I care about. There are plenty of companies with less than 100 employees and little to no revenue who are massive consumers of storage and servers. How does one characterize MySpace or FaceBook in the old way of looking at things? Is Google considered the same type of IT shop as the rest of the Fortune 500? I think not. If you are going to sell IT stuff to the world, then the only legitimate way to make comparisons is to get very basic - and I suggest that means servers. It doesn't even really matter if it is physical or virtual (as more and more will become virtual) - servers support applications that support users, processes, and other applications. If you understand server growth, you get a better picture of the company's growth. We know when a company goes from 25 servers to 200 over two years that that should be a company on our radar screen. If their employee count went from 50-200 in that time frame you probably wouldn't pay attention.

This is absolutely brilliant. This is what makes my (pseudo) job worth it.

I just opened an email from Beth Mayhew, Director of Marketing for AIMM.org that says this:

"Enterprise Search Frustrates and Disappoints Users

69% of respondents report that less than half of enterprise information is searchable online

Silver Spring, MD - June 17, 2008 - In a new study on Findability to be released by AIIM, 49% of survey respondents "agreed" or "strongly agreed" that it is a difficult and time consuming process to find the information they need to do their job. The new survey of over 500 businesses conducted in May 2008, suspects that a prime culprit for the failings of Findability in the enterprise is the admission that 69% of respondents believe that only 50% or less of their organization's information is searchable online. Given the ready access that users are supposed to have in this "Age of Google" - how is this possible?

"Findability has been a common source of frustration in the enterprise for decades," states AIIM Vice President Carl Frappaolo. "As information has become more and more digital, from it's creation through to management, the pain of finding enterprise information has moved from the piles of paper on the desktop and in storage cabinets, to the digital landfill of file servers, e-mail inboxes, digital desktops, and content management systems. Despite the advances made in search on the internet, enterprise search leaves most users frustrated."

Finding content digitally is only possible if pointers to content or the content itself is in native digital format, made available for indexing by search, and/or accessible by information organization and access techniques (such as navigational structures, taxonomies, bookmarks, etc.). The lack of such functionality in the enterprise is at the heart of user frustration.

But fault does not lie with technology solution providers. Most organizations have failed to take a strategic approach to enterprise search. 49% of respondents have "No Formal Goal" for enterprise Findability within their organizations, and a large subset of the overall research population state that when it comes to the "Criticality of Findability to their Organization's Business Goals and Success", 38% have no idea ("Don't Know") what the importance of Findability is in comparison to a mere 10% who claim Findability is "Imperative" to their organization.

The lack of strategic understanding, implemented plans and technological pros and cons to address Findability in the enterprise continues to cause pain in most organizations, although slow progress is being made."

.

Several Points:

1. Duh. You can't find diddly in an enterprise or out. When does 2 zillion responses to search end up being helpful? It's ridiculous how much internal corporate knowledge is totally wasted because your own people can't find what they need.
2. "Findability"?
3. Not one to nitpick but "from it's creation" should be "its creation".
4. Perhaps best of all - try to find out in this press release what AIIM stands for! The irony is superb. Better yet, go to AIIM.org - it still isn't obvious. When you search AIIM in their search bar, it takes you off site to Google, who promptly displays 326,000 results, none of which actually define AIIM as far as I can find.

So the organization assembled to deal with the issues associated with finding information does a survey that tells us that users are not happy when they can't find information, but uses Google to not find information that its members (or me) might like to find. I almost don't want to ask, but where do they keep these survey results? Have you seen 'em? Nope, have you?

You can't just make this stuff up. It would have been much better if they slipped in something like "48% of all data is entirely fabricated, but 98% of the time we can't prove it because no one knows where any of the information is".

So if this little brilliantly perfect example doesn't get you to realize that without an entirely different data-centric approach to categorizing and classifying data - ideally at creation - you are completely and utterly hosed, nothing will. E-discovery my butt.

Most IT operational issues can be paired down to one common denominator - data growth. If it were not for endlessly growing volumes of data demanding equally endlessly growing amounts of infrastructure we would have solved every major hurdle to creating a stable, predictable service based utility model within IT.

In short, data growth strains and eventually breaks every single process within IT. Data growth:

• Causes the need for more and more infrastructure, which in turn causes
  • Greater likelihood of infrastructure failure/outages
  • The need for additional IT staff to manage the additional infrastructure
  • Increased levels of interdependencies between infrastructure elements
  • Larger footprint, power, and cooling requirements within the data center
  • Increased difficulty in problem isolation/resolution
  • Increased likelihood in missing SLA's, being outside governance parameters, etc.
• Causes process failures and magnifies downstream issues
  • Backup/Recovery - more data requires more time, more horsepower and more precision to ensure adherence to established SLA's (RPO/RTO)
    • Further exacerbated by multiple copies of primary data used for various reasons
    • Requires more media, more off-site vaulting expense
  • Disaster Recovery - more data requires more time, more bandwidth, more infrastructure in order to ensure recoverability SLA's continue to be met
  • Application slowdowns - more data to comb thru requires more infrastructure to maintain application performance. Data grooming/archiving may fix performance burden but simply shifts the burden off of production environments, rarely eliminating other downstream negatives.
  • Delays new business applications and initiatives - more data/infrastructure/processes require more planning and downtime associated with rolling out new applications.
  • Data migrations, infrastructure rollouts/replacements further complicated with growing data - equates to slower overall IT response time to business
  • Negatively affects Compliance/Governance or simply finding the right information becomes harder as the volume of information increases. Having more than a single place to look for data creates more opportunities to have data fall through the cracks - and makes it far more difficult for organizations to derive incremental benefit from an information asset after the primary use.
  • Creates increased opportunities for security issues, lost information, unprotected data, etc.

Without data growth - or at least the meteoric compound rates of data growth we have experienced over the last several decades, most every popular problem discussed in IT would have been solved. Processors, storage, and networks get faster, cheaper, and easier. Management and automation tools are more than adequate - until data growth creates an unforeseen dynamic. We would have mastered the required processes to protect, deliver, store, manipulate, move, and access our data if it weren't for the never-ending growth.

The Realities:

Data growth is not going to abate - it is going to accelerate. More people connected more ways have more ability to create data than ever before and whether we like it or not, they will do so. The usage, size, shape, and requirements of data will change as well. Faced with these realities, it is apparent that continuing down a dysfunctional path can only end in failure, and as such something needs to change.

The Solution:

Since you cannot really impact the growth of newly created data, you have to deal with elements that do reside within your control. For the point of this paper we assume that not allowing data to be created is not a realistic alternative. Therefore, there are only two fundamental control points that can reduce the burden of data growth which you can affect; the number of copies of data which exist at a given point in time, and the treatment (processes) of that data at a given point in time. Focusing on these two metrics will give you valuable insight and enable you to add predictability to your entire operation.

In order to best frame the suggested methodology, we have devised four (4) simple stages of "life" to consider for any type of data - and for each stage there is a common set of questions you should answer which will result in a conscious understanding of what is currently occurring and the ramifications of that, and provide you with an opportunity to alter those results.

The Basic Lifecycle Stages of Data:

Stage 1: Dynamic Active Online Data

Stage 2: Persistent Active Online Data

Stage 3: Persistent Inactive Online/Nearline Data

Stage 4: Persistent Inactive Offline/Deep Archive Data

Definitions:

There are two primary data life forms - Dynamic and Persistent. Dynamic data is any data that is living in a change state - where fluidity and changes occur. Persistent data is non-changing, fixed, or static. A change of data in a persistent state creates a new data object.

Both definitions are subjective - they are not hard and fast rules. While true there is most likely an exact time when some piece of data stops all changing and becomes persistent, that is not the point. Eventually all data becomes persistent - when you deem that occurrence to have happened - and what you do about it - are entirely up to you. It is the consideration that is important - reflecting on the state of data and the treatment of data at that state is where value is to be realized.

If you do nothing else, recognize that while you don't have to do anything differently - you should take the opportunity to think about if you should do anything differently each time some major set of data evolves to a new stage. You should ask yourself two simple questions when that occurs:

1. Should the data itself remain on the same physical infrastructure required during its dynamic phase?
2. Should we alter any of the process requirements associated with the data at this stage?

My guess is most of the time the answers to both of these questions will be "no" - but the answer to the question of "are you going to do anything about it?" is probably also "no". If you at least stop to consider it, however, you provide yourself a ray of hope.

More to come......

Mike Workman, CEO of Ellison's Pillar Data Systems, is as much a lunatic as I previously mentioned. Check this article out in Forbes - Article

If you don't feel like reading it, allow me to paraphrase: Mike blows things up. He makes fireworks, bought "Weener Works" - which is some land in a desolate area of an Arizona desert - so he could go make heavy explosives and watch them blow up. How cool is that?

As a male, I'm also stricken with bizarre fascinations with cars, big trucks, and blowing things up. I buy silly cars. Mike makes bombs. I think I'm saner but who's to judge?

Funny thing is, in real life, while he can certainly be volatile, for the most part Mike is about as serene and passive as one can be. He listens, thinks, and listens some more. Maybe going to the desert and blowing things up keeps him from doing so in a staff meeting. It might be good therapy.

Speaking of blowing things up, I had one of the more interesting - and only outdoor - briefing of my illustrious career recently. ioSafe is a California company who builds fireproof/flood proof packaging for disk drives and systems. They showed up with oven connected to enough propane to make Mike Workman happy, and proceeded to take a normal 3.5" disk and one of their magically packaged disks, copy some photo files onto them (mostly of Brian Garrett who you just can't fake photographically!), and proceed to blow them up. They got the thing up to 1100 degrees (they wanted 1500 but the New England wind was blowing) and cooked the disks to death. They then dumped the magic disk into water, seeing how if your computer room blows up eventually you'll need water to put it out.

It's pretty cool stuff. This package costs about $300 bucks (with a 2.5" drive) and when it gets hot, gaskets swell up to seal the disk off as it shuts down to keep flames and eventual water out of it. After the wreckage, you take the disk, send it back to ioSafe, and they rip off the enclosure (the SN of the disk is stamped into the metal, as paper labels would be toasted), pull out the insulation, and plug the disk into a reader. I saw it work in 3 minutes. For a small company who doesn't do any disaster recovery, buying/building an array using this technology might add $1000-$1500 bucks to the cost of the storage - but what piece of mind! They make bigger self-enclosed systems (NAS and USB) for mid-market plays, but why wouldn't even big shops want this? For a pretty paltry sum you can add a whole new layer of insurance to the game.

So now when Mike comes to blow things up, you might lose a limb but you won't lose any data.......

You gotta love this guy....and with all due respect to my intellectual engineering friends who think sales guys are the root of all evil, think again.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121251528966441919.html?mod=yahoo_hs&ru=yahoo

At the 5 month mark in the year of 2008, I find myself thinking about how upside down things are. The general mood remains pessimistic, but most IT companies are hitting their numbers. There are budget cuts across the board, but for the most part the first five months of 2008 along with Q4 of 2007 have been rock solid. IT departments are cautious, but continue to spend.

You sort of expect EMC and NetApp to be kicking butt, if for no other reason that we are conditioned to it. I didn't see Symantec's big number coming, but come it did. You would have thought the great depression of 2008 would have crippled the smaller guys, but Isilon, 3PAR, Data Domain, CommVault, and Compellent have kept on keeping on.

No one gives any attention to Double-Take, but they might be the most consistently performing one of the bunch. Boring yes, but putting up killer results. The company has completely (and almost instantly) turned around under Investor turned CEO (again) Dean Goodermote and hasn't looked back. Replication is good after all - especially if it pertains to good numbers.

I would have probably kicked you in the shins, or worse, had you told me a few years ago that I'd spend actual time thinking about power, packaging, and cooling in 2008, but alas, I do. Green matters, for the wrong reasons mostly, but it does matter. People spend money on "perceived" relevant green IT. Mark Peters knows more about Green realities than anyone else in the space. Good thing he works for ESG.

Guys like Xyratex have a pretty killer play when people start rambling about power, packaging, and cooling. They get no credit for where they sit in the food chain from Wall St., but they should. They ride with the core market - which is in hyper growth mode - and are in prime position to take advantage of the stratospheric growth that Web 2.0 presents. Why should Google, et al, keep building science project/erector set infrastructures? If you want to be your own OEM, eventually you need to act like one - which means you need to package things up to be supportable, tested, etc. In the Web 2.0 world, inexpensive capacity in professional packaging for short dough is going to rule the day, so who better to ride that wave?

Mark Hurd stole the big-deal show buying EDS, but Andy Monshaw's storage business at IBM has done the most interesting and most out-of-the-box deals in the sector. I would have never believed anyone in that job would ever buck the outrageous "not invented here" attitude that has been the hallmark of that group. It remains to be seen if the infusion of outside talent will have the desired effect or the anti-bodies and big company politics will push out the new blood. No matter what, you have to give Monshaw due credit for doing what few ever thought could be done by lighting a fire under the group and making IBM storage interesting. By the end of 2008 we should be able to get a feel for how it's going - death or glory, if you will. Maybe both - with glory usually comes some death.

5 months ago DataDirect Networks was about as exciting to talk about as processed cheese, but former HDS marketing madman Steve Zivanic joined the ranks and immediately began to tell a much more interesting tale. DDN just so happens to sell into the sweet spot of the media, entertainment and Web 2.0 worlds. DDN was used to create the new Batman movie trailers and effects for The Dark Night (way cool, those Batman movies). Zivanic leverages play's like this and finds ways to get attention, where in the past DDN might have added a Pacific Title & Art (the post-production house) logo to their list of customers and hope you might somehow know who that was (you wouldn't) and why they mattered (ditto). If you aren't a multi-billion dollar player you need to be different to be noticed. Look for more interesting things out of DDN and Zivanic, he does things that make me pay attention.

Finally, the only thing more boring than storage, packaging, and IBM historically has been the analyst business. Apparently there is such a thing as the "Institute of Industry Analyst Relations", or IIAR. I cannot tell you exactly why, or who these nice folks are, but bless their hearts for ranking ESG in the top 10 firms globally (out of over 100) and in the top 5 in the U.S. in the "Analyst Firm of the Year" category. We came in at #7 in the "Most Important Firm of the Year" category globally, but heck if I can tell you what that really means. Congrats to Brian Babineau who made the top 10 in the global "Analyst of the Year" category, out of 191. If 191 were nominated how many does that mean there are in the world? Yikes. Thanks to all the folks who took the time and effort to put this together and to those who voted. It's nice to get recognized even though we are boring.

Cisco, Nortel, Riverbed, Isilon, Symantec, and LSI all beat their Wall St. numbers last quarter. LSI's CEO Abhi Talwalkar stated, "Stronger than expected sales of our SAS and SAN silicon partially offset the effects of normal seasonality while the longer-term benefits of our strategic steps and sharp focus on storage and networking continued to grow." LSI supplies those who supply IT.

Sun's numbers, of course, were exactly opposite, but they tend to be contrarian in general. Their numbers were "stunningly bad" according to the young ESGer who tracks them.

It is clear to me that the buying spree is over, but that companies continue to invest into technologies required to keep them competitive and even accelerate their leads. Smart companies spend in downturns - they just spend smarter.

I'm ok with people being smarter as a general rule. If budgets continue to get tight it forces better use of those budgets or exposes that we were in processes of solving problems that perhaps didn't need to be solved. It's like spending $14 million on a conduit system for the Big Dig so cell phone companies could put their gear into it - only to find out those companies would rather just run lines the old fashioned way - or perhaps like giving Matt Ryan a $32 Million dollar guaranteed salary (the highest ever) before he ever takes a professional snap as a football player simply because his agent (salesman) made the ownership somehow panic that without giving Matt the dough they would somehow end up repeating their Michael Vick fiasco. The point is, people who have way too much money to spend on way too insignificant issues may be a salespersons' best pal, but it doesn't tend to drive sustainable business behavior.

What's the number one reason IT buyers pick one vendor/solution over another when scrutiny is high? It's marketing and psychology. Pressure mounts when you under the microscope, so buyers make what appears to be the most practical choice to have the most possible impact on the most visible elements of a problem. If the answer is "I have no money" like in 2001, then cheap wins. If the answer is "I'm not going to be an idiot" as it appears to be in 2008, then the winners are proving to be those with the clearest articulation of value. They market clearly and concisely into a known problem area. Folks getting squeezed don't buy based on brand recognition or high-level abstract campaigns if they have tactical problems to solve.

The moral for you all is simple - say what you mean and mean what you say - all the rest is noise and buyers can't afford the time or effort to decipher whether or not you might have a solution to their problem based on the fact that you are a staunch proponent of free love and are firmly against dumping toxic nuclear waste behind school houses.

First, Jay Kidd is a good blogger, but he's a marketing guy so I'd expect nothing less. Second, the point he is making - while seemingly somewhat self-serving, is realistic. We spend way too much time trying to come up with catchy phrases to make our dumbed down efforts seem hipper.

Comcast, clearly reacting to ill-understood pressure, bought "social networking pioneer" Plaxo. Plaxo is a social networking pioneer just like Jehovah Witnesses are welcomed ice-breakers. Plaxo is a good idea - keep your contact list online and have it be automatically (almost) updated. The problem is they didn't stop there - they decided that once they had enough members they were a social network. They aren't.

A social network is one in which I decide to whom I wish to reveal myself (so to speak) and under what conditions. The social networks of the business world today are the modern manifestation of everything we've hated about consumer marketing of old, except now it's spam instead of telemarketers. I have received 11 billion Linked-In requests, to which I'm flattered. I ignored 99% of them, until one day I decided to see what it was all about. That was a mistake. There is little to no value to me in most social networks today - I suppose if I had nothing to do or knew I was in a perpetual state of requiring another job that might be different, but as it sits, being pestered online is no more fun than being pestered anywhere else.

Eventually there will be legitimate business networks that provide real value. People like and leverage Amazon because of user ratings. Amazon blows that goodwill (with me anyhow) by sending me 198 emails every day. I don't want the emails. If they gave me user ratings and left me alone, it would have value. When we grow up enough to apply true social phenomenon's to technological capabilities we have the chance to make really big changes in the way business is done - and that's going to be interesting. Along the way this step back to "boiler room" tactics thinly guised as "social" is annoying.

The real value of all of this to date is in the Web 2.0 delivery of Web 1.0 capabilities - it's letting me buy stuff online and more importantly, it's letting me store stuff online. The business implications thus far have been around monetizing eyeballs (Google) or finding a new usage/consumption model for infrastructure (cloud computing/storage) by enabling the consumer to create and store where and when they want. Today our kids take video's on their phone and immediately email it to their pals or post it on MySpace. Why hasn't Verizon offered an adjunct service to allow them to put their video's or pictures on the Verizon site instead of simply routing them to someone else? Verizon best learn to give those types of things away, less they get Goggled up.

Thus far the economics of all of this are based on giving away the ability to create piles and piles of data - all of it file - and even giving away the ability to store and access it - in exchange for new, different monetization schemes. I'm more than fine with that.

What will happen is that traditional business not currently under attack by others attempting to pull the go-to-market rug out from under them will continue to feel like all this social networking/web 2.0 stuff is what it has mostly been - noise from the kids. The really big money and really big impact is going to happen when business 1.0 figures out that world 2.0 isn't going to operate old school anymore - and then they will panic. E-Trade was no threat at all to traditional Wall St. brokerage houses. No one would ever do that! Think again my friends. Just because we might have to wait for Web 3.5 before real business making real money becomes a real thing doesn't mean you should blindly dismiss what's going on as a fad. Life is in the clouds.

It's funny when it's Monty Python, but a massive pain in the butt in real life. I received 266 Spam emails yesterday. One day - 266. The problem isn't getting better, it's getting worse. I won't debate the "why does anyone take the time to create Spam?" issues - there are total A*holes in the world as we know. Tip: Don't respond to the ridiculous offers you get in your Spam and maybe they will stop sending them!

Anyway, I was ok with an odd little homegrown package build specifically for Notes (yes, I'm still running notes, and no, I don't know why) that worked pretty well. I thought it was a pretty easy to use white list/blacklist tool - if you sent me an email and weren't in my contacts folder (or often even if you were), you received a notice that told you to copy a long string and stick it in the subject line of your reply. Amazingly, I figure half of the people screwed up that simple instruction. Therefore, while the filter worked for machine generated noise, it also couldn't adapt to human moronity, which meant I always had a bunch of legitimate emails lost in the piles of Male Enhancement and downright filthy other offers. Sorry if I have blown your email off - I swear it was the system.

Our other guys finally started getting hammered with Spam as well so we moved to Postini as a quick fix. It works pretty well comparatively, so many complaints stopped. As a user I get a Postini email (which seems to get trapped, ironically enough, somewhere because I only see the email on my Blackberry - but not in my inbox) that gives me a link I can click to go to their site, log in, and peruse the spam of the day (which I don't do, because it doesn't show up in my Inbox). Like most users that turns out to be a hassle, so I don't do it. I've occasionally logged in to Postini when I have the time or inclination and can remember my password, but now the volume is so big it's pointless.

Then, as pure luck would have it, I found a nice Irish lad in my office last week from Spam Titan. The pitch was simple - we trap all your spam but make it easy for an individual user to administer their own lives. The system sends an email with the Spam embedded in it - so there isn't a need to go anywhere else. You can blacklist, white list, or deliver the email to your inbox in a microsecond. It has a bunch of other cool corporate features as well, but I don't even really care - it lets me control my own requirements without bugging our IT guys and its idiot proof (or "Me" proof, if you will). Best of all, it is grossly underpriced - $550 bucks for 100 users, and $4400 for 5000. That's ridiculous. I'll be showing them how to A: provide this offering to smaller groups and B: price to value and jack the prices higher for corporate accounts - so go get it while you can. http://www.spamtitan.com

HP buying EDS is brilliant.  HP needs to up the game and get into high-end corporate board rooms, and at the same time extend its global high-end service capabilities.  Problem solved.  IBM has run around all alone as a systems player with those relationships.  Interesting to watch as they are very different cultures. 

IBM has been squishing HP and most everyone other IT vendor in the "green" play.  They figured out that chasing the IT guy isn't the right way - since IT appears well disconnected from the Sr. Management of those companies.  By aligning IT moves with actual corporate objectives, IBM has been taking advantage globally.  EDS gives HP the ability to have those conversations.

Yahoo telling Microsoft to pound sand was dumb.  They won't recover, and the only winner is Google.  I suspect you'll see the management and board tossed while the vultures wait for the inevitable collapse.  There is a chance the next regime will go back to Mr. Ballmer with their hats in their hands, in which case the deal will go down at least 20% below Microsoft's offer, further irritating stock holders, but no way does Ballmer not make them squirm - even though Microsoft needs Yahoo more than Yahoo needs Microsoft long term.  Google is taking all the money from the next generation.  Microsoft is taking money from me.

VMware buys Yahoo in 8 months, EMC goes private.  Stuff enterprise search capabilities into VMware and they have the legitimate chance to become the data center operating system. 

Having said that, VDI is the next virtualization war - and it will make the server virtualization market look tiny.  There are 100 times more desktop machines than servers in the corporate world - at 100 times the power, cooling, problems, etc.  Those are going away, and the corporate benefits are staggering when they do.  Think of the money some will make when we collapse 200,000,000 desktop drives down to 2,000,000 or less.  Short term boost for Seagate, long term problem.  Same for Intel. 

Bad scenes in Burma and China.  Pray for them.

Why not? We have Software as a Service, Platforms as a Service, and a host of others. How about Service as a Software? That's what all the backup guys are really offering ï¿1/2 not Software as a Service.

This "asS" acronym might be my final undoing. Lemmings, you all are. Why can't we simply say what we do? Why do we feel compelled to jump on any passing bandwagon in some pathetic attempt to reap rewards that invariably end up causing customers confusion to the point of giving up and taking a job mowing lawns?

Mozy is a backup service. No one in their right mind considers it "Software" ï¿1/2 it's backup. Connected (Iron Mountain) sells me services ï¿1/2 they back my stuff up, and give it back when I need it. It ain't software. If I wanted software, I'd buy it. The whole point is I don't want software - I don't even necessarily want a service ï¿1/2 I want backup.

Do we call online banking BaaS? Retail shopping online RaaS? Is a train really Transportation as a Service?

5 years ago if you used the word service you were ridiculed. You couldn't fund a service company to save your life. GlassHouse might be the biggest "in your face" to the establishment in twenty years. They were told they were nuts to even think about a service play, that they could never raise a dime, and they could never have a legitimate company. The establishment was full of crap (as a service, which would be CaaS).

Now services are way back in vogue. So what do we do, we ruin them by grabbing the latest moniker du jour and shoving it on top of our ill advised product. Can a tow truck company use Jack as a Service ï¿1/2 or Jack aaS?

I am totally fine with the "aaS" descriptor and even the concept used properly. "aaS" is a way to enable different consumption models for technology and products for customers, and therefore expand the reachable markets for these technologies and products. I think that's great.

Coming up with new out of the box thinking around go to market models that enable us to put our value into more markets is great. Creating new unique ways for customers to do business with us is fantastic. "aaS" in the pure sense ï¿1/2 the Salesforce.com model ï¿1/2 is exactly the right play. They knew people failed in their CRM endeavors most of the time. They knew it failed because the promise of CRM was littered with a minefield of noisy, competitive offerings that ended up requiring a huge time and expertise investment on the part of the customer ï¿1/2 who had better things to do. Salesforce took away the biggest obstacles to consumer consumption ï¿1/2 they offered the stuff as a service. By doing so they took away that whole "IT problem", took away the capital cost/budget problem, and also took away the complexity by only giving people what they actually needed versus all the marvelous bells and whistles they might have normally jammed into their product in order to differentiate it.

It ain't about the moniker people; it's about the business model. Do business the way your customer wants to and good things happen. That's $aa$.

....of Silicon Valley tech companies, that is. A depressed dollar, a booming Chinese economy flush with more cash than the U.S. has debt (which is a lot, in case you are wondering), a superbly educated, low-cost work force, ultra-low cost technology development and manufacturing expertise already in place and an internal market capable of dictating the new rules could mean big changes are coming.

I've been spending a lot of time attempting to really understand the Chinese market over the last few years - as a consumer of U.S. (predominantly) data center products - which I figured was a good idea considering that's how I make a living. Everybody knows China has been the world's hottest economy, so everyone wants to sell their stuff there. Here are some of the things you should know or at least consider:

1. The China IT market doesn't operate like U.S. or Europe - at all. Most of the economic growth in China has been recent, so prior to the last 10 years there was no real overall data center infrastructure in place - at least not widely. That's good and bad - mostly good. No previous infrastructure means that while they are "late" to the market, they also aren't burdened with 57 generations of staggered, incompatible legacy bets to contend with. For the most part, the Chinese are able to start from a clean sheet of paper. The bad news on this front is that the IT consumer market has to be educated at every level. As capitalism and decentralization have taken a foothold for Chinese business initiatives, there has been very limited local senior IT talent with any long term experience, and as such it is only natural that Chinese IT leadership is forced to learn on the fly. If someone has never experienced the pure joy of making the decision to dump the mainframe for the mini-computer and adopt DECnet as a networking standard, they simply are not armed with the experience to see some potential pitfalls. This is why global system integrators like Accenture have done so well in China, and more global brands have grabbed big market share.
2. The opportunities have only just begun. For example, because of the Olympic Games, China has a massive push to move their thousands of pure analog cable operators to bypass straight digitalization and move directly to HDTV - all within about 9 months. I figure the storage capacity requirements for this little endeavor will eclipse 2 exabytes - to start. As business grows in China, so will their IT needs. The only way to circumvent practical experience is to buy your way to success - and that is what the Chinese are doing.
3. The decision makers for the majority of IT opportunities are not internal IT people - they are the system integrators. Chinese SIs - which really are more like VARs in the N.A. and Europe - are the perceived (and often real) knowledge experts, and as such command more influence in the Chinese market than anywhere else on Earth that I can think of. That will change as the IT community becomes more strategic and skilled, but for the foreseeable future if you want to sell into China and don't have a huge global direct presence, you better figure out who the SIs that control your accounts are. If they say no, you don't sell anything.
4. The Chinese government still has deep influence and ownership in most commercial enterprises. For example, there are about a dozen major global banks in China, and all of them are owned by the government. They operate fairly autonomously however, and the government has been a very large supporter of commercial expansion and modernization.
5. The Chinese are in it for the long haul. They are spending and building infrastructure that is second to none. From cell phone systems to WiFi, the Chinese are ready for whatever is coming next. They have the economic strength to afford to do it right and the centralized power to force it to happen. This will be the largest consumption market globally for IT products for at least 15-20 years I think. It really has only just begun.

Myself, and I think most industry people, have correctly viewed China as a land of unabashed opportunity. We think of China as the recipient of the things we bring to market - and for the next 5 plus years that will certainly be true. Sooner or later, however, the Chinese are going to reverse the roles - they are going to be the ones globalizing their own tech companies, and acquiring ours and others along the way.

A year ago I was introduced to H3C, a Chinese mega-company that came about after its predecessor, Hua Wei, effectively had to halt their own global initiatives due to a major IP piracy suit leveled by Cisco. After years of legal wrangling, Cisco and Hua Wei came to terms. Along the way the Chinese realized that they didn't need to steal and copy to design and build world-class technology products. They have the money, the market, and the manufacturing to take anyone on. They set up a joint venture/merger with ailing 3COM in the U.S. and went on to form H3C. H3C took all the internally developed IP and left behind anything that was challenged. The company now builds its own high-end core switching products, GSM infrastructure, storage products, security, and slew of other things. They sell their networking and core infrastructure products outside of China - mostly in Europe and South America thus far, and the rest has been captive to the local Chinese markets. Hua Wei does billions of dollars in revenues, and H3C over $700M, but no one has really heard of them in North America or most of Europe.

I became interested in the company when Jon Oltsik told me that technology and capability wise he felt that Hua Wei/H3C could pose the only true legitimate second choice to Cisco globally. How could a company I've never heard of threaten Cisco? His logic, which I agree with, is that there really is no true number 2 - that as great as the next level of big guys all are, if you add them all up they still don't come anywhere close to Cisco. We know from history that N.A. and European IT buyers like to always have a number 2, if for no other reason than to try to keep number 1 honest. It happens with servers, storage, and every other area of IT, but as a general rule not at the core network. With the right technology, built to be sold profitably at a huge discount to Cisco, and enough marketing money, Jonny figures they could grab significant overall global share even if they never even really threaten Cisco - just to let Cisco know that the IT guy has an alternative. I like the argument. Human nature is a tough thing to beat. With billions in revenues already, clean IP that works (they have over 700 patents), and a bankroll big enough to pull it off, the only remaining question is does H3C really want to be a global provider?

If we assume the answer is yes, then H3C - who is widely watched by a lot of other Chinese tech companies who would love to be able to follow in their tracks - is only missing one piece - a go to market strategy and execution plan. Just like U.S. vendors have often totally misunderstood the Chinese market and how it differs wildly from N.A. and European markets, so too do many of the Chinese. The difference that I have seen, however, is the Chinese appear willing to learn whereas Americans tend to take a more 'ready, shoot, aim" type of strategy, only to clean up the messes we make well after the fact.

I met with the President and several executives of H3C's Storage business in Orlando a few weeks ago. They were on a quest to better understand the markets here. What impressed me most about them (besides their tenacity - I think I met with them 4 times) was that even when I abruptly suggested that they had some basic fatal flaws to their core assumptions, it didn't set them back. (Yes, I made sure they knew what I was saying, and yes, I had a smarter person than I attending to see to such things). They really seemed to want to learn. I found it interesting to finally realize that cultural differences are bi-directional. In China a VAR controls the deal, but in the U.S. or Europe the VAR fulfills most of the time. In China a "partner" such as H3C can bring huge revenue opportunities to foreign companies. In North America and Europe, unless you are an OEM you probably are not going to be in a position to really move the needle for H3C. We all know that getting a major U.S. or European OEM is no easy task.

To be ultimately successful internationally, however, the Chinese will have to learn exactly what the rest of the tech world learned the hard way - that you will need to be "American" to really succeed in the U.S. and "European" to succeed in Europe. A transplanted national fresh from Beijing won't be any more successful running a European operation than a kid from Boston College sent over to Belgium. If you don't believe me go ask the Israelis, or the Japanese. It took Hitachi many years to move control of HDS to the U.S., but it was the only way to ever become a true competitor in the U.S.

If and when companies like H3C begin their international quests, it is only logical to assume they will do so both organically, and by acquisition. They will require localized market capabilities, which mean they will buy up VARs, service providers, and other manufacturers. They will make mistakes, and they will learn. Since they have incredible amounts of cash and answer to very few, they have the ability to buy just about anyone they want. They also have the capability to act faster than most U.S. entities. In order to create a global consumption base, why not just buy someone who has already done the heavy lifting? There are very, very large deals that are possible in this scenario. China owns the largest oil company in the world (Unocal) - by acquisition. They own property throughout Europe and South America, and have been slowly entering joint ventures and making equity plays in the U.S. markets. They have the money and opportunity to be global players in any industry they chose, so it's probably naïve to assume they aren't going to start buying up chunks of Silicon Valley. People will start complaining about anti-trust issues, etc. but let's face facts - the world runs on the economy, and while we will continue to be paranoid about allowing sensitive security oriented technologies to go, at the end of the day can anyone really prevent anyone else from getting to whatever end they want if they have the means? It's not as if we aren't getting hacked and attacked and defrauded by every other country on the planet already. At least the Chinese provide N.A. and European companies an opportunity to sell their goods - which is more than I can say for the 7 eastern bloc hackers who just stole another million credit card numbers. We used to fear the Japanese in the same way, but now the global economy wouldn't survive without them.

For what it's worth, I had one of my American Express cards compromised two weeks ago - and yesterday I found out that the replacement card had already been stolen. I don't know how, but besides being annoying, this has got to stop. Thankfully AMEX is great about situations like that - others, not so good. We freaked out every time the Russians did anything a few years ago, but now we welcome their security companies openly (Kaspersky Lab). Hermes in Slovenia develops OEM code for just about every major software/hardware person on the planet. U.S. companies send out development to everywhere from India to the Ukraine and everyone is fine with it. Perhaps we should rethink our outdated ideas about who we will do business with and why - since the ability to control anyone from sending a hunk of data to anyone else anywhere went away a long time ago. I think we should mandate protection schemes and encryption policies, since clearly the other ways don't work. Look at the public relations mess our friends at Hannaford, the grocery chain in Maine, got into - and they did everything right. They followed the credit card PCI rules to the letter, still got hacked by people stealing data in flight before it even hit their systems, and have done nothing but be stand up people since it happened. They didn't try to hide it, they brought it out. They didn't blame anyone else, they took responsibility. They spent more money encrypting data at the source - which isn't mandated by anyone - just to try to ensure it doesn't happen again. They have done everything right - and are still getting slaughtered by the local Maine media - who would really be appalled if they had any idea how often this happens and how most companies hide from it.

Is simply smoking hot. The numbers are killer, and I don't care how much you hate them, right now you want to be them. Smoking hot. Annoyingly hot perhaps.

What macroeconomic downturn? The hedge strategy they put into effect in 2002ish is paying off in spades right now. Can they sustain this level of execution across the board? Probably not - but man, oh man, talk about prime positioning. If the economy really tanks globally, they are actually in a position to increase overall share simply due to the fact that since data growth never abates, the (as ridiculous as this sounds to us old timers) fact that EMC has an end to end consolidation/ROI story is working superbly. They are absolutely attackable in individual areas but hold the majority of the deck of cards overall. It's the old IBM play - when the going gets tough, shoot excess vendors.

I'm not suggested that never-ending revenue and earnings growth like this is feasible, but am suggesting that even if they dip they will steal share and dip less than the collective competition.

Glad I left in '89. I knew they would crash and burn.

XIV, Files-X, and now Diligent. It's been a busy month for big Blue.

First, allow me to take full credit for calling the Diligent play. I said "Diligent will be the next to go - with the run on bulk storage plays designed to support the new era of digital content, a big honking de-dupe data protection play for big data centers like them will get scooped up this year" in this blog - back on January 8^th. I should have said "this quarter" and I would have looked smarter.

XIV is being left alone, heavily funded and encouraged, and has begun to start the war. They thus far are building an EMC 1986 sales force as far as I can tell, which I still haven't figured out is a good thing or a bad one. Clearly that genre knows how to sell storage, but I'm afraid they may point at the wrong battle - namely "Kill the Symmetrix at all costs!" which won't work, of course. Sooner or later they will get their market position sorted out and then it will be really interesting. I can't see how IBM can do anything but benefit by the effort eventually. It may ruffle a lot of feathers, but I'm a big fan of ruffling.

I probably should have seen the Diligent move as inevitable. Mr. Yanai and Diligent CEO Doron Kemple are pals from the days no one openly talks about if you are Israeli, and just looking at Doron you know he can kill you 11 ways with a Q-Tip, while never losing that disarming smile. Both these guys come from big iron, big data center pedigrees and IBM was a natural spot to end up even without the fact that Yanai is now there and the band seems to be getting back together in Haifa. Most interesting is that Diligent was an EMC spin out (formerly the Copy Cross team). I wonder how much EMC got on the deal.

Files-X I can't really comment on, other than to say I hope my permanently 9/11 bonded friend and founder Jacob Herbst got out with some money. Somebody must have had pictures of somebody else to get that thing sold for the rumored $50M - but we are talking about people good at taking pictures. I'm not sure where it even fits, as this was a Tivoli deal.

SANRAD, Continuity, and StorWize are still standing, but for how long? Like most Israeli companies, they don't emphasize little things like Marketing very much, so few know them, but they all have killer stuff. If they go, who's left? And, as it just so happens, all three would fit nicely into the New Blue world. SANRAD has some of the best packaged up storage virtualization services out there and is a killer play with server virtualization for DR (I'm doing a webcast soon on the subject). Continuity is helping big shops discover the holes in their DR (a wonderful little tool to be used by IGS to keep tabs on how well they are meeting SLAs - or for them to see where some products are not working - or for some customers to use to keep IGS honest). Finally, StorWize has hardware acceleration/compression technologies that enable de-duplication type functions for primary storage environments - even hard ones like database. IBM has big plays in all these areas.

Is there such a thing as some anti-competitive regulation if one buys all the tech companies in an entire country?

The story hasn't been told all too well, but the parts fit perfectly.

F5 is the king of "useful virtualization" for IT in a Web 2.0/SOA world. Hear me out.

F5 has made a living by doing intelligent web load balancing - virtualizing web servers to the outside world in order to dynamically optimize performance and eliminate any downstream effects of failure. From there a web server - which may be in itself virtual (VMware, VI, Citrix, etc.) might like to speak to an application. F5 also load balances/virtualizes Application environments. The web server talks to the app server via the F5 virtualization layer. VMware can make one physical server look like 98. F5 can apparently make 98 physical servers look like 1. That's killer.

The network is virtual by design - it's IP. The missing piece of the pie was the data layer - which is exactly why they bought Acopia and exactly why it's brilliant. Now from the first instant a web request comes in all the way to the file sitting on some disk the entire stack can be dynamically virtualized and optimized. As you add lower level virtualization to the components under the higher level F5 architecture, you can start to draw a picture of exactly how life is supposed to be.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but this was an epiphany for me. Plus, the CEO is a Scotsman, and lord knows this business could use a few more of them if you ask me. IT could use a bit more FREEDOM! Either that or blue face paint and kilts.

Everywhere. Sorry for the blog delay people. I'm in SFO, again, for 28 hours. Red eyes might be the equivalent of cruel and unusual punishment. I'm on American. I used to be someone on American - not anymore. It's ok, the biggest airline ever will be Northwest/Delta - neither of which I fly or enjoy. That deal is just like two drunks holding each other up in a bar if you ask me. Now there will be less choice, more cost, and crappier service by really old belligerent people. Cool. Jet Blue is the only one who should survive.

The valley was 85 degrees and sunny, surprisingly. It will be 14 degrees and sleeting when I land in 4 hours. The only flight that ever lands early is a red eye - because that's the only flight you don't want to land early.

The Santa Clara Marriott might be the real ground zero. Unfortunately, because I was there and irony is my middle name, the Internet didn't work. Too funny really. I also had no toilet paper, which one only realizes way too late as one might expect housekeeping to keep house on such things. No need to continue on that path.

Had a very nice dinner with some ESGers and Ash from HP (founder of AppIQ and a wonderful, not tall, person) at something in Palo Alto. Nice Greek place. I had been there before, many years ago, with Jerry K. of Riverbed and Chris Schaeppe of Lightspeed (VC but don't hold that against him). Chris gave me a bottle of Harlan, which I drank too soon. Jerry couldn't figure out what possible value I brought to anyone. Smart man that Jerry.

Last week I was in Orlando at the vendor love fest called SNW. I never left our suite. I will be the last one to leave that show as it's fantastic for me. It's great for vendors who want to do a bit of biz dev too. Why anyone else goes is beyond me, but guess what? 11,549,993 IT professionals were in attendance! A new record. They were invisible, which is why you couldn't see them, but they were there. Trust me.

I saw the sun for the first time in well over a decade. It was great - my wife and 75% of my kids came down for a few days. In another classic ironic bit of my life, the geek show left town, I went to the pool, my kids came by, and just when life was good - 8,000 teenagers checked in to the hotel. The Florida Key Club - some sort of good samirtan thing I'll never quite get - invaded the hotel. I don't eve like my teenagers that much, let alone 8,000 other ones.

There are a LOT of acquisition deals in play right now, none of which I can tell anyone about. 7 that I know of. I am not only speaking of the Moshe/IBM "buy everyone who has ever been in Israel" kind of buys - some are really big. Of course I'm not supposed to know about any of them, so I shall now go get on the most uncomfortable plane ever and be accosted by a flight attendant.

This comment was posted on an earlier blog trail I started from a gal named Catherine.

"Comment:

Well I now have proof that the Marshalls (a TJX Company) is screwing over people. I shop at the Marshalls in Redwood City California and everytime you bring a "Name" brand piece of clothing to the counter that is on sale they dispute the sales price and tell the customer it is a mistake. This has happened to me 6 times in the last 2 months. The most recently today and when I went back to purhcase the garment at my lawyers urging it had been sold. Well guess to who........to an employee. I think something strange is going on.........."

Awful. You'd think they might be trying to be pure and sympathetic to the nightmare they have caused many, but clearly they aren't either.

Instead, I'm now watching New England supermarket chain Hannaford being dragged through the coals for a similar incident - only Hannaford didn't really do anything wrong. They were hacked the old fashioned way, and as soon as they found out, they shut it down and told everyone. They, unlike TJX, followed the Visa credit card security guidelines perfectly - which shows you that no matter what, if bad folks want to do bad things, they will find a way. Hannaford didn't even save credit card numbers - these hackers somehow stole them real-time during the transaction - not by breaking into the database where the payload sat - there was no payload.

Perhaps it's because they are from Maine, but Hannaford did everything right, both before, during, and after this event, yet they are being sued and dragged through the news almost daily. TJX got away with doing everything wrong and got a slap on the wrist. Why is that, I wonder? Public company versus private? Lying works better than the truth? Politics? Hmmmm.

Hang in there, Hannaford.

Big giant companies bore me normally. They tend to have more bad than good, so they rarely reach their potential. Having said that, since they are giant companies, reaching their potential doesn't usually matter because they tend to make lots of money despite themselves - at least until they go out of business.

Every company has dysfunction. Big giant companies simply have more of it, since they have more people. Of course Microsoft is the most hacked/attacked operating system, there is more of it to attack and hack than any other. Older, big companies tend to have the deepest dysfunction simply because human nature is such that people don't like change, so if they did something one way in 1975 they probably still do it the same way now. HP has been around for a long time.

In the HP Carly years, I looked at HP as the next DEC - clearly running themselves into the ground attempting to cling to the way things were instead of dealing with the realities of the way things are. The fact that people were still talking about what color Taurus they were going to get and how great it was that everyone is in a cube (really ugly 1970's looking cubes) instead of asking why the storage business went from 98% world domination in the midrange to just another marginal player or why Dell was squishing them in PCs had DEC written all over it. It's a good thing that HP tends to have 1-story buildings or people would have been tossing themselves off of them.

Then Mr. Hurd came along. I still haven't met him, but certainly have been watching him. When they first hired him I thought he was the "Bob Palmer" of HP - the guy to sell the place to the next biggest guy in line. He came from NCR. NCR? Cash registers? Aren't they in Nebraska? I was meeting one of our clients in NY, who is a hedge fund manager, when they announced Hurd was the CEO. I said "Who?" He said, "Wow, the guy is an absolute rock star." He was right.

So Mr. Hurd went about his business and in short order not only stopped the bleeding but righted the ship. He cut costs and grew at the same time - no easy feat. According to Randy Mott's presentation at their analyst day yesterday, HP is saving $2B a year in IT alone by consolidating data centers and implementing virtualized commodity hardware. $2B here or there can add up to real money. Yikes.

The server business turned around, the PC business turned upside down, the services business has been booming (although I personally think this is one area that hasn't even come close to reaching its potential and is the key area for growth in the new world order), and of course they still sell a few printers and ink cartridges. Storage, on the other hand, has been one business that has continued to perplex me.

HP StorageWorks was the undisputed king of midrange storage - and yes, it came from DEC. Tom Burniece built the business at DEC with a stellar cast that featured Richie and Ellen Larry (Richie is the guy who looks like Kramer you see at storage shows - mega genius, Ellen is the normal looking person next to him) and Mark Lewis (now an EMC mucky muck - which was a huge defection at the time), and many lesser known industry folks like all the newly rich people from Equallogic. Then, when sold to Compaq (and then HP), they added folks like Darren Thomas (Dell), Howard Elias (EMC) and more. Clariion was inside of DG and just starting to make a run at StorageWorks, but the DEC stuff ruled the world in the mid-market. When EMC bought DG it basically shelved Clariion for a year or two until Mr. Tucci took control, and StorageWorks kept on chugging, but people started leaving and engineering started getting cut, and some products started getting a bit old, and so on. When EMC decided to make a real run at the market, HP wasn't in a position to react, so Clariion ate up their share on the block side while NetApp continued to destroy any aspirations of a NAS business. Bob Shultz was able to slow the death spiral and stabilize the business, but it didn't grow. Last year Dave Roberson took the reins and growth is back on the agenda.

In the meantime, things have become a bit easier on the market attack front. Intel/Windows is the server to attach to. HP sells a few of those. Linux is the next, and yes, they sell a fair bit of those as well - on the same hardware. The world is moving to a commodity based, scale-out, low-cost, virtual infrastructure place - so who better to capitalize on that set of realities than HP? Roberson, a 547 year Hitachi Data Systems man (26, but it might as well be 547) who was running the show at HDS and definitely could have hung out there and retired, somehow got introduced to the opportunity and to Hurd, and a deal was done. I'd like to think that I would make a move like that if presented the opportunity, but I'm not sure I would. Most would probably have stayed put in a nice comfy job with big pay and a relatively easy ride (not to diminish the job or insinuate anything, but hell, after 26 years there can't be many secrets). I don't know Roberson well enough to consider him a pal, but certainly well enough to know he's one of the very few, very senior storage industry execs that has been through it all. He's not the "chase the shiny object" ADD type. He's sort of boring, really, and I mean that as a compliment. Thus it is an interesting situation all around. HP represents chaos compared to HDS - thousands of products versus three. In chaos, there is opportunity for sure, but to head into a great unknown like that is a risk I'm not sure many would take - which is probably why the job took so long to fill. Dave didn't take it for the money (I'm surmising) or for job security, so he must actually be looking for real change. Hurd is a change agent if nothing else, and HP has so many parts that are leveragable, that if they really want to do something different it has the potential to shake things up dramatically. Since I have ADD and love chasing the shiny object, I'm hopeful that we'll see some massive disruptive forces at play - but I'm also semi-realistic and don't expect to see Mr. T commercials at HP anytime soon. HP is boring. Hurd isn't a public, in your face, attention grabbing guy, and Dave isn't exactly Liberace, so if they are going to shake up the establishment, it will start behind closed doors and folks like me will have to try to piece together what's really going on and what it will mean. It would be cool if they can do it as it's pretty rare that big old companies ever reinvent themselves, but when they do, it gives us plenty of stuff to talk about.

The first sign of change hit me in the head last night. Dave now has German guys doing marketing. There are plenty of jokes and wisecracks to be made with just this line alone, and suffice it to say you should assume I made them. Having said that, I spent some time with Director of Marketing Patrick Eitenbichler last night, and had one of the most unexpected, interesting market conversations I've ever had with anybody at HP. The guy is nothing that one might expect (forget the German part, just think HP marketing) - he didn't even quote a market share number. He talked about Web 2.0. He talked about the fact that server virtualization is great, but needs to be connected into the virtual layers of the rest of the infrastructure. He talked about how people use stuff, not how fast stuff is. He talked about the market as it will be, not as it has been. It was quite surprising. And it made me think that it just might be possible for an old dog to learn a few new tricks after all.

I'm having a surprisingly difficult time finding folks who are attending the spring show - even the usual suspects are blowing it off. I'm going anyway - if I don't see the Sun soon I'm going to start evolving into a subterranean creature.

If you are an IT person, and you are attending, send me an email (steve.duplessie@enterprisestrategygroup.com) and let me know. I'm looking for a casual impromptu cocktail-based get together to run a few ideas by and ask a few questions of some real people - ideally Monday afternoon or evening. I'm buying. Vendors, VARs, or other vagabonds need not apply.

Thanks!

Tony Asaro is back in the blogosphere. I particularly like his comment that Citrix (Xen) doesn't have a fully functional product. Say what you will about Mr. A, he ain't shy about tossing a bomb or two.

Bear Stearns is gone (and what a deal that was, the government insured the debt and the building alone is worth 4X what the company sold for). What's interesting is that Wall St. IT has always been considered the king of all that is IT - they have the most dough, the best people, etc. Guess what? It ain't true anymore. They still have the most dough, but the crown of IT gods lies now firmly in those who have mastered the wacky world of Web 2.0. Google and Amazon do way more interesting stuff with way less money and "talent" to drive value out of their IT operations. Why? Because instead of retrofitting legacy architectures and processes to work in the world of unknown value, totally unpredictable growth, and "make it work right now, not in 4 months" demands, they did they opposite. They started with those requirements (adding on "I want it free") and retrofitted those principals onto their business and distributed systems. People think Google runs its billing operations on loose components they pick up at Radio Shack, but they don't. They run the same transaction systems as you do. Their marketing and engineering folk don't use systems with wires sticking out of them; they use the same stuff you do. They just do it from a different perspective.

Speaking of Amazon, S3 is getting way more traction and attention than I would have thought possible. Since it's so non-core to their real business, I figured it was just a way for them to try to monetize their IT development efforts, but trends are pointing positively for them. They should split that business out, however, if they want to compete long term.

It's spring in New England. You can tell by the frozen flower buds, and that Manny Ramirez already spent 35 minutes watching his Japanese homerun that didn't exactly make it out of the park instead of running around the bases.