Storage Sanity

IT!! - Johnny Angel Wendell

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:42:27 PST

Damn IT!! – Carmen's Right, Again.

Back in 6th grade, John Carmen taught me a hard lesson. Out on the playground of the Katherine Lee Bates School, John learned me some pain. No, he didn’t beat me up. I had 30 pounds on him, and stood a head taller. It wasn’t noses that got bloodied that bright cold September morning. The intended target of his punch was guts, hearts, maybe something deeper. The weapons weren’t fists or sticks.

Plain and simple, John taught me the power of words – mine, his - meant, mindless - stupid, hate filled, and heart-felt.

Schoolyards spawn hateful taunts the way school lavatories spawn flu viruses. Despite the antiseptic efforts of administrators, the germs of prejudice are well fertilized in the petri-dish of adolescent insecurity.

There’s always one or two schoolyard catchphrases in every generation – the put down of 1950’s elementary schools was ‘Kraut’. Anyone and anything could be disparaged with Kraut. “Bob is such a Kraut!” Politically incorrect? You bet. Wrong? Sure, but an expression you might hear at the movies or on popular war-story television shows at the time.

In the 2010s, the word “Gay” seems to have been adopted in a similar manner. Everything from clothes to cars to classes to curfews can be dismissed with, “That’s so gay!” Wrong? Wincingly, for sure. And thankfully not echoed in the media, but if you have teenagers, I bet dollars to donuts you’ve heard it.

In the sixties, the disparagement of choice, at least in our lily-white bread, Betty Crocker protestant suburb was “Jew”, and I am ashamed to say I used it. More than once. To put down John Carmen.

It’s pretty clear that kids today know what ‘Gay’ means, and they know it’s wrong to use it freely and disparagingly, though they seem to anyway. It would be disingenuous to say that I didn’t know calling someone a Jew in 1968 was wrong. We were isolated suburbanites, not idiots. But I honestly didn’t know that I had ever met a Jew, didn’t know a thing about the religion, or its history of oppression. When I called John Carmen a Jew, to me it was a mindless, empty-vessel of a word. To me. For all I knew or cared, it was just another putdown, like a million others that young boys throw at each other every day. I didn’t mean to hurt him. Hell, he was my friend. I could have been calling him a jerk. Except, of course, I wasn’t calling him a jerk. I was calling him a Jew and, of course, John Carmen was Jewish. And I did hurt him.

And, of course, he told his dad. Who told Richard Barrone, the principal of Bates School. Who told my parents.

And the next morning, as soon as I walked into class, our 6th grade teacher silently and scornfully walked me to the principal’s office. I can still see the brass name plate, Richard A Barrone, Principal, bolted to his door mocking me. Inside the dark office, they all lay in wait. The thought of that intermediation still makes my knees ache. I had never seen a look in my father’s eyes quite like the distain he flashed me that morning. It took a minute or two for the reality to sink in. My arguments - that the words meant nothing to me, that I didn’t even know what I was saying, that I didn’t even know John was Jewish - all of my thick-headed defenses just made everyone even more angry.

I was frightened, cornered, and for the first time in my life, my parents were not coming to my rescue. I don’t remember the words she spoke, but I do remember the anger and sadness in my mother’s voice as she scolded me. A wave of shame, embarrassment, and true honest repentance swept over me, leaving me drooped on Mr. Barrone’s hard oak visitor chair, blubbering, and wet-faced.

My penance included taking classes at a local synagogue, meeting with John's family, and eventually attending his Bar Mitzvah. Thankfully, the lesson took. I can’t remember anything else I learned at Bates School, but no one has ever had cause to question my sensitivity to differences in beliefs, cultures, or actions since. I’m not, as friends will tell you, politically correct, but I am very, very sensitive to the power of words, intended or not.

For a while afterward, John and I tried to be friends. We tried to play guitar together. He didn’t play with a pick; he used all the fingers of his right hand to play complex jangly Aeolian solos ala Jeff Beck or Mark Knopler. I struggled to strum three chords in a row. John sold me his crappy Westwood imitation SG electric guitar for $75, probably more than it was worth at the time, and bought a real Gibson Les Paul. I kept the Westwood for years. It made my fingers bleed. In college, a roommate’s bird – some god-awful white parrot-like creature – took a huge bite out of my beautiful Westwood’s red flame-burst body. I was mortified. Eventually, I sold the old girl to a grinning little kid at a flea market for five bucks. I was wistful. He was thrilled.

John and I aren’t friends anymore. The last time I physically laid eyes on him was in 1979, at a Boston nightclub called Cantone’s. He had transmogrified into Johnny Angel, leather-bound lead guitar player for a band called, The Thrills, one of the seminal Boston Punk bands of the late seventies. (That's him on the right.) They put out a couple of modestly successful singles. Sounded sort of like an alien lovechild from the unholy union of The Bangles, The Ramones, and T-Bone Burnett. Later, he formed a band call The BlackJacks. I always thought it was funny that Johnny Angel’s day job was working as a stockbroker for his dad’s firm.

Eventually, John ditched Wall Street, moved to LA, and got lost. We reconnected once in the nineties- before Facebook – and exchanged an email or two. In 1994, he sent me a copy of his album, Creeps in Exile, which I tried to listen to, couldn’t stand, still have, but have not listened to since. Talk about god-awful. Oy.

He went dark again on me until one day in the mid-2000s, when he friended me on Facebook. Whoa. He’d changed his name again – to Johnny Wendell – and was spewing his own version of nasty as an uber (and I mean UBER) left wing radio yakker on the left coast.

Most of you know, I am just a little bit to the right of Oliver North politically, so this was fun – I wish I had saved all the screaming you-are-such-an-idiot stream of consciousness emails we’ve exchanged over the years. Finally, before FB let you control which friends are allowed to post on your wall, I had to defriend my old friend so people wouldn’t think I believed his insane-clown-posse-on-Pelosi-steroid non-sense.

I think he was offended… Oy.

I was surprised to hear from him again last year. He wanted me to send him money. What? Yes, he had written twelve new songs he needed to record. If I gave him money now, through a website called Kickstarter.Com, he’d pay me back with a copy of the album later. The Kickstarter idea was sort of intriguing – so despite our checkered history, and the threat of another Creeps in Exile album on my CD shelf, I punched into PayPal and paid my old pal $15. And waited. And waited. An eventually forgot all about it, until a couple of weeks ago, when he pinged me for my home address.

Next thing I know, IT!! showed up in my mailbox.

IT!! is not Creeps in Exile. IT!! is actually excellent, and thankfully, there isn’t a drop of Johnny Wendell hate-spew anywhere near it.

John’s lyrics are insanely original, funny, and sweet. His tune-smithery is just as engaging. You’ve heard these melodies before – somewhere. The songs are an intricate array of smoothies, blended from a fruit orchard representing every influence, and every great hit song, between Peter Noone and Ozzie. If you can figure out which hook came from which, you’re better than me, but either way, you are bound to love this music.

The record starts off with the guitar hook laden, Crazy Eyes – a mashup of Richie Furay, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Conway Twitty, and Frank Zappa - that I simply cannot get out of my head. I mean “sing it out loud all day” cannot get out of my head.

This up-tempo country tune will not win a CMA award, but it deserves one. It’s a shame, but your local pickup truck and six pack country station doesn’t play songs with lyrics like:

She’s got a strange little giggle,
A wobble and a wiggle,
Like an itty-bitty baby palm tree.

They won't, but they should.

And I don’t think Kenny Chesney is going to cover the slow country swing of Your Sweet Baby Blues:

It’s not too late to make this work,
Don’t you wash me away,
Like a stain off a shirt.

He won't, but I think he should.

John seems to think Gypsy Boots – a signature twang-filled guitar hook-driven pop rocker – would be the single of the album, if there was to be one.

Gypsy boots and big round glasses,
You’ll still be hip when this trend passes.
It wasn’t kismet that we had to meet.
Gypsy boots and I was meant to be.

I love the song, but I’d make it the flip side of Crazy Eyes – if they still make flipsides, that is…

Perhaps the best all-around creation on the thing is She’s Someone Else’s Someone Now, where John channels a tongue in cheek Warren Zevon covering George Jones.

I make myself promises.
I stand resolute.
And then in one glimpse,
It all goes down the chute.
When I see her. Yes, I see her.

If John had a sweet side growing up, I never saw it, but he’s grown one and exposed it here with the sweeping and gorgeous Lullaby Arms, sung to his kids – guaranteed to pucker your chin. In the cigarette lighter ballad, September in New England, he simultaneously paints a visual omage to our old hometown, and memorializes his father, Dan Carmen.

Singing to a wandering lover, in the airy cha-cha (yes, as in Cha-Cha-Cha), As Long As You Always Love Me, he writes:

You could move to Topanga in a VW van,
Or take up Kabuki, relo to Japan,
I don’t care.
Baby, I don’t care.

My favorite refrains, and perhaps one of the more memorable set of lyrics in modern songwriting, comes in the Asbury Park Street Corner Rhumba (yes, as in Rhumba), Up in Her Room:

Get back in this bed right now.
Stop making me laugh.
Naked cartwheels cross my ragged floor,
Don’t want to hear it from the neighbors below.

See? You can’t help but smile. Right?

IT!! is filled with touching moments, gritty growls, soaring vocals (who knew?), tight harmonies, clean musicianship, great production quality, goofiness, catchy hooks, great riffs, a Celtic stomp?, and other oddities from this gifted guy with a huge heart, and even huger chip on his shoulder, who had the courage to stand up for himself at twelve, and who continues to stand up to the world 40 years later. In his odd way, I think John is still teaching us all an itty-bitty little lesson. Despite his political mental illness, the guy makes great music. It sort of makes me want argue with him again. Gee- I hope he accepts my friend request this time.
You won’t want to eat just one chip in this bag – but start by downloading Crazy Eyes.

Good luck getting IT!! out of your head.

Anatomy of a (successful) Marketing Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:07:02 PDT

Last fall, our marketing radar picked up signals of a powerful opportunity.

We began hearing from our field teams, product management/development, partners, and even from our own internal IT team about an impending market transition. The SSL keylength of the RSA public encryption key was doubling from 1024-bits to 2048-bits.

According to the experts at F5, SSL is a cryptographic protocol used to secure communications over the Internet. SSL ensures secure end-to-end transmission and every web browser and web site worth its salt uses it.

This doubling of the keylength was imperative, the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued an edict driving conversion by January 2011.

Any website wishing to provide digital signing– anyone doing credit card transactions, for instance – would have to support the 2048 keylength.

(Hey, I am the marketing guy, OK? Learn more on the mechanics and requirements here.

The impact is huge. There is a significant increase in processing power required when you go from 1024-bit to 2048-bit, and webs sites performance takes a hit when key sizes increase, regardless of the platform or vendor.

Our product/solution teams had a solution.

Offloading encryption to the special purpose processors in BIG-IP helps reduce the performance impact of the conversion, and centralizing encryption across many application servers reduces the number of certificates required and thus cost. For more on the solution click here

So, we were facing a marketers panacea – transitioning market conditions, obvious and understood customer pain point, straightforward proven solution, solid value proposition and powerful cost drivers. What’s not to like about this story?

Of course, we were not the only game in town, and time was short. Then a competitor launched a program aimed right at the heart of the issue, and pretty darn close to the heart of our installed base. Yikes.

If we had one weakness in all this, it was that not all of our loyal and loving customers realized they could use BIG-IP to solve the problem. Thus, our customers were vulnerable to FUD from others if we did not inoculate them first.

Every marketer knows the ubiquitous floor wax/desert topping joke – well the government just had demanded every household wax its floors, and we already had delicious creamy desert topping that also shines floors in 90% of the refrigerators in the country. (Oh god, the product teams are going to kill me for this analogy). If we could just get customers to spray those cans of desert topping on the floor, it would shine like crazy, and they would buy a lot more cans!

We realized we needed to move fast. We wanted every BIG-IP customer to hear the message - F5 CAN HELP YOU SOLVE THE 2048 KEYLENGTH ISSUE! – before January 1st and before the other guys convinced them they needed new cans of floor wax. (Ok enough analogy).

We pulled everyone together – technical marketing, product management, field marketing, sales, field readiness, channels, community relations, operations, etc. We integrated email, social media, advertising, and web content. We reached out to sales teams in the field for success stories and incorporated them as proof points.

We built a technical webcast to discuss the issue and explain our solution. We decided on a slightly unusual approach for the webcast – instead of running it once in the US and promoting recorded versions world-wide, we opted to deliver three live webcasts on a follow-the-sun model, so everyone had a live experience and was able to have their questions answered in real time. We coordinated the event with partners and field sales to drive attendance.

To cap things off, we got on the phone, and contacted over 6,000 customers directly. Whether they joined the webcast or not, we were determined to get the message to every F5 customer we could.

Managing opportunities and following up was of paramount importance. While convincing customers to offload encryption was the goal, we knew this transition would drive new business.

Because we coordinated up front with our inside sales team they knew what marketing was doing to start and drive conversations and they knew what they could offer in terms of both information and solutions to follow up. They also knew these leads would be hot, so there was not throwing it over the fence from marketing to sales – both teams were running in parallel.

To paraphrase the old Monty Python song, Every Lead is Sacred, Every Lead is Great.

It took us three years to fine tune our lead management / marketing automation system. Again, we worked together – sales operations, marketing operations, inside sales, product and field marketing, etc. etc to create an integrated machine that I would hold up against anyone else in the industry. With it, we set scoring rules for incoming inquiries, and created lead nurturing tracks that take a common inquiry through several stages of qualification – instant email acknowledgement, 24 hour human contact, and very rapid escalation of hot revenue opportunities to sales teams and partners for fulfillment.

While the automation is all fine and good, human beings play a key role here as well so marketing and sales teams met before, during, and after the campaign to ensure no lead is wasted, (or Kirby gets quite irate…)

Bottom line – by the end of December we had touched upwards of 50,000 contacts, generated more than 3000 inquiries, and posted about $5M in sales pipe. Last time I checked, we were over $12M in pipe.

Now, that is a lot of floor wax, or desert topping, or…oh, never mind…

For more on this topic, there is a great case study write up done by RainToday posted here.
We will be speaking at the SiriusDecisions conference in May on this and other aspects of our sales/marketing alignment initiatives. Hope to see you there.

Maggie's Last Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:47:51 PST

Maggie doesn't know about Jesus being God or about tomorrow being his birthday.

She thinks we're nuts for dragging a tree in the house, and she doesn't get the point of hanging lights outside.

She sees fine in the dark.

If Jesus came by the house tomorrow, she'd bite his butt. She does that. She's bitten the drum teacher, most of Lily's friends, a few of David's, my sister-in-law, brother-in-law, the Zoots guy, and probably a few dozen others.

So I'm pretty sure if a bearded guy, with long hair, and a robe came to the door, she'd take a little chomp of His butt, too.

She can't help it.

Maggie likes big butts...I cannot lie...

and thighs, and the occasional ankle.

And it's not like she doesn't know better...she's been bitten a few times herself...by coyotes, the dog next door, a friend's dog at a field hockey game...she's literally covered in scars from nose to tail.

I suppose she has a right to be cranky. After all, she lives with just about every known health issue a Shar-pei can get - allergies, tiny ear canals that get infected, eye lids that roll under and scratch her corneas, skin infections, Shar-pei fever, kidney failure, and now incontinence.

She also smells. Omg, she reeks! And leaks, and barks, and frankly, she is a major league pain in the ass.

She doesn't play - ok, she'll fetch her rag doll a couple times if she's in the mood before plopping back down to sleep, but that's it.

Come to think of it, she really doesn't do much of anything. She eats, drinks, poops, pees, bites butts, and guards her territory.

Wow...does she ever guard her territory. You don't want to be a squirrel, or a cat, or a UPS truck driver in our neighborhood.

Did I mention she bites?

So a lot of people told us we should put her down - our family, neighbors, insurance agent...they all said she's not adding anything to the family, so get rid of her. Why would you keep her?

There were some times we asked ourselves the same question...we used to joke about taking her on that long one-way trip to the vet. Especially after she bit, or leaked, or puked, or scared someone half to death.

We know the way to the vet with our eyes closed. In addition to bites, she's had a bunch of skin tags removed. Another bump, another trip to Angell Memorial, another operation - thank goodness for pet health insurance.

We're so used to it, we didn't think a thing about having another one removed last month.

Until they called and said it was a mast cell tumor, stage 3, Incurable. A few weeks...maybe.

I haven't seem my son cry so hard in his entire life.

The odd thing is she seems totally fine, just great - happy-to-see-us waggy-tailed every morning, jumping-around-the-kitchen excited for supper, spinning-in-circles pysched when the postman throws her a cookie, four-feet-in-the-air wiggly for belly rubs. If anything, she's in a better mood than ever.

It's like she's trying to make up for all her years of petly suck-a-tude.

She hasn't even bit anyone since they started the chemo, but just to be sure we'll lock her in her crate tonight so she doesn't snag a toothful of Santa's butt when he slides down the chimney.

As for Jesus, if he does decide to stop by the house for his b-day party tomorrow, I hope she doesn't scare him away.

See, I'm hoping he'll perform one more miracle while he's here.

Today they found another tumor...we don't have much time left with her...so it would be awesome if he could lay hands on her and fix it so she wouldn't smell quite so bad...

SSP Failure to Cloud Storage Success - What a Difference a Decade Makes

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 10:49:38 PST

Storability 10 year Reunion

Years ago, a few buddies and I started one of the first cloud storage providers. Of course, we didn’t call it cloud storage back then, but we merry band of brithers (and sisters), we first generation Storage Service Providers (1gSSPs) were cloud storage way before the cloud was cool.

All the 1gSSPs – StorageNetworks, ScaleEight, StorageWay, Sanrise, and others – failed. The core problem was and still is that renting raw capacity over the network is a lousy business model.

1gSSPs couldn’t sustainably buy their storage cheaper than their retail customers (although over a beer I can share some great stories of how the early 1gSSP robber-barron’s ‘negotiated’ with the storage vendors during the boom).
SSPs couldn’t sustainably offer broad enough management efficiencies to generate profits.
SSPs couldn’t overcome a host of logistic and cultural issues (network performance/cost, stigma/liability of releasing core data, etc).

After the bust, and the 911 attacks, the entire business simply collapsed. Some of us – my company, Storability and others like Arsenal Digital - managed to flip over to providing managed storage services – running NOCs, and doing backups and restores for our customers. Wasn’t a great business, but we survived long enough to eventually be sold off.

For those interested in an unbiased history of the 1gSSP market, there is a thorough and thoughtful analysis from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) posted here.

Ten years later, things look different, and the same.

A whole host of storage service providers – nee’ cloud storage providers – has arisen, not so much from the ashes of the 1gSSPs, but certainly with their dust in the new CSP DNA. These folks have it a little easier than we did back then, and I think more than a few of them are going to make an honest living this time.

In addition to the obvious improvements in network connectivity, bandwidth, and reliability, I see three critical changes that I believe will mark the difference between the past failure of 1gSSPs and the future success of today’s Cloud Storage Providers – file systems, file virtualization, and file storage gateways.

File Systems

Data used to be stored as long strings of 1’s and 0’s, actually millions and billions of 1’s and 0’s we called megabytes, gigabytes, petabytes, etc. Back in the 1gSSP days, applications like database management systems untangled those 1’s and 0’s and formed them into useful information like bank account records and social security numbers.

Today, data is still made up of 1's and 0's, but the fastest growing forms of data, from the pictures you upload with your cell phone, to the books you download to your Kindle, come packaged in a convenient format called a file.

Files matter – files have digital labels that convey information about the file package itself. Raw strings of 1’s and 0’s don’t. More importantly, files have business and human context - 1's and 0's not so much.

Context matters - with it, we can make decisions about how to treat data. With files, we can look at the metadata (the data about the data contained in the label or header attached to the file itself) and learn who created the file, how old it is, and even gain hints about its actual content (does the file contain a song or a spreadsheet?). With this information, we can make intelligent decisions about where to put the file, how many copies we should make, how often we should back it up for safekeeping, etc.

With raw megabytes – no context - we have no way of discerning what’s what, so we have to treat the entire string of 1’s and 0’s the same – in most cases that means treating it all as if it’s all vitally important.

1gSSPs got sort of a raw deal trying to build a business storing all that raw data.

They had to treat it all the same – backing it all up every night, for instance.
They had to connect it directly to live applications. The banking app needs instant anytime access to the entire database – no telling when you might make an ATM withdrawal – and apps don’t like to wait for data, so the connection has to be very high speed (laws of physics and economics apply here).
They had to have it all – because they couldn’t discern one cluster of 1’s and 0’s from another, customers had to trust the SSP with all their raw data.

Files make life easier for today's wannabe Cloud Storage Provider.

Customers can decide and control what files go to the cloud
CSPs can offer differentiated services for files based on metadata
Applications are not as dependent on instant and constant access to files - they've learned to be patient waiting for downloads, just like the rest of us.
Files can be uploaded and downloaded between users and CSPs with ease, so variability in persistence and performance of the connection is better tolerated

File Virtualization

So, the ability to decide and control file location is critical for the success of cloud storage, but it's not enough.

If we know that Sally’s MP3 file of Andrea Boccelli’s “Silent Night” is non-business-critical (albeit absolutely amazing and worth downloading today), we can decide to push Sally’s file to a cheap storage device, and not back it up, saving us money and effort. We might even decide to upload Sally's file to a Cloud Service Provider that offers essentially free storage capacity, and really save the company some dough.

BUT…how will Sally know where it is when she goes to download it next Christmastime? Whoops.

Important point - moving files and treating them differently based on metadata is great, but users and applications cannot be expected to keep track of constantly changing file locations. So cloud storage won’t fly as a business model if Sally or her apps need to keep track of what’s where in the cloud.

Enter file virtualization, a technology which masks the file's physical location.

File virtualization matters – with a virtualized file structure, regardless of where it physically resides, Sally and Sally’s applications are tricked into thinking Sally’s file is on her network drive at G:/Sally/Music/SilentNight.MP3. She never realizes, and does not need to know, that it’s been moved, thus the Cloud Storage business model becomes viable.

File Storage Gateways

OK, so now we can decide, move, and eliminate the disruption of moving. So far so good, but the Cloud Storage Business needs one more piece of connecting tissue to reach the tipping point.

If all we care about is Sally and her music, the cloud storage business is pretty simple and in fact a bunch of free or almost free services abound that do just that. Though I admit it is obviously possible (duh, Facebook) I don’t know how to make money off ‘free’ so I am leaving that model alone.

In order to have a successful enterprise oriented (paying customer) cloud storage business, CSPs need the rough equivalent of a set-top box they can provide to the customer. Today, most CSPs offer a programmatic interface to upload and download files, which is kludgy at best, and isn’t going to scale in a commercial environment.

No customer is going to want to be locked into a single CSP, or be forced to adapt their infrastructure or modify their applications to support one vendor's cloud model.
Latency is an issue - no matter what we do to reduce the performance imperative, we are eventually going to have to accept the logic that some subset of cloud resident files must reside at least temporarily at the customer premises (sort of like the difference between downloading and streaming movies).

File storage gateways matter – with a gateway in place the customer can treat the cloud just like another storage device. Sure, the vast majority of spinning disks are now located at the CSP, but to the customer the CSP (through the File Storage Gateway) appears to be just another NAS box - albeit a cheap one, that never fills up, and never needs to be backed up.

Up until recently, there have been a few FSG startups poking about, which has been useful for vetting and growing the concept. Fortunately, for commercial CSPs, serious and trusted vendors are now releasing FSGs.

So now, I believe we finally have the necessary infrastructure and technology for Cloud Storage success. It's now possible to decide what data can, and control what data will, be safely stored in the cloud. Once separated and moved, it's possible to decide and control how data is treated when it gets to the cloud. It's now possible to do all this without disrupting users and applications. Moving from one CSP to another is now simple and non-disruptive. The performance and persistence issues that plagued 1gSSPs are under control. Modifications to the files, user behavior, and application intelligence are no longer necessary to achieve the benefits of cloud storage.

To my mind, the combination of these three major changes in the storage landscape – massive reliance on file systems, commercialization of file virtualization, and emergence of viable file storage gateways have now combined to eliminate the barriers and challenges we faced in the 1gSSP days, and together provide the technical and process infrastructure necessary for cloud storage to finally reach its full potential.

With the technical and logistical hurdles out of the way, it will be up to the skill of the players to decide who wins.

All best wishes go out to the next generation of cloud storage entrepreneurs – as we brithers say, ladies and gentlemen, the ice is yours. Good curling!

A quick, non-traditional, note of thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 10:47:12 PST

My wife comes from a huge family – this Thursday there will be 30 people in various states of consciousness standing around staring at the oven waiting for the female-in-laws to pull the turkey(s).

I grew up as the only kid in the house, so I get a kick out of hanging out with a gang of revelers on holidays. One of the best parts of the day is going around the table asking what everyone is thankful for this year – we get a lot of the usual; family members, school, friends, the dog, passing grades.

This year I am going to offer thanks for something a little non-traditional.

I am going to be thankful for the results of my labors. Yup. My labors.

Talk about politically incorrect! OMG – I am going to create a scandal. Half my in-laws are left of Che’ and Fidel combined. One beloved brother-in-law insists he votes for democrats so they WILL raise taxes. Hey, I’m working on them, but it may take a few more 2011 type elections before the pigeons come home to roost.

Oh boy, can I hear them talking about me behind my back Thursday afternoon!

“What unmitigated gall! How dare he thank himself! He owes thanks to God, and America, and, and…and…well, I never...”

“I know…it’s SO selfish…and on Thanksgiving!!! He should be thinking of others!”

Pammy is going to absolutely kill me – she hates controversy - poor thing married to me, hunh?

I don’t care. I’m doin’ it anyway.

Here’s why.

That turkey did not get there because of God, America, or the Democrat Party. Sure, the big guy had a hand in it; he put turkeys on the face of the earth in the first place, presumably so we could eat them. But, he isn’t going to reach down from heaven on Thursday, chop Tom’s head off, and stuff him in my oven.

Maybe America will someday hand out salt-free, transfat-free, peanut-free, non-denominational, carbon-neutral, children’s toy free, tofurkeys to every man, woman, and child – I guess that was sorta supposed to be the point of the hopey/changy thing that hasn’t seemed to work out too well – but so far this week nobody from Beacon Hill or Washington has offered us anything for free, especially not a nice, big, fat, brown, juicy, Pepperidge Farm stuffed, Butterball.

No folks, the turkey is on the table this year because I worked my butt off, created wealth, produced, innovated, and received a reward for doing it.

We can, and believe me I do every day, thank God for giving us the opportunity to produce. For me personally that means, I thank Him for giving me the brains to create ideas, the hands and voice to convey them, the feet to get me places to convey from, and a great employer who seems to value them. I also thank Him every day for giving me my health and the initiative – the will – to produce, to compete, and to win.

Our ancestors – well mine anyway – created that first Thanksgiving by working their tails off. They cut down trees and ripped up tree stumps to make fields. They sowed, tended, and harvested. They fished. They hunted. They milled and baked and fried and roasted. They brewed! Then, when the storehouses were stocked and beer was lukewarm, they invited the neighbors over and kicked it old school for three damn days. Go Papa Alden! You rock(ed)!

Yeah, I know they prayed themselves silly doing it, and maybe both Grampy John and Grammy Priscilla are rolling in their graves down in Duxbury right now as I write this, but to my mind this holiday is about the producers, the workers, the contributors, the ones who build, make, create, and add value to the world. They are the people who make this country great. Always have.

Let the collectivists, apologists, and takers have some other holiday. Thanksgiving is for celebrating the results of hard work and enjoying the rewards of its reaping.

Gooble, baby, gobble!

Sit down, shut up, and fly

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 10:46:02 PST

Last night I tweeted, "Move it, Get out of aisle, let ppl by, dont smash in2 ppl alrdy seatd, dont grab seatback getng 2/frm seat. Is that so freakin hard ppl?"

Got a load of holier than tho feedback. ooo - dont be part of the problem kirby...oooo

Listen - I live up here. I spend more time at 30K ft than 99% of the world. More than they legally let Stews and Pilots. I was reading the sign on the new X-ray scanners at BOS which tells you that the machine emits the equivalent radiation you'd receive from 2 mins at 39K ft. My blood ran cold. I need lead underwear.
.
Point is, I watch what the Stews go through - 4 times a day most of them. Load 'em in - give them the 'please share overhead space, please step out of the aisle, please put smaller items under the seat' speech. Last week I heard one frustrated stew muttering under her breath, "this is the worst 15 minutes of my day..."

I had an idea - why don't they make a video for everyone to watch before they load the plane. Like when everyone is jockeying for position in front of the entrance gate. Sorta like they do at some airports during the TSA line - but instead of 'take off your shoes, put liquids in the bin' this would be about how to get on an airplane quickly without pissing off everyone else in the process.

Rule 1 - don't carry a bunch of stuff. 2 regular bags, one in each hand. No coffee, soda, books, fishing rods, guitars.

Rule 2 - pick up your bags, don't try to roll your rollerboard down the aisle. It bangs into everyone, and doesn't fit as the aisle gets narrower at the back of the plane - and believe me if you are trying to roll a rollerboard down the aisle, you are headed to the back of the plane...

Rule 3- Don't smash yourself or your crap into other people on the way down the aisle. C'mon, do I really have to explain that? Are you just an a%%shole or what?

Rule 4 - When you get to your row, put your bag up in the overhead fast. Put your other bag on the seat in front of you and step out of the aisle. Face the rear of the plane, so you are out of the way and in front of your seat. Let people behind you get by - while you are doing this, unpack your Bose headphones, your book, and whatever else you need for the first 30 mins of the flight.

Rule 5 - If there is already someone sitting in the seat in front of you, do not smash your butt or any other part of your body in the seatback in front of your seat while following Rule 4. Don't touch the seatback. If you do, say, "excuse me" - you just irritated the person in front of you.

Rule 6 - When there is a break in the flow of people going by, you may cautiously step out, turn around, stow your carryon, and sit down. If there is a little room above your rollerboad in the overhead, you may also cram in your jacket or sweater. Do not take up invaluable overhead space with your clothing - you may only cram it into nooks and crannies.

Rule 7 - Sit down. if you are in the aisle or middle seat, do not put on your seatbelt until the window seat is occupied - and it will be. As other row mates arrive, smile, nod and jump up quickly into the aisle to let them follow Rules 1-6. Move behind your row to let them in, but not so far back that the rest of the line blocks you from getting back to your seat. Again - sit down as soon as you can to let others get by.

Rule 8 - If you are in the aisle seat - keep your feet, hands, wings, beak and anything you got now bow wow, out of the aisle while people are loading. Keep your shoulders out of the aisle.

Rule 9 - Once everyone is in your row, put on your seatbelt. Shut up and read the in flight magazine. Do not get up again. Do not ask the stewardess for anything.   Do not bother your fellow passengers. Do not introduce yourself. Do not ask them about the book they are reading. Do not comment on their watch, shoes, clothes, personal appearance, etc.

Rule 10 - Do not have body odor.

Rule 11 - Do not squish beyond the confines of your allotted seat. If you are that big, buy a second seat.

Rule 12 -  Do not allow your children, pets, or anything else about you to touch, sniff, or otherwise annoy row mates.

Rule 13 - Do not dominate, or otherwise battle over position on the armrest. Armrests are shared space. One of you goes in back, the other goes in front. this position can switch by mutual consent. This should not require a conversation - just let it happen. If your row mate is struggling to type into a laptop keyboard, be kind and let them have the back position.

Rule 14 - Don't spill - if you do...well, just don't. That is all. Don't.

Rule 15 - You asked for the window seat and you got it.  If you have a bladder condition, bad back, DVT or anything else requiring frequent trips up and down the aisle, GET AN AISLE SEAT...

Rule 16 - Passing gas...see Rule 14 and Rule 10.

Rule 17 - Keep your legs in the area directly in front of your seat. Do not spread your legs into your row mate's space.  If you do, Rule # 14 is abrogated and your row mate is free to spill cola on your crotch.

Rule 18 - After landing, it is not necessary, useful, or productive to get up from your seat at the the exact second the pilot turns off the seat belt sign, especially if you are seated in a window or center seat. It will be 5 or 10 minutes before you have a chance to reach the aisle.

Rule 19 - Do not be the person who runs up the aisle as soon as the Fasten Seat Belt sign is turned off. There is no frigging rush, the plane is not going to take off again with you in it. Relax - let it happen.  Everyone in the lower numbered rows will get off ahead of you - get over it- then, when it's your turn step into the aisle, grab your stuff - 2 bags, one in each hand - and walk calmly off the plane.  If you want to pull out the handle of your rollerboard, carry it off the plane and step behind the wheelchairs waiting on the gangway. Step out of the path of passengers behind you, and arrange yourself. When you are ready, cautiously reenter the stream of people headed for the terminal. Keep walking up the gangway and do not stop in the middle of the hallway at the gate. Do not block people behind you.

I think it would make a great video - and it would really help get planes into and out of the gate faster with less stress - especially on the Stews.

Happy Skies....

The Knothole Conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:49:55 PDT

In marketing – especially product marketing - we every now and again run into a conflict between what is and what should be when it comes to product releases.

Perhaps it happens when development slips the schedule on a specific feature, or perhaps Marketing wants to pull in the announcement to hit a specific date coinciding with a trade show or other event. Maybe you’ve just got wind of a competitor planning to pull the rug out from under you…whatever the cause, occasionally someone will say, “Well, we can still launch on time as long as we clearly document this ‘temporary’ constraint.”

I call this classic release challenge the Knothole Conundrum.

This type of ‘x+y+z feature will work, but only if a-b constraint are in place’ constraint is often a dicey and dangerous slope - and it’s also a very common situation. In my 30 odd years doing this work, I’ve seen it play out over 100 times. No company is immune. Hardware vs software doesn’t matter. Grizzled old-timers and newly minted MBAs have all run afoul of the conundrum. Sometimes they sail through the bumpy water and launch Valhalla with no one the wiser, sometimes the knothole snares them into a vortex of Homerian epictatude…forcing more than a few launch captains down with their ship…

Nobody wants to look bad – or point fingers - or even admit there may be anything amiss in constraining a release - so the complexity is often systemically downplayed.

In a perfect world, if everybody does exactly the right thing, this sort of constrained feature release looks ok on paper, but we don’t market in a perfect world, do we? Your field is dealing with thousands of distractions everyday, so it’s inevitable that wires will get crossed – and when they do, all kinds of product manager bits and pieces hit the fan.

More than likely, the field mistakenly positions the new release ignoring the constraint, setting up a customer expectation that can’t be immediately met by the new ‘slightly-constrained’ product, resulting in pushed sales, expensive on-site expert intervention, frustrated customers, and risk to company reputation.

It is difficult to stand up during a launch prep process and scream at the field - Hey, pay attention! Danger here! Especially, when at the same time you are telling the outside world that the new product or release is just what the doctor ordered.

This problem gets worse with scale. The likelihood of fragging one of your reps or partners goes up as the distance between you and your field and partner set expands. The mitigation cost and reputation risk if something does go wrong increases exponentially as the installed base expands.

Since its a systemic issue, I believe the solution must also be systemic, often requiring attention to process, organization, power and political issues.

A few suggestions:

1) Insist on sacrosanct MRD/PRD process - with strong and empowered marketing and sales representation. There must be an honest and open discussion of the risks faced by releasing anything less than whole product. Marketing and sales need to assert that this type of knothole positioning and config limits are dangerous and should be considered a last resort requiring significant and open debate prior to commitment. The quality team needs a place at this table, as does the customer service and professional services teams who are likely to be called in to ‘clean up’ if the constrained launch creates a toxic spill somewhere

2) Honestly face and consider the dozens of alternatives to 'X+Y+Z but only if A-B' constrained release. Perhaps if we take our eye off the calendar and time clock for a minute, we’ll realize that a slip in the release schedule to get a whole product out rather than rush a constrained one, won’t kill us. In all my years – every time I’ve heard, “the window of opportunity is slamming shut” it wasn’t. There was always more time to get it done right. If you can’t concede my point here, ponder this truism, “More time will always mystically become available to fix it if we rush and get it wrong”. Maybe it’s worth prioritizing more dev resources to get the complete product out on time – if in this case 9 engineers can actually make a baby in one month. My point is, do not just accept that the knothole is the way to go. It is certainly the easiest – for the Ivory Tower, anyway. However, it is often not the right thing to do when you consider all the risks, dependences, and real costs.

3) Open/improved Sales Engineer communication in the launch process. If you do decide the constrained product route is required, then get the SE’s on board early and scream danger at them with a megaphone.

4) Start the launch message development process with the worst case audience in mind. You all know what I mean – there is one particular sales person or small group of them that are the most at risk from constrained product launches. Ironically, they are probably your most successful on-the-ball reps. They push everything to the limit, and when they see an opportunity to close a deal with the new product, the limited constraints you so diligently documented will often get lost in the rush to revenue. God luv ‘em. But as your prepping for the constrained launch make sure the the team asks themselves how they will make sure all these ‘special’ reps and their teams hear and understand the limitations. Don’t leave it up to the documentation to tell the story, or you’ll soon be muttering, “But the constraint was as clear as day, right there in the release notes!” just like a thousand frustrated product managers before you…

5) If it is necessary to move forward with one of these knothole releases, put some safeguards in the order process. Review orders for 'knothole compliance' until your complex ‘X+Y+Z as long as A+B’ config rule is lifted. Acknowledge that no matter what or how well the rule communicated, somebody will screw this up. Demand that some safeguard against it is put at the end of the process flow. No one will want to do this because its hard. What usually happens (and can't/shouldn't…ever) is that all the compliance responsibility is put on the field. If you allow this, expect vicious finger pointing when the whole mess breaks down.

And, finally, take some solace from knowing you are not the first or last to face the dreaded Knothole Conundrum…

Jeffrey Taylor Wadsworth Graduation Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:53:09 PDT

Thank you all for joining us here today to recognize Jeffrey’s achievements and to celebrate his graduation from Babson College. If you haven’t yet experienced a classic Kirby kid-speech, be forewarned. You may want to grab a napkin…this usually gets a little messy…

Last Saturday many of us witnessed firsthand Jeffrey’s graduation (with cum laude honors) at Babson College’s graduation ceremony – proud recognition of his hard work and success in the accounting program at that very fine school, and most of you know he will earn a Master’s degree in accounting this summer and join Price Waterhouse Coopers in September. Not bad.

The ‘Jeffrey Stories’ we love to tell as a family are by now legion to many of you.

For instance, most of you remember Jeffrey’s fascination, at a very young age, with vacuum cleaners. If you remember, as a baby Jeffrey loved pushing the on and off button of the vacuum cleaner and listening to the motor whirl. One particular day – when he was about a year old – the vacuum cleaner refused to whir as it usually did when he pushed the power button. Jeffrey stared at the machine for a few minutes, tried the power button a few times, and then crawled over, grabbed the unplugged power cord, crawled back, plugged it into the wall and hit the button again – squealing with delight when the motor turned on. Pam and I looked at each other and simultaneously mouthed, “We are in BIG trouble with this one!”

You have all heard Pam and I tell the story of Jeffrey’s birth. Talk about a pain in the you-know-what! This kid came into this world in major crisis mode, and has not veered too far from that course since. If you remember the circumstances, carrying Jeffrey in August 1987, Pam came down with preeclampsia. She was admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in early September, and was forced to lie on her left side for several weeks. In late September, when she was due to deliver, the doctors inexplicably sent her home. On the evening of September 29th, Pam went to bed early in our apartment in Weston. That night, Ged, Eric Stephens, and I watched a gory combat movie and drank way too much beer. At about 1am, we heard a faint cry from upstairs, “Kirby! I think you better call my mother!” The next couple of hours are a blur now, but I do remember driving my white Toyota Supra about 100mph down Rte 9, sort of hoping a cop would pull us over so I could tell him that my wife was about to have a baby. No such luck…we made it to the hospital in no time…but it took the little shit 3 days of pushing, and finally all sorts of flesh cutting and forceps pulling, to finally make his appearance. By the time he slithered out, the place looked like a scene from MASH – blood and guts everywhere. Looking back at that experience, it is amazing we ever had another child…

Speaking of other children, who can forget several years later, the ‘accident’ when Jeffrey and Stephen were playing in the fort I built for them in the backyard. Stephen was at the top of the fort, and Jeffrey rushed up the ladder to the attack him. Stephen pushed Jeffrey off the ladder and he landed in a crumpled pile on the ground, with a mangled bone protruding from his wrist. Rushing to the hospital, I don’t know who was in worse shape – Jeffrey or me.

Or… how about the time Bethy was babysitting Stephen and Jeffrey in our old house on Timber Lane – Jeffrey and Stephen shared a bunk bedroom back then, and for some reason I don’t remember, Stephen slept in the top bunk. They ordered pizza and watched a movie before Bethy put them both to bed. Sometime in the evening, before we got home, Stephen woke up, felt sick to his stomach, leaned over the edge of the bunk bed, and …well, you get the picture. Jeffrey literally took it on the chin…

Yaya will remember when Jeffrey was about 5 years old, during a visit to Runaway in Maine, he bumped into the kerosene lamp at the top of the stairs, spilling fuel down the hallway and threatening to burn the camp down. What Yaya may not know is that it was actually the ghost who spirits the Runaway stairway that literally scared Jeffrey half to death and caused the ‘accident’. So, Yaya, maybe now you can finally forgive Jeffrey for spilling that kerosene…

And several of you well remember many years later, during a Christmas Vacation visit to Yaya at Quail Ridge in Florida, Jeffrey was riding one of Bobo’s old red bikes, when the chain bucked and Jeffrey flew over the handlebars breaking his collarbone, and almost destroying his curling team’s chances to win the Junior National championships…

And there are many, many other ‘Jeffrey Stories’…

But, through it all Jeffrey not only survived, but found or fought his way to success. Through the broken bones, challenged spirits, and other barriers, Jeffrey has always made a way -- over, under, around, or through. He is relentless in pursuing his goals. Challenges? – sure he has had his unfair share. Triumphs? you bet – more than you can count.

I want to take a minute here to recognize three people that Jeffrey was fortunate to have close loving relationships with who cannot be with us today – Bobo, Waddy, and Phyllis.

Jeffrey was in awe of his great-grandfather, Norman Appleyard. He loved Bobo – and Bobo was proud and protective of Jeffrey. I know Normy is looking down (or up depending on your point of view) and smiling today – although admittedly, Jeffrey, he would have preferred Brown over Babson…

Likewise, Jeffrey had a very special place in the hearts of my Mom and Dad.

Of all the pictures I have ever taken, my favorite is a close up of a month’s old Jeffrey and a very many year’s old Waddy, face to face, laughing at each other. My dad was so proud of me for having Jeffrey, and his pride in my becoming a father meant the world to me.

I know all of you who knew her loved my mom, Phyllis. She absolutely lived for Jeffrey. She lit up around him, reading him stories, baking him cookies, finger painting with him…I truly loved seeing her love for him.

I know all three of them are here with us today – and I know they are just so, so proud of Jeffrey.

I suppose any father is partial to his first kid. None of us is born predisposed to raising children – we don’t inherit the skills and knowledge needed to take a tiny little thing that can’t eat on its own, or wipe its own bottom, and turn it into the amazing adult you see here. We all make mistakes – we are too harsh, or too soft, or too dominant, or too something, or too not ‘something’ enough… The first always takes it on the chin – as first time parents we all make mistakes, and raising of Jeffrey was no exception. Pam and I have over-parented, under-indulged, over-indulged, over-worried, ignored, and if it is actually possible, maybe loved him too much. But to his credit – Jeffrey took our amateur parenting in stride and came out the better for it in the long run.

The man you see here today is pretty amazing in his own right. He is grounded, intelligent, worldly, curious, caring, driven, fastidious, sensitive, sweet (in his own weird way), and solid on his own two feet. He is ready to make his way in the world, to create value for himself and others, to be a positive contributor to society as we know it.

We have done all we can for you, Jeffrey. And you, Jeffrey, have made us very, very proud.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all that any parent can ask of a child.

Please join us in a toast to, Jeffrey Taylor Wadsworth, adult.

Angels over Arizona

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:53:56 PDT

She calls herself SkyAngel, btw, which is perfect don’t you think? She is what Seth Godin describes as a lynchpin. I see her as a model for what the word ‘work’ means. In a thoughtful New York Times write-up, Adam Cohen vamps on Studs Terkle’s reflections on Working, “Even for the lowliest laborers, Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, "for daily meaning as well as daily bread."

SkyAngel sent me a nice note after my last blog entry. I just happened to catch her doing what she does everyday for all her passengers. “It’s my job,” she says, “Safety, comfort, and if I can make someone’s day just a little brighter that’s all I need.” She’d make a great interview for the updated version of ‘Working’. She is exactly what America in the 2010’s needs – nothing fancy, just doing it right, and getting it done. I was very pleased when American Airlines sent a note saying they were going to reward her for her great service. I'm sure she appreciated the gesture, but I bet she got more personal reward from simply knowing she had served well. Lynchpins are like that.

On the ride from the airport to the Princess Hotel in Scottsdale, I happened to ask the cabbie for his views on the new immigration law. Was somewhat surprised to hear how strongly he supported it, being that he was a dark skinned immigrant from Sudan, who I surmise will have to prove his citizenship the next time he runs a red light. “The reaction is hurting us, we don't understand why our fellow American's hate us for this. These Mexicans, they sneak in here and cause holy hell,” he shouted over the wind rushing in the open windows of his stifling non-air-conditioned, yellow cab. “They have accidents, and tie up traffic for me. They don’t have insurance, no license. Me, I worked hard to come here. I have an engineering degree from Sudan, but there's no work there, so I come here. It takes me a long time, I play by the rules and am very proud to be here. I work hard 12-14 hours a day. I do some good – ha! See, I help you get to your hotel. That’s good. I do that, otherwise how you get there? But these Mexicans, they don’t work for good. If they work at all its for fun…”

I ask him to explain working for fun.

“Fun. They don’t care about doing a good job, helping anyone. They only want to make money to buy beer, get drunk, have fun. Maybe they send some home. They don't do no good for anyone here.”

I think about this for a while.

At the hotel, I ask the pleasant, older, white lady in the gift shop what she thinks of the law. “We have to do something…the city is overrun. We’re terrified…and it isn’t fair to the law-abiding citizens. These people are criminals, they don’t pay taxes, but they use our services, lots of them. So we are paying more, getting less, and they are benefiting from our honesty and hard work. They are a scourge of drugs, gangs, and guns…it horrible, something has to give. I am afraid to drive home alone now, my husband has to come get me after work.”

I see from the fear in her eyes, and the trembling in voice, that she isn’t some wild-eyed tea-bagger. She’s living her version of a very real nightmare.

On the way home, I ask the driver for his opinion. He’s a well dressed, polished gentleman in his late sixties with a strong accent I can’t quite make out. Turns out he’s from Serbia. He turns back to look me in the eye, “Have you ever had a gun barrel jammed in your neck? “ I stammer, “No, you have?” “I drive all over this town, one end to the other at all times of the day and night. Two times, Mexican gangbangers have jumped out of cars behind me or next to me and robbed me right through this window. Shoved the gun right here, into my neck. I don’t know…they see the nice black car and figure I am rich or something…ha! I give them everything – my wallet, my phone, my watch (see I don’t wear one anymore), even my wedding ring. I am so scared, I wet myself sitting right in this seat. I hate them. I follow the rules, worked hard to get here. I pay my taxes. I am proud to pay. I love America. I have a good life here because I work hard. These people are destroying this city. It has to stop. Has to… And you tell your neighbors in Boston that want to hurt Arizona, that they are wrong. We are not the enemy – this is just the front door – this hell will come up there to you from here if it isn’t stopped. We are just brave enough to fight back. They will see. They will see...”

Then I went back and read the law – you can too, its 6 frickin’ pages, you can handle it. And please don’t argue with my argument until you do. I am bored with scripters yapping racial profiling talking points. There’s simply nothing complicated or nefarious here. Nothing ‘harsh’. In fact, SB1070 isn’t an immigration law at all - it’s a law to let state law enforcement enforce current federal laws on the books today. It pretty simply states that no government agency can refuse to enforce FEDERAL LAW. No law officer or city or welfare agency can ignore lack of citizenship. For cripes sake, I completely agree with anyone who wants to argue that its a stupid law. It absolutely is stupid. We shouldn’t need a law for force the government to obey the law! Obama, Calderón, and the Boston City council seemingly don’t like Arizona’s law because they want to change the FEDERAL LAW. (More likely they really just want to appease sympathetic constituents – legal or not). And speaking of Calderon, where does he get off telling Obama and America how to fashion our immigration policies? His moral outrage is especially deceitful considering Mexico has, in many ways, stricter laws than Arizona. And just like Arizona’s, Mexican law states that law enforcement officials are "required to demand that foreigners prove their legal presence in the country before attending to any issues."

Hey, if you don’t like a law, any law, fix it. But the argument that it’s OK to ignore, or legislate that someone ignore, FEDERAL LAW because you don’t like it, is simply preposterous. And, to vilify a lawful, decent, well-meaning population of fellow American citizens because they passed a law forcing their government agencies to OBEY FEDERAL LAW is worse. It’s a long list of anarchistic, dishonest, duplicitous, double-dealing, dishonest, and mainly just plain stupid.

If we as a society feel we can and want to expand immigration, great, all for it. As long as coming to America requires investment – time, honor, and duty - just like it always did. If you want the free healthcare, the free food stamps, the free education…you follow the rules. You live within the laws. You contribute to the common good somehow, anyway you can. You don’t suckle at the public trough at the expense of the rest of us, forever. You don’t traffic humans, drugs, or guns. You don’t deal in violence and crime. You ‘work for good’. You work to bring daily meaning to your life, as well as daily bread. You add some value, make our society just a little bit brighter everyday. Make yourself a lynchpin.

If you don’t want to do that, if you think America owes you a debt, if you think its fine to take whatever you want from wherever you can get it, and hurt anyone who gets in your way, then frankly, America has a right and an obligation to make sure you get the hell out…and stay out.

A fine stew...

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:54:57 PDT

It’s a lousy job.

Get ‘em on, get ‘em off. Hussle up the newbies and –in-frequent fliers. “Stow your gear, and get the heck out of the way, you dopes. Move it, we got schedules to meet, and you got a hundred people waitin’ on the jetway for you to step out of the aisle.” You know the poor things just want to scream by the time the doors close and the seatbelt/life vest demonstration starts.

It’s a really lousy job, getting worse by the day.

Tough hours, away from home half the time, crappy airport hotels, crappy airport restaurants. Company bustin’ your chops to cut costs and reduce service levels at every turn. Smaller, more crowded planes. Longer flights. Shorter turnarounds. Crankier customers. Now they even want them to help clean the airplane.

Coffee, Tea, or Me? Not hardly, no more. The days of Sinatra’s magical Starry Eyed, Rarified Air are long gone. Ya, maybe the Southwest crews try to inject some humor, but even they know the whole experience of air travel just plain stinks – for passengers, crews, everyone.

But in the midst of this lousy, grating, fingernails-on-a-chaulkboard, if-you-kick-my-seat-again-some-overhead-luggage-is-going-to-shift-unexpectedly-on-your-freaking-head, world...OCCASSIONALLY a light shines, a bright surprise burst on the vast gray mediocrity of air travel. OCCASIONALLY, someone actually still gives a hoot.

You won’t realize it at first when you step into her universe, but she doesn’t think she has a lousy job. She loves being a stew. Always wanted this job since her parents flew her to Disneyworld when she was 10 years old. She beems you a non-phony smile when you enter her dominion. She’s patient and helpful with folks struggling to get seated – actually leads the way for an old man teetering to his seat and helps him find a place in the overhead for his bag – with a smile and a kind word. In the short time before the flight leaves, she memorized – yes MEMORIZES – the first names of each of her 16 first class passengers. She stops at each seat – not checking a printout – and greets them by name.

When you enter her lavatory, you begin to get a real sense of what’s happening here. She has a little stereo setup on the counter playing classical music. It’s covered in a gaily patterned silk scarf arranged ‘just so’. After take off she arrives in the aisle with hot towels – really hot – on her tray she’s got a wine glass filled with dry ice and water, bubbling nitrogen steam, just for fun. She shares a few kind words with the older couple in 4A-B – Why yes, they are on their way home to Phoenix, been visiting the kids in Dallas. She kneels down to offer some advice to the brand new mom in 6F with the beautiful, but inconsolably screaming 6 week old daughter. In minutes, the kid is sound asleep, the mom and her fellow passengers sighing in relief at the silence.

Sbe isn’t some fresh scrubbed, overly enthusiastic plebe either. Long white hair flows to her shoulders in a casual pony tail. Her deep set smile lines betray many millions of miles in the flight attendant saddle. She is a throwback. A retro. Despite labor disputes, long lines, the overall basterdization of the flying experience, she stands firm – holding court over the first class cabin of flight #AA1279, refusing to accept her lot, unwilling to accept mediocrity, unflappable, determined to provide great service despite the situation, the union rules, and the company men, despite the pressure to do less for more. Instead she gives of herself, just a little more than she needs to, just a little more than others in her profession ever do. She fights for our dignity, and in doing so, she preserves her own. In her own small way, she gives us all hope. Hope that hard work, and pride in it, matter. And, that is the kind of hope, the kind of America, we really can believe in…

Test Me If You Can

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:55:29 PDT

Ever see a headline on a press release like this?

“According to the widely respected OhGosh Group, OUR Product Performs Better Than THEIR Product!”

or

“New Report from World-Renowned Acme Consulting Proves XYZ Technology’s New Stamflatz 10000 delivers More Gigaflux Capacity than ABC Technology’s Burgpultz 500!”

Or how about my personal favorite?

“Industry Leading Analyst Firm Ranks XYZ Technology’s New Stamflatz 10000 the Clear Leader in Customer Satisfaction!”

Oh, and the tweets are even worse:

“Great News! We absolutely blow away Burgpultz! But, don’t take our word for it.. check out HTTP.BS.B.LY”

You know the type – usually sounds all hyperventilated and squealy. Ugh.

My good friend and colleage, Lori MacVittie just wrote a blog on this subject, For Thirty Pieces of Silver My Product Can Beat Your Product, that got my 'marketing professional' dander dandying.

Digging under the covers, it becomes pretty clear that ‘widely respected’ OhGosh Group, or ‘world-renowned’ Acme Consulting, received a (big) check from the marketing department at XYZ Technology, Inc. to run (or worse, to simply observe and report while XYZ actually ran) that test that XYZ Marketing is now so breathlessly touting.

Hey ho…lazy marketing managers at XYZ…here’s a wake up call…the market – despite current leftist leaning political opinion – is not stoopid. You are. The market is in fact brilliant. You are not. The market cannot be fooled…fool.

Two things really stick in my craw about this lousy, lazy, and professionally embarrassing marketing practice.

First – it hurts customers. These one-sided tests - bought and paid for by technology vendors - do not serve customers in helping them make thoughtful buying decisions.

Second – pay for play performance testing makes a mockery of the marketing profession, and it makes the jobs of legitimate, knowledgeable and hardworking Marketers that much harder. The customer you snookered with your lop-sided test results soon learns to discount all marketing information as more of your hogswallow.

A friend of mine, who also happens to be a big-time CIO, has one of those red Staples ‘Easy Button” things on his desk. When a vendor starts spewing this nonsense, he hits it, and instead of a bubbly, "That was easy", a stern voice loudly proclaims, “Warning BULLSHIT level approaching DEFCON-5!”

I love that. But I hate that he thinks all technology vendors spew BS, and that’s the problem.

So, if you call yourself a marketing professional, the next time you find yourself tempted to pay somebody to run a trumped up test or skew a survey to make your feeble product look formidable, slap yourself upside the head, and get back to work. There are no short cuts.

If you’re a customer, the next time you see a headline or read a report that claims, “XYZ Technology is Faster, Better, Cheaper, Shinier, and More Fun at parties” than ABC, stop and ask yourself, which company would you want as your trusted advisor – the one that pays to play, or the one that always, not matter what, shoots you straight?

Now a word about the relevancy of File Virtualization

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:59:34 PST

Having just discussed the ninny-ness of calling something relevant, now you can call me, Old Storage Ninny (OSN).

First, let's establish my cred before I start jumping up and down screaming that File Virtualization is relevant.

I am speaking for myself here – not my employer. While acknowledging that I work for a company that sells file virtualization technology, I want to be clear that my position here is mine – it’s personal this time. Sure, I want my employer to succeed, but I am speaking now from the heart, and from my 30 years of storage industry experience.

In those 30 years, I have created, instigated, and perpetuated dozens of break-through, first, best, only market-changing PR-bubbles. I admit that.

Some of them were complete BS. I admit that, too.

For a long time, creating PR-bubbles put bread on the table in the OSG(N) home.

(And for you techno-snooty, marketing is all BS and I only want the technical documentation types...well, all I can say is you can’t handle the truth. Because, the truth is without me and mine, you’d still be wrapping 9mm tapes around capstans and working on 3270 terminals. New technology gets to markets through people like me – we who are willing to do what it takes to break through the noise, to get somebody’s attention, and get you techno-snoots to try something new.)

For the sake of this argument, I am the (still alive, for now) Billy Mays of storage. Ok – maybe that’s a stretch- let’s make it, the Ron Popeil of storage…

Sure some of my PR-bubbles were BS – but ah…some of them–like modular storage arrays, RAID, multi-vendor storage, and storage services (now cloud storage) were eventually, in fact, very important if not game-changing to the storage industry.

And let me tell ya, folks, file virtualization is gonna change your life in ways you can’t even predict…its gonna cut your storage costs, reduce user disruption, cut backup in half, and best of all folks it’s so easy you can…”SET IT, and FORGET IT!”

I am actually sorry we, at Acopia, settled on promoting the term, File Virtualization. It was probably lazy of us (me). We allowed ourselves to describe the product market we were creating by the function of the technology that delivered it. That is dumb. Ford did not create the motorized wagon market, and then sit back and let people argue about whether a steam engine was better at replacing a horse than a gas engine.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what we did. Take a lesson, whippersnapper.

What is now called, File Virtualization, should be more accurately thought of as the concept of decoupling servers from file storage, and then applying intelligence in between. Same as RAID controllers decoupled DASD (look it up newbie) from processors. Same as Load Balancers decoupled servers from the network. Decoupling (ok, virtualizing) the connection between file storage and application servers has massive advantages. Cost, flexibility, scale, availability, the list of ‘ities’ is endless, as is the market opportunity.

File Virtualization – this intelligent decoupling – provides us the ability to intermediate between different types of storage technology and seamlessly and intelligently position data on those storage types. That capability is more relevant now than ever before:

Some vendors may claim file virtualization and tiering is dead when in fact they are just hiding this function in their arrays.
There are others that have outright co-opted the value proposition – automated storage tiering now seems to be part of the industry's marketing repertoire (Google, storage tiering). If tiering is file based - and it should be - it's FV at heart.
Other vendors call this ability to intelligently decouple storage and servers different terms,- like ILM and HSM.
Even caching from the likes of the new cloud storage gateway start-ups like Avere and Nasuni is a form of this intelligent decoupling.

As storage technology diversity increases – dedupe, SSD, cloud – this ability to manage, move, and maintain data across many technology types becomes an increasingly important element.

At a high level, customer use cases for file virtualization haven’t changed in six years – what’s interesting, however, is how these use cases continue to evolve in response to developments in the storage ecosystem.

For example:

Storage tiering

Past – tiering started out as a way to migrate inactive data from FC to SATA disk.
Present – as data deduplication has started to become more mainstream, customers are using storage tiering as a way to move appropriate files onto deduplicated storage systems.
Future – customers will use file virtualization to help them move their data into the cloud. I personally know of several live projects with Nirvanix that will require this functionality, and have heard of similar projects involving Iron Mountain, Rackspace and other cloud storage providers. I'd argue you can't have effective cloud storage in the enterprise without file virtualization.

Capacity balancing

Past – capacity balancing started out as a way to aggregate the performance of multiple storage devices
Present – customers are now using capacity balancing in a couple new ways

To support their applications that are scaling faster than the storage devices behind them. One user I know needed a workspace greater than what was supported by their storage system for their video on demand application
Improve backups by presenting large file systems to applications while breaking them up into smaller file systems behind it. I know another user who reduced backup times by up to 20x doing this
To overcome scale limitations of physical devices. File virtualization can help customers better utilize Netapp A-SIS volumes, which have small volume sizes on the smaller devices, by aggregating these into larger virtual volumes, for example.

A great way to understand the value of this very relevant technology is to spend some time checking out the great stories and case studies available at TechValidate.

So enough – I think my point is made. Call it whatever you want – we chose to call it File Virtualization – it’s critical to the future of file based storage. It’s critical to storage customers, and it's critical to the storage industry.

And, anyone who tries to tell you different is a big, fat, dummy.

Irrelevant is the hardest word

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 12:06:53 PDT

"What do I do to make you love me? What have I got to do to be heard?”
© 1976 Big Pig Music Limited

In ’76, Elton John tried to convince us “Sorry” was the hardest word. He was wrong.

If you want to hurt someone or something – the 2010 attack of choice is to declare him or it ‘Irrelevant’.

Two months after a stunning win that rocked the entire USA, Scott Brown was declared irrelevant by the media yesterday.

ir•rel•e•vant (ĭ-rěl'ə-vənt) adj. Unrelated to the matter being considered. having no bearing on or connection with the subject at issue

Last month, President Obama declared the other Two Branches of Government Irrelevant, at least according one press outlet.

On March 5th, Google declared Desktop PCs will be Irrelevant In Three Years.

Last November 2009 (ok, a short cheat on 2010), online investment advisor 7/24 Wall St declared Nissan irrelevant.

In fact, there is now a brand new website devoted to 2010’s latest obsession – irrelevancy.

The beauty of declaring someone or something irrelevant is the instant enfeeblement of the target. What’s Scott Brown going to do now – jump up and down screaming, “I so to AM relevant you big fat idiots!”…? Is Michael Dell or Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn going to write an op-ed on the relevancy of PCs or Nissan cars? Not likely.

Claiming you are relevant makes you sound like a ninny. Anyone or anything that is relevant, doesn’t have to claim relevancy. That’s why its such a beautiful, and disgustingly cheap and dangerous attack.

- Lazy people declare opposing arguments irrelevant when they have not devoted the time or effort required to craft a solid argument for their point of view.

- Weak-minded people with weak-minded arguments call their opponents irrelevant.

- Fearful people who are afraid to answer tough questions dismiss them as irrelevant – usually quickly followed by the directive, “Let’s move on…” - a favorite interview tactic of politicians who are often lazy, weak-minded and fearful.

So while it may be tempting to label something or someone irrelevant – doing so reveals your inability to address the real issues, it reveals your innate fear of exposure as an idiot, and it lays bare your abject laziness in researching, preparing, and formatting a compelling argument...

Or worse, it reveals your lack of credibility, character, and intellectual honesty...

and quite frankly, doing so makes you...in a word...irrelevant…

Super Duper Deduper (for iTunes on Windows7)

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 12:08:17 PDT

I made the mistake of turning on Home Sharing in the iTunes version 9.1.3 (don't do this...).

The OSG family has about 10 computers lying around the home network, just waiting to pounce. In no time, my poor iTunes library was flooded with multiple copies of musical bilge - seriously what in heaven's name are those kids listening, too? (and Watching!!! - but that's another blog for another day...).

I found I had 12 versions of Dream On, , and Paperback Writer was written is 18 places on my drowning disk drive - I was Suddenly Numb (17 versions/copies).

I started to manually remove them - ever tried that in iTunes? About every 3rd delete it makes you confirm that you really, yes, really, I said REALLY, gd it!!, want to move the file to the recycle bin. Who wrote that damn feature? After 10 minutes I gave up - seriously considered deleting the whole thing and starting over...

Before pulling the red cord, I checked around online for an iTunes friendly deduper. Not an easy task if you run W7. A superstar named Doug Adams wrote some brilliant shareware script for this - "Corral iTunes Dupes AppleScript 7" - but it only runs on Apple. Molesoft will let you download a free version of Duplicate File Finder, but that only tells you the baby's ugly - it doesn't actually DO anything. You have to pay up if you want to actualy fix your problem. I have no problem paying for software - but it isn't worth $$ to me to dedupe iTunes. I am irritated, but not incapacitated.

Finally tripped over a duper-souper, wicked-pissa FREE (well, voluntary contribution model) deduper that works fine with Windows7 iTunes, called Meta-iPod. Actually it does much more than dedupe. It analyzes your library, determines ratings, checks and fixes mismatched metadata (more on this in a minute), finds lost tracks, locates album artwork, and dedupes. It is really coolio, awesome - seriously.

The artwork search is extensive - this thing searches all over the world for album art and gives you a dozen choices for each album. If the metadata's right, it will automagically add artwork for each song on the album at once - which saves you doing it individually. Its still a hump if you have lots of albums - and each person will have to determine how much work its worth, but its definitely fun to mess around.

I'd be a little more careful about the meta-data fixing - I think it munged a few different versions of same songs into one. I had about 10 legit verions of One Particular Harbor recorded live, old, new, at Fenway, in Hawaii - now I have one....bummer...but it only happened after I 'fixed' my meta and deduped. Be careful of the dreaded "Accept All" temptation...

There is also a function called File Inspector - didnt try it, have no idea what it does...

Overall - a great de-duper - and a super-de-duper iTunes library manager. And you only pay what you and your conscience think its worth.

oh - one more thing, remember to turn off Household Sharing before you dedupe or it will keep trying to reload copies from other computers on the network and you'll be forever swimming upstream.

Have fun.

I am a Stay-at-Home Failure

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:52:38 PDT

The OSG family Wife/Homemaker/Mom is on vacation this week. Visiting her mom and grandmom down in FLA. Sleeping late, sunning at the pool, maybe taking a stroll, living large, taking it easy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the OSG family is teetering dangerously close to derailing.

There is no food in the house. Someone clogged and overflowed a toilet upstairs. Sister needs rides to cheerleading at the same time Brother needs rides to the hockey banquet. Dad has saddle sores from driving errands and shuttling teenagers. The dog is still at the kennel from last week’s trip because no one has the time or inclination to go retrieve her. One of the cars is stuck in the garage with a dead battery. We missed the weekly trash pickup. Everyone is running low on underwear and sox. First spawn needs help packing for his school trip to Russia. Somebody’s girlfriend is coming over this afternoon, and we were just informed there is a middle school party here this weekend??

Calendar is showing 7 work-related conference calls today – silly season looms, couple of very pressing issues, some routine stuff, and about a dozen live projects on the burner.

Friend of ours is a homemaker/dad – wife’s a mucky-muck in perfumes or something. I love the guy, seems so relaxed, funny. Whenever we get together, I chuckle and tease Mrs. OSG about his ‘arrangement’ – ‘gee, I wish my wife would take care of me like that…I’d love to stay home, get my nails done, and watch some Soaps’…

OK, God – I get the message.

Final errand before she gets home will be a stop at the Jewelry store.

But first I gotta get the dog.

O curlers, come, we're brithers a' (and good luck to you)

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:34:14 PST

Every four winters, the population of the world with televisions gets the notion that it can compete in the Olympics. Very few think, "Hey, I can just sit on those big fat skis, slide down that 300' foot jump, stand up at the end, and get a gold medal. Even fewer - especially this year - think to themselves, "I can ride a sled! I'll just lie down on that thing and slide to victory, nothing to it..."

But, every four years people sitting in their living rooms, eating pretzels and drinking beer, think, "Hey, that curling is silly, it's shuffleboard on ice, any idiot can do that. Heck, I am going to the Olympics and do some curling..."

Every four years, Curling Clubs across the US brace themselves for the inevitable post-olympic rush. They happily host open houses, offer beginner classes, reach out to the press, etc. Yesterday, the local TV station here in Boston ran some footage they took at Broomstones showing the kids shooting and sweeping. Easy right?

The game is ancient - invented in 1400s - anything that people have been doing that long deserves a little respect, don't you think? It's also freaking hard. Try threading a needle 150' away, standing on ice, in shoes with teflon soles. Like golf, anyone can have fun with 10 minutes of instruction, but it takes 10 years of training and practice to be any good.

Four years ago, Michael Graham - local radio 'personality' started in on his show about how dumb curling is, how anyone can do, how it's the only Olympic event with a smoking room for the contestants, etc...and I called him on it. Bet him $100 to his charity of choice that he couldn't make a shot. To his credit, he showed up, tried it, and did in fact fall on his butt. He paid up, too. I hope this year he remembers the experience and gives curling its due.

A friend emailed yesterday to say he was bored to tears watching Olympic curling on TV. He's not alone. It takes 2.5 hours to play a 10 end game - that's 160 individual shots. Compared to watching Shaun White Mcflip wheelies for 20 seconds? Hey, its dull. But here's the thing - watching an amazing curling shot is a near religious experience for curling fans. True afficiandos hold their breath, moan, scream, twist their bodies, pull their hair - hmmm...sounds more ribald than religious, but you get the point. To curlers - a great shot is a beautious thing...worth wading through 159 other shots to experience.

If you do find yourself watching some matches this week or next, here's a quick primer to help make it more interesting.

1) Curling has nothing to do with shuffleboard - if there is a comparison, it's to chess. Curling is a mental game. The challenge being that it takes four 'mentals' - the brains and brawn of all four team members working together - to make each move. The goal is for your rocks to be closer to the center of the house (the button) than your opponent at the end of 'end'. You get one point for each rock in the rings that is closer than your opponents closest stone (watch a couple of ends, you'll figure it out).
2) Each player throws two rocks per end.
3) The skip calls the shots - indicating to the shooters where to put their rock by holding a broom (the stick with a pad on the end) as a target.
4) Three out of the 4 players sweep when they aren't shooting (skips generally don't sweep). Sweeping keeps the rock straighter (not letting it curl as much) and makes it run further (not faster).
5) Strategies run from keeping a clean house (that target looking set of rings painted in the ice at the other end) by knocking out every rock in sight, to cluttering up the front of the house with guards and eventually drawing in behind.
6) Every shot counts, but usually (like basketball) the last few minutes of each end are the most exciting/interesting as the skips jockey for final position. This is where you see some amazing shotmaking. Watch for double/triple takeouts, come-arounds where the rock sneaks by a front guard and curls behind, and crazy angle-bank-raise 'circus' shots that look amazing and are just impossibly difficult.

Oh...and the cowbell thing?...it's really more of a Canadian affectation. Don't show up at your local curling club clanging one - pretty much paints 'rube' across your forehead.

And remember, winners buy the first round.

Here's to the sport of fair renown,
Here's to the roarin' game;
Here's to the stones that go gliding down,
Here's to the icy lane:

Here's to the skip with shout so bold,
Here's to his players' fling,
Here's to the game that is never old,
Here's to the songs we sing.

Come join the curling game;
Our eyes are keen, our arms are true,
Our courage is aflame;

In winter air, and sport so rare,
The stones our weapons be,
We'll make the fight with honest might,
To gain the victory:

A man who is a curling man,
No better man than he.

Tiering, ILM, HSM and WGAF

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:34:46 PST

In 2004, SNIA defined Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) as comprising the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure (I would have added 'for its placement' but the ILMers at SNIA are wicked fussy about inferring that ILM has ANYTHING to do with storage. –Ed.) from the time information is conceived through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business processes through management policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, information, and data.

I like that definition – in fact, I was hanging around SNIA a lot back then kick starting the CDP working group, and may have contributed to that definition. Who knows, sounds like something I might have written- lots of warm air whooshing around those words…
In January of 2005, an unattributed author at TechTarget opined that: Tiered storage is the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media in order to reduce total storage cost. Categories may be based on levels of protection needed, performance requirements, frequency of use, and other considerations.
In early 2006, SNIA added that "ILM is more than Tiered Storage" and went on to suggest the need for a complex set of data classification capabilities. Whoops – too little too soon? All the data classification start-ups I knew blew up or died on the vine.
Then, according to someone unnamed author at TechTarget back in March, 2006 the definition of Information life cycle management (ILM) became:
"A comprehensive approach to managing the flow of an information system's data and associated metadata from creation and initial storage to the time when it becomes obsolete and is deleted."
I'm not as crazy about that definition – final disposition not always being obsolescence and deletion and all...
The same unknown author went on to add:
"Unlike earlier approaches to data storage management, ILM involves all aspects of dealing with data, starting with user practices, rather than just automating storage procedures, as for example, hierarchical storage management (HSM) does. Also in contrast to older systems, ILM enables more complex criteria for storage management than data age and frequency of access."
I guess I don't really understand what 'all aspects of dealing with data starting with user practices' means. Do you? I do appreciate that ILM can use more complex criteria than age and access frequency, but I didn't realize that HSM couldn't…
According to the same source, this time written in July 2001 by Gaston Navea, the definition of Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is:
Policy-based management of file backup and archiving in a way that uses storage devices economically and without the user needing to be aware of when files are being retrieved from backup storage media.
Gaston then adds that policies might include age or access, but also states that executables might be excluded, inferring at least that 'type' metadata is also a valid differentiator. But for me, Gaston puts the stake in the heart of HSM when he goes on to say, "The apparently available files are known as stubs and point to the real location of the file in backup storage." No wonder HSM flopped. Stubs are a nightmare. Disconnecting the location from the payload is a huge strategic mistake. Either is useless without the other, the opportunities for disconnections are ample, and the cost of disconnect is horrific. So HSM is out.
Back to the ILMers at SNIA. They believe ILM represents a holistic approach to information management. I suppose you have to appreciate anything that represents a holistic approach. But then they go on to introduce ILM 2.0 which re-introduces the concept of Information Lifecycle Management with accompanying processes and procedures absent from earlier days. I personally hate all 2.0 terminology, but that's just me.
And they warn us, even with ILM 2.0, to: Make no mistake; Information Lifecycle Management is still a difficult and challenging proposition. They go on to define ILM 2.0 as: a service management style framework for cost-effectively aligning datacenter storage, security, services, applications, and infrastructure with the business requirements for the organization's information. This model, by the way, as 100 individual elements, and comes with a checklist of 21 specific steps to follow to achieve it.
As Andy Azula says in the recent UPS whiteboard commercial, "Is anyone else getting thirsty?"
Referring to an article by George Crump on file virtualization, my F5 colleague, Don MacVittie wrote, "The other thing that made me a throw up a little in the back of my throat was his use of the dread phrase "ILM" (Information Lifecycle Management). I shudder when our marketing organization uses it too." This is memorable, and pretty witty if you ask me, especially considering that Don is officially in marketing at F5… That snark aside, Don's core point is that many of the better elements of the ILM concept have survived the gooey-glop-ulization of the term itself in the form of real solutions to actual customer problems. This takes us back to Tiering.
Tiering works. Plain and simple. If you don't believe me, watch this short powerful video of one of our customers, RHWL Architects, discussing what tiering did for them. He says something like, "All our storage problems disappeared overnight". Pretty powerful and not goo-gloppy at all. I happen to know that these folks did not follow any 21 step, 100 element service management style framework to solve 'all their storage problems overnight'. They implemented an ARX file virtualization appliance and tiered their storage – that's all.
How could anything be that simple? Ah, heck, we storage marketers have been complexifying and goo-glopping this whole issue for a decade or more. Somewhere along the line, somebody got the idea that if we make it hard, complex, and scary, then we can charge more money to fix it. (maybe this is all really my fault afterall.)
Look it's really not complicated. Sort your files. Then put some of them on one array and some on another. The rest starts to take care of itself after that. Sort them anyway you like, by age, size, owner, extension, type, whatever. Most people use 'last modified date' first, and then get more granular later, but you will figure that out on your own as you get smarter about tiering.
Tiering is sort of akin to contributing to your 401K (in USA that's a retirement savings account). You don't need to think about it too hard. Just do it. Not doing it is really stupid, and anyone who tells you not to is an idiot or worse. You don't need to have a perfectly balanced investment strategy, and a complete understanding of your financial risk profile, before you sign up for payroll deductions. All you need to know is it saves you money on taxes and gets you started on a nest egg. Once you start building up experience (and capital) you can add more finesse. Same here.
Just do it. Sort, Tier, Save. Simple – does not require arguments about definitions, and will not make you throw up in the back of your throat.
PS – Make sure you use a solid solution - like the F5 ARX - to do it. Don't use stubs. Don't use half-baked hybrid clunkers that go in and out of band (and rely on stubs even if they say they don't). Investing in a 401K works, letting Bernie Madoff manage it doesn't. Be smart. Do the right thing.
PPS - I am leaving it to you to figure out the WGAF acronym. Use your imagination.
PPPS - Admit it, you didn't know who Andy Azula is did you? See, you always learn something reading this blog...maybe not about storage, but something...

The Character of Clouds: Ethics Matter More for Service Providers

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:37:17 PST

Here's an important reminder for cloud service providers: character counts.
Ethics, Values, and Trust are table stakes – for anyone who wants to succeed in business long term – but especially for cloud service providers.

As a cloud customer, I am not simply buying/renting your hardware and software. I am grafting my company onto yours. We are intermingling our corporate DNA. I am loading my databases on your disk drives. I am modifying my internal processes to map to your services.
If you suddenly grow 3 heads, I cannot easily cut and run. Who you are matters. How you behave matters. What you believe in matters - more so than what your service actually does for me - a damn sight more.
Don't believe me? Think that's Barney talking…? Think it's all about the infrastructure, managing your capital, maintaining the buzz, keeping the pipes pinging…?
Engage me for a moment in this nearly true to life tragic tale of the CEO of a small venture backed cloud service vendor, and how he single-handedly blew a huge deal out of the water by forgetting that character comes first. (Names and circumstances changed to protect all involved).
You blew it, Jon. No one else.
Not your sales people.
Not your sales manager.
Not your lawyer.
You, Mr. CEO.
You Mr. President.

Here's a quick recap of the events of the last 48 hours of your deal from my perspective. Keep in mind that when I say "my" I am again speaking AS THE CUSTOMER, Jon.Everything was moving along with the deal. We had a solid understanding of your service. We felt it would work for us. We had the money. Jon, think about that. We had the money budgeted. The check was written, buddy. All you had to do was take it to the bank and cash it.

How in heaven's name did you blow this?As we got near the close, my team started getting weird vibes from your sales rep. He was playing games, dumb rookie stuff - divide and conquer, 'we can only ensure this discount if you sign today', skeesy Glengarry Glen Ross nonsense stuff.
I heard my folks complaining about him, but ignored them. Probably shouldn't have. His skeaziness was a big bright red flag waving in my face. A lighthouse beacon warning me to keep off the rocks of doing business with you. A canary in the coal mine…oh, heck…you get the idea.

I was brought into the deal at the last minute when our lawyer and your lawyer bumped into a glitch in the contract that they couldn't sort out. My team wanted quick resolution, so they asked me to step in.We were readying plans to start implementing your service next week, Jon. This dumb legal wrangle was nothing to lose a deal over, Jon. It could have been sorted out in 10 mins. Once I understood the issue, I probably I would have talked to my lawyer, we would have deemed it a business risk we were willing to take, and we'd be shakin' and signin'.
Next week. $$$…all yours, Jon. All yours.

Now, as feuding lawyers do, these guys were each squawking that the other lawyer was being unreasonable. Squawking and sputtering. Jon, that's what lawyers do sometimes…they squawk and sputter.So you and I are supposed to jump on the phone and sort it out. That's what us business guys do…they sort stuff out.

At this point, I'm just trying to figure out what all the squawking is about. It's pretty confusing, and pretty technical. I am listening.Then all of the sudden my radar starts beeping.

You are getting all hot and bothered. Jon, my heavens, now, you're squawking…"In all my years, I've never had a client ask for anything so outrageous!"

You are squawking pretty good, Jon."None of my other (name drop, name drop, name drop) clients have ever raised this as an issue! This is absurd. You can't be serious!"

Why are you squawking, Jon?"I am not signing any contract that has this clause in it! We may as well not have a contract at all."

Aren't we supposed to be sorting stuff out, Jon? Business guys don't squawk, do they? I sure don't, squawk, much, Jon.I am finding your reaction…troubling…

I am not listening anymore. I am wondering what you will act like when the brown stuff inevitably really hits the fan later. Stuff always hits the fan, eventually, Jon. And business guys sort it out…if we don't, it gets really messy…But you are squawking…not sorting…

I am sitting across the table from my lawyer. So what if he squawks a little? He's a guy I know and trust. Heck, we pay him to sometimes squawk a little.I don't know you from Adam, Jon. You're a voice on the speakerphone.
And, I barely understand the twisted legal edge-case condition that both lawyer guys are squawking about. Heck, Jon, I haven't even looked at the contract.

But, Jon, I'm hearing something in your voice on that speaker phone that makes me nervous. I am hearing you squawking not sorting.Then I think I hear you say something about how we might act in bad faith. Seems to me you are worried about us being dishonest. What?? We don't act in bad faith. We are as freaking honest as the day is freaking long and then some…

I don't even know you. I haven't opened my mouth other than to say, Hi how are Ya, and you are accusing me of dishonesty? I begin thinking maybe you are just a little bit dishonest, yourself, Jon.This is getting way more troubling…$$$, Jon…slipping from your fingers…flittering right out the window…going up in smoke…flushing down the…ah heck, you know what I'm getting at here…

I end the call. I'm feeling like I need to take a shower.A couple of minutes later I get a follow-up email from you. You think my lawyer is being unreasonable and you want me to replace him with outside counsel. What? You want me to throw a respected peer and colleague under the bus so you can get your deal done? What??
Claxon horns are blaring in my head. My stomach is doing back-flips.

I tell my team that I am uncomfortable doing business with you. They ask me to sleep on it.I wake up the next morning absolutely sure I don't want to do business with you. I try to tell myself it was the gruel – just a bad dream. I vow to be more open minded and give you a chance.

I get to work that morning and find an email from you telling me you did in fact talk to an outside counsel, and he (surprise) agrees with you that my lawyer is being completely unreasonable (squawk) – you share that your outside council is vehement and is using strong language to say we are being unreasonable and our concern is 'absurd' and doesn't deserve the dignity of a response (squawk, squawk, squawk…!)I go with my gut and cancel further discussion. We are not doing business with you.

I squirt some hand sanitizer into my palms and feel marginally better.
Then I happen to read the rest of your email – really only by chance – and an unbelievable window is opened onto the soul of your company culture, its values, and your personal ethics.

You have accidentally attached a string of emails between you, your lawyers, your sales reps, and your sales managers…the string reveals unethical behavior apparently condoned by management, and a fundamental disrespect for customers that is so powerful it makes me want to gag. All described in vivid tone and tenor.I realize I have just dodged a bullet – an armor piercing bullet.

My hands are shaking and I have trouble concentrating for the rest of the day.You know the rest of the story, Jon. Your pitiful attempts to reengage. Your realization that you attached those horrible emails. Your mistaken conclusion that it was your flub of attaching the emails that sent me over the edge. Finally, your abortive, sad, and frankly creepy apology. (Seriously Jon, a guy like you shouldn't be teaching Sunday school…)

You blew it, Jon. The buck stops with you. Rail all you want about my lawyer being unreasonable. Blame me if it makes you feel better. Make excuses if you must.But take this to your now empty bank: It was never about the contract, Jon. It was about you and your company. I was both ready and able to accept some business risk, but once you revealed your true self, I certainly was not willing to share my business's DNA with you.

Yes, sure, to do business with enterprises, cloud providers must have enterprise quality infrastructures – safeguards, systems, processes, quality people all count. We are not going to run our core business applications on infrastructure that does not meet the business standards we've developed to run in-house.And there must be a compelling ROI to move these core applications outside the safety of our four walls.

BUT – big but – that is not enough. In addition to the hard technical and financial standards, we also need assurance that you can be trusted, just like we trust our own employees, in fact, even more.For a cloud service provider to succeed, it must deeply internalize that:

Character counts.
Trust comes before contracts.
Ethics matter.

And that, Jon, is both the God's honest truth and your $$$ lesson for today.

Rule 1: OSG is always right

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:37:52 PST

Rule #2 - if you think right is wrong, you're not paying attention.

Regardless of who pays for it, healthcare is a set of goods and services that must be delivered by others to you.

Like if or not, there is not enough 'healthcare' to go around. Everyone cannot and will not get all the 'healthcare' they need or want.

This is just a reality, not a political statement.

When you let the government pay - the government has to decide who will get how much. Since government represent everyone equally, government payment systems requires 'fairness'. This means the government has to decide who gets treatment and who doesn't.

Some form of the following:

Life expectancy (age) X quality of life (defined how exactly??) X effectiveness of treatment / Cost of treatment

is used to determine whether you (or your kids or your parents) get the treatment.

Hey - wake up - this isn't some philosophical argument. Today - right now - Australia has what so many of you seem to want - nationalized medicine. There aren't enough cancer drugs to go around in Australia - and Australia has a panel of experts called the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee who perform this economic analysis on cancer drugs to determine who will get them.

This is a direct quote from their website:

"Users should be encouraged to understand the costs, benefits and risks of medicines, and wherever possible the public benefit of provision of medicines should be achieved through the regulated marketplace...it can be difficult to meet the community’s expectations regarding subsidised access to all available treatments. Both the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the treatments need to be considered in making decisions about subsidisation...(we must assure) access to necessary medicines occurs at a cost the community as a whole can afford, particularly in the context of pressures such as the development of new high cost medicines and Australia’s ageing population...."

READ THAT AGAIN!

Cost...effectiveness...regulated...access...decisions about subsidisation...afford...new medicine... aging population...

What? Hello?

As I said - healthcare isn't a right, it's a good. Goods must be distributed. In nationalized (socialist) systems the government uses fairness to determine distribution.

Meaning - sick, old people don't get no chemo.

Tell mom that was the hope and change she believed in...

(oops, that was a political statement, sorry, just slipped out...)

Save a Socialist, Ride a Cowboy

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:38:29 PST

I rejected your comment because I found it insulting, and it's my blog, so tough noogies. But, here's my attempt to respond objectively.

Your 'right' cannot ever be granted by taking property away from others. Rights are just that, rights - you have the right to life (I can't kill you), liberty (I can't enslave you), the pursuit of happiness (whatever that means). You don't - in western society anyway - have the right to take my stuff.

You don't have a right to eat my food. You have a right to earn your own darn food.

The blanket statement - "in western society, health care is a right not a good" is intellectually dishonest.

It ignores the fact that health care is in fact a set of things - services, drugs, machinery, facilities - that must be created, are in limited supply, and must be distributed. It is not some unalienable, god-given right. Health care must be paid for - if not by the patient consuming the service, then by all of society.

Let me repeat. Health care is not free. It is a service delivered by people to people. Somehow that service - that set of goods - ultimately has to be paid for by someone. Health insurance is only an abstration layer that spreads the risk - it doesn't remove the necessity to pay for the service eventually.

So we are back to an argument over the proper method for distribution of this service. You say it's a right - meaning that it must be provided in full to anyone who wants it whenever they want it. Think about that for a minute. There is not enough of 'it' to go around - never will be - so how exactly, with intellectual honesty, do you propose to distribute the services that deliver this 'right'?

Doh...

My position is that distribution in this society - whether you or I like it or not - is inherently and by design decided by merit - by value created as measured by wealth.

You can argue rationally and with intellectual honesty that this is unfair. Could not agree more. In fact, it is totally unfair - purposefully unfair if by fair you mean equal or common to all. Meritocracy is not fair.

You can also argue rationally that according to your value system, you find this system of distribution wrong - it tweaks your sense of injustice! OK. Nothing intellectually dishonest with saying that. You're simply stating that your personal value system is different than the one the founding father's established.

Lots of people will agree with you. In emotional terms, people who espose this beleif are often associated with socialism. In extreme forms, some people do not believe in individual property rights at all - they beleive that all goods belong to the collective group. In emotional terms, people who belieive this are usually called communists.

Then again, lots of people don't...agree with you, that is...

Blind Faith, Dashed Hope, and Unequal Justic

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:39:03 PST

Been thinking about justice lately.

Left sees injustice in the fact that some people are wealthy and others are not.

Right sees injustice in the government taking away their property and giving it to others.

Healthcare Reformers see injustice in wealth determining access to medical services.

Kanye West sees injustice in Taylor Swift winning an award instead of Beyonce.

When we sense the order of things is out of whack, we get a visceral mental reaction. We hate injustice! We are even willing to fight wars to right injustices if they are menacing enough.

But what is injustice, exactly? And why do we so violently disagree on what is just or isn’t?

Justice is all about the proper ordering of things in a society – the distribution of stuff. We sense injustice has occurred when we encounter what we believe is the wrong distribution of stuff – primarily wealth, power, and respect in all their forms.

The trick here is the ‘we believe’ part. What’s fair? How should stuff be distributed?

The ultimate distribution of power is freedom vs. slavery. We struggled with that for a while in this society before creating laws to neutralize it. There is no limit on the amount of freedom we can have, so laws guaranteeing absolute freedom for everyone are rational and enforceable.

Not so for wealth. It is a basic law of the distribution of goods that there is not enough wealth for everyone to have everything they want or need. There are many theories on which method is most ‘fair’ for distribution. Communism, Socialism, Capitalism are all essentially methods of distribution of wealth.

Our society was founded on the principle of meritocracy. Here in America, stuff is distributed based on the value a person creates for society. It’s an imperfect system, but roughly translated, the wealth you accumulate equals the value you create. Goods are distributed based on that wealth. If you create an enormous amount of value for society, you and your ancestors will benefit from the accumulated wealth.

The founders created laws to protect property rights and other unalienable rights in order to protect this system. In meritocracy’s purest form, all goods would be distributed this way - food, shelter, and water among them. And originally this was the case. You were jailed for debt. If you didn’t work, you and your family starved.

But we aren't monsters, so as society developed we created safety nets for those who could not create value themselves - the old, infirm, etc (note - however there was no patience or mercy for the lazy, addicted, criminal, or otherwise self-afflicted –those people were punished or jailed or worse.)

At first we freely offered our wealth to those in need, usually based on religious convictions. Eventually, we softened further creating welfare societies and other social programs to help those who found themselves in need. Eventually government intervened to create these safety nets, taking wealth by force through taxes from those who created it and giving to those who did not.

In western society, as we move across the scale from freely earned meritocracy and charity to forced distribution, we begin to run afoul of our visceral human desire for justice. And therein, lies the root of the current problem.

There is not enough wealth to go around. Taking it from those that create it and giving it to those that do not in order to affect an equal distribution has proven a doomed social strategy – and is so antithetical to the American spirit that any serious attempt to do so now would surely meet massive resistance and ultimately revolution. Even the hint of it has half the population in a panic today.

When taxes are raised high enough, our sense of injustice is stimulated and, as we saw in 1776, all hell breaks loose.

Universal distribution systems may seem fair from afar. Everyone gets the same ration. But they never work. The human spirit is not programmed to excel in order to share, or to involuntarily give up wealth. Innovation grows from desire. It cannot be mandated.

Healthcare wealth is no different than any other form of wealth – it’s just a much more emotional microcosm. There is simply not enough medical care to go around. Not enough doctors, hospital beds, machines, drugs – not enough of any of it, and there very likely never will be. This isn’t freedom, we can’t just mandate that everyone gets healthcare and that’s that. Healthcare is a good –plain and simple. It has to come from somewhere. Hard as that is for the more sensitive and caring of us to accept. It is a good that is, must, and probably always will be distributed unequally. Like we always have, as a society we will gladly provide for those truly in need, but expecting full equal distribution is irrational.

Forced equal distribution of healthcare through universal healthcare such as Canada and the UK is especially problematic. Healthcare resources are a limited commodity. Use of these resources is not evenly divisible. Expensive drugs, procedures, and machinery consume healthcare resources unevenly. Therefore methods of prioritization must be applied. Quality of life and life expectancy are variables often used for prioritization. Again, our sense of justice combines with concerns for personal welfare and that of our families to create a very potent political cocktail.

The method for distribution of goods at the core of this society's DNA is merit measured by value created or more imprecisely, wealth. Every other method of distribution raises our sense of injustice – sometimes to the level of complaining to a friend, fighting with a family member, calling a radio talk show, attending a tea party, or even marching on Washington. And, as we saw in 1776, sometimes it raises our sense of injustice to the point of declaring independence from the oppressing government. Now, luckily we just vote them out.

Hey, we’re Americans, it’s how we roll.

Ah…whippersnapper…

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:39:41 PST

like you, I have attended many trade shows. More than you, perhaps? We are no longer taught to respect the wisdom of our elders in this culture. However, perspective is very hard to acquire.

Sure, some things have changed since I wrote the rules on technical trade show strategy in 2007. Ironically, I wrote that at the urging of the sponsors of your upcoming all-natural show who were flumuxed about how my little startups always got so much attention while other huge sponsors went lacking.

In North America, people no longer come to technical trade shows to have thoughtful discussions with technical experts at exhibit booths. Nowadays, in North America people come to technical trade shows to get drunk in the hotel bar, hang out with their peers, ogle the unattainable and collect stuff. Oh, and if they see something cool, maybe take a look and pass info on to some other people who didn’t come back home to justify the trip. They don’t have the patience or the attention span in a crowd of thousands to follow a live demo. They do not line up at your booth so that you plant a tree for them. Ask the lonely dark booth full of bored shuffling technical experts in the back corner of the next show you visit.

Whippersnapper…at the last SNW, were those your lonely sore little feet in that lonely little booth in the back row?

Bright shiny loud things attract a crowd – even today in our current all natural, politically correct, sensitive new age, anti-plastic, pro-environment, gender-neutral, healthy, crunchy, flaky, non-deodorized society.

Politically correct or not, sexual attraction is still the strongest and fastest human response. Now, even I, the OSG, have been beaten into submission on the subject of booth babes. OK. OK. Hot guys DO work just as well as hot girls. I give. I give. Use both sexes. Here’s why – and it’s not what you think.

Technical experts are basically almost always shy. Sales people prowling like wolves scare skitterish attendees away before you even start a conversation. Babes are different – they bridge the gap. They are confident. They smile. They come bearing gifts – ok, make the damn chotchkee an all-cotton, child-labor-free tee-shirt, dyed with natural fruit based ink – it’s still a gift - an tiny little enticement to stop and pay attention. There… we’ve broken the ice and created a sense of obligation on the attendee’s part to ask, “So, what does your company do, anyway?” Gotcha. That’s what it’s all about. With BB’s you get conversations, without them you don’t.

By the way, BB’s do not have to be from a modeling agency. Our most successful BB’s have been the least kitten and boy toy ish. Anyone can be a BB – they just have to be confident, outgoing, smiley, and understand their job.

As for uniforms – if you can’t stand out in the crowd, you become one of the crowd – a tree lost in a forest. Ok, so nurse’s, schoolgirls, strippers, alien goddesses and those infamous twister girls are over the top – nuts, pointless and rude. I am not talking about that nonsense. I am talking about making sure that everyone who sees you knows you are their representing your company, and you are ready and willing to have a conversation. Whatever that takes, do it. I personally like bright shirts because they work. My team likes black shirts with red logos – I got tired of fighting about it. I’ve proved my point too many times.

As for purpose and strategy - trade shows are a bad investment for vendors who want real sales opportunities. The numbers just don’t work anymore – customers get their information online now. That’s why shows are shrinking, failing, consolidating, and closing by the dozen. Big vendors don’t need more lists of attendees; they have finely tuned marketing databases. If you’re a startup, Jigsaw gets you any name, phone number, and email you could ever want, practically for free. Besides you don’t have the resources to sort through the haystack of tradeshow leads to find real opportunities anyway so why do you want them? See my comments on LEADS SUCK – nothing’s changed there – lead management technology is better, sure, but tradeshow leads still suck.

Tradeshows are not so much about demand generation anymore, and if you are spending your tiny little startup marketing budget on them, whippersnapper, you’re going to crash and burn before you get that puppy off the ground.

Tradeshows are useful for positing a new concept into a market – speaking at them if it doesn’t cost you’re a fortune – is how you get this done. The speaker should be the CTO, not the VPM. The topic is the new concept or idea, not your product or service. You are trying to open up new concepts for debate and buzz.

Tradeshows are also useful for finding and talking to other vendors you might want to partner with – this is done at the aforementioned hotel bar after 10pm. Ditto industry analysts, although time moves to after midnight.

Tradeshows can be ok for (re)positioning your brand in the market – getting on the radar screen if you are small, or repositioning yourself into larger markets if you are bigger. This is done with keynotes or major announcements.

Mostly tradeshows are about connecting with friends, colleagues, peers, competitors, and the industry in general. So go have some fun, come by the booth and say hi, get yourself another tee shirt for your significant other to sleep in, or a big red bouncy ball to take home to the kids.

And for heaven’s sake, whippersnapper, lighten up before you pop something.

Stephen's Graduation Party Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:50:29 PST

Everything's Changing - Nothing Much Has Changed

Putting together a video compilation for Stephen's graduation party was a bitter sweet experience. It was fun to find so many old video tapes of Stephen as a baby, but sad to realize that 20 years has passed so fast.

Stephen was born without incident - the obstetrician’s first words were “I’ve delivered lots of babies, and let me tell you, that is one good-looking kid” – nothing much has changed much there.

Stephens’s first and favorite toys were balls - he had a set of crystal plastic balls with shiny spinners inside - slept with them in his crib. Went to sleep with his balls in his hands every night. – nothing much has changed there - still sleeps with his balls in his hands.

One summer at my parents house on Cape Cod, Stephen learned to hit a baseball - hit it over the roof of the house almost as soon as he learned to swing - certainly nothing much has changed there.

When he learned to ride a bike without training wheels, I was proud and excited - but as I watched him ride down the street, my stomach twisted in a knot - it was a selfish knot - I didn’t want him to grow up - I didn’t want him to not need me...but, I forced a smile, gave him a high five, and we moved on to the next pressing thing.

It seems looking back, that Stephen's entire childhood was condensed into 40 minutes of rushing to practice, hurrying to games, and popping McNuggets while tying skates in the back seat. I still have scars on my hands from pulling those laces, 'tighter, daddy, tighter’.

Then one day, he tied his own skates - and that ugly twisty-stomach feeling came back.

When Stephen's beloved coach, Steve Henley, died suddenly our parenting skills were put to the test. I thought my job as a Dad was to make pain go away - clean the booboo, put a band-aid on it, and kiss it all better. But there was nothing I could do or say to make this all better. I've never felt quite so inadequate as a father – all I could do is be with him as he struggled with his grief and mourned his loss. Those of you with kids know there is no pain worse than your kid’s pain - and there is nothing worse than not being able to make your kid’s pain go away.

Then one he drove himself to practice - and for a minute I was relieved because driving him everywhere was really a pain. Then as Pam and I were driving alone to his game that weekend, that twisty thing was back in my stomach.

But whether he needed us or not, we went. Pam never missed a game, and I went whenever I could. Although Stephen would never admit it, he always looked to see if we were there in the stands. Of course, he didn’t wave or anything - that wouldn’t be cool, but we knew he knew and that was enough.

Then one game when I wasn't there, tragedy struck. I was standing on the San Diego shoreline watching the most beautiful sunset when the call came. I will never forget Pam's voice, Stephen was hurt - badly hurt – might never play again. I dropped the cell phone, and balled my eyes out.

Stephen's stoic determination and courage in facing that injury still amazes me - he never complained, never pitied himself, never looked back - he marched on, and the results speak for themselves. He used the same strength in breaking into social and academic life at BB&N, and I know he will draw from it to succeed at Holy Cross and beyond.

People often come up to us - complete strangers sometimes - to tell us that we should be proud to have such great kids. We do have great kids - strong, smart, good-looking, sweet, kind, courageous, and tough. We are proud of them, yes, and we are privileged to have been the job of raising them - to have been allowed to be their mom and dad.

So now that Stephen is a grown man, we can look at the sum of our collective parenting of him, the hours, the talks, the money!, and the accounting shows a very, very positive return on investment.

As he is preparing to ride down that road towards his own life, his own freedom, and his own future - I have to tell you, that very selfish, very twisty feeling is back with a vengeance.

I am proud, bursting with pride, excited at his accomplishments, and I very much do and do not want him to go...

Stephen, son, I love you very much – and nothing much will ever change there.

Payback is a Perk

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:01:45 PDT

Vibhoosh Gupta, one of my Babson students from last year, stopped by the booth at Interop.

He's with Motorola.

Last year, he was an engineer - with good ideas and good busines sense. He always seemed somewhat frustrated to me, and I was happy to hear he wanted to move into marketing.

He stopped by last week to tell me that he had indeed moved to a Market Development role - he had come up with a great idea - taking fiber directly into commercial buildings and distributing it to the desktop in place of ethernet cabling. Benefit is pretty straightforward - no power required for switches, no switch closets, hi-performance, and total security (no EMI emission to tap). Vibhoosh ran with the idea, put a business plan together, got it approved and launched it at Interop.

He was nice enough to say that he was able to use his learnings from my class in doing so.

It meant a lot to me that I was able to help someone along the way - you never really know, do you? The reason I teach is to give something back - pay forward in reverse, I guess - and in the case of Vibhoosh, it seems to have worked. Made my day.

Boy, I hope he's successful with the idea, and if not, I sure hope he took good notes during the "starting from scratch is hard" class about getting up, dusting off, and starting over again...after you fail...once, twice, or a dozen times...

TechValidate

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:30:54 PDT

Brad O'Neill showed me his idea for TechValidate in the lobby of the New York Hilton at SNW a couple of years ago.

I loved it then, and I love it a lot more now. StumbleUpon was a pipsqueak of an idea compared to TechValidate.

As long as I have been doing this - marketing black boxes to IT geeks, that is - it's been near impossible to get and keep customer references.

This dearth of referencable customers leads to half a dozen thorny problems.

- Editors won't let reporters/writers do stories without customer quotes. Even if you have the best mousetrap since cheese, you can't get anyone to write a story about it.

- Frustrated writers/reporters can't publish even their most interesting stories.

- Prospects won't buy unless they can speak to a customer.

- Salesreps drive marketing crazy asking for references.

- Customers who do make themselves available quickly get besieged and 'burn out'

- Salesreps lucky enough to have customers willing to take calls, horde them like squirrels horde nuts, and won't let other reps (or marketing and PR people) get to them for fear of 'burning them out'

This friction in getting, keeping, and managing customer references creates scarcity and high cost. Industry analysts fill the void - for a price - acting as a proxy for real customers, offering quotes to press releases and reporters, opinion (expert or not) on the value of the product to customers, etc.

Along comes Golden-Hand O'Neill - OK, arguably with a bit of a chip on his shoulder for industry analysts perhaps - and innovates a tool that blows up the whole mess.

Talk about disruptive...

TechValidate lets customers offer their honest opinions directly and anonymously, but verifiably.

Writers and editors can now write stories with validated quotes, without the hassle of getting permission.

Prospects can get validated experiences from real customers to increase their comfort levels.

Salesreps can confidently make claims of value based on validated customer response.

Marketing people can stop fighting alligators and get back to draining the swamp.

Just once, please, can't I have a brilliant idea like this that will make me $10 or $20 million...?

Just once?