Storage Sanity

The Character of Clouds: Ethics Matter More for Service Providers

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:39:57 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) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:06:56 PDT

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) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:25:41 PDT

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) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:15:05 PDT

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, 10 Sep 2009 13:31:34 PDT

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) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:49:23 PDT

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?

Wow

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:24:09 PDT

Dave Donatelli leaving EMC. Wow.

DD at HP. Maybe. Probably Not. Wow.

Huge loss either way.

On Meyers/Briggs tests I'm always an INTP - which makes me a pretty good strategist - analytical, perceptive. I can usually sense industry moves BEFORE they happen.

But holy-batman-in-blue-tights-and-red-cape-with-a-big-S-on-the-chest...I sure didn't see this one coming.

Dave and I go back a ways - 1993-4 I think. He was pushing EMC to go multi-vendor when I was pushing DEC Multi-Vendor StorageWorks. We were both anti-authority change agents and competitors of sort. He was fighting against EMC's success in AS400 and IBM mainframe storage. I was fighting against the failure of DEC.

I interviewed with him once for a job at EMC. But, during the meeting, he told me about taking an MBA program in Chicago while living in Boston. That introduction to the Kellogg North America program changed my life. I followed Dave to Kellogg, but not to EMC, the year after he started, and one of the proudest moments of my life still is graduating at the top of the class while my father was still alive to see it.

The comparisons sort of end there though - Dave stayed at EMC. I quit Compaq to chase the startup dream. Last year, Dave made five and a half million dollars...let's just say, I didn't.

Despite his reputation as a very tough cookie in a box of tough cookies, Dave deserves a spot in the Storage Sanity Hall of Fame. There probably hasn't been a more influential hand behind the scenes in the storage industry for 15 years.

And, honestly, even though I did graduate at the top of the class, he was always smarter than me...we will all be better off as an industry if the courts let him work somewhere.

Something we all beleive in...

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:24:46 PDT

Today, Illinois' new governor, Pat Quinn, proposed a 50 percent increase in the income tax rate stating that it was based on "...something we all believe in -- ability to pay..."

Mr. Quinn - we don't all beleive in Marxism.

Karl Marx's famous - "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" - is the central communist idea - that the most productive should be forced to pay for what other's receive from the state for free - only because the most productive, as a result of their productivity, have the means to pay.

This socialist philosophy - which so scares MOST of us to our bones - is based on the twisted and debased principle that the people exist to serve the state.

Of, by, and for, Mr. Quinn. Of, by, and for.

This democracy exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. The government exists to provide benefits and protections to the VAST MAJORITY of its citizens. It exists because we will it to exist, not because it forces itself upon us.

We all agree that government has worth. We respectfully can disagree about how much it should do, and how much it should cost.

But when we start losing sight of the role of government we risk losing the country itself. Here it is again, just in case Mr. Quinn, or any of the rest of our leaders need a refresher.

"...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

It is simply amazing that the last 6 months have so changed us, that we now numbly accept, in the tenor of public discourse, the very concepts and ideas that generations of Americans gave their lives to protect us against.

I just got ripped off...

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:28:47 PDT

Google finally got me...

I overran the free storage limit on my google account, and they made me pay $20 for another 10GB for a year. What a rip!

I could have bought a TB network drive from Dell for $179.

Let's see ... that's 1,099,511,627,776 bytes at $179 (call it $200 with tax and shipping) or $0.00000000018 per byte.

Take 6 or 8 zeros off and I'm still getting a whopping, I coulda had a V8, headache.

My first 1 TB storage system was the Digital StorageWorks Enterprise Storage Array we introduced in 1993/4. It came in 3 fully loaded 19" racks and cost over a million dollars.

Doh....

A virtual world of virtualness

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 07:51:42 PST

I wrote this a while ago, but returning from Nice last week, it still strikes me as somewhat prescient - if I do say so myself.

Kirby's Sub-theorem #2 - Virtualization eventually surrounds and commoditizes every IT resource

Ultimately, IT infrastructure will be made up of groups of commoditized resources – processor power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, etc. – connected through ‘buffering zones’ which are at their core virtualizers.

These connecting layers between resource pools will also provide the control points for infrastructure management. These connecting layers will be a loosely coupled network of policy enforcement engines – both providing the decoupling (virtualization) of the resources and enabling management policies to be injected, enforced, and visualized.

As data moves between servers and storage, policies will control access and placement. As traffic is moved from applications to end-users, policies will control security, quality of service, and even provisioning of additional resources.

IT operations will be provided a single unified view of the infrastructure and policies, enabling near-instant IT response to changes in the business environment.

It will be interesting to see how the virtualizers are eventually virtualized.

Forget Iceland - OSG is off to Galt's Gulch

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:57:43 PST

Ok, so I was right and the loonies were wrong. $750B didn't do diddly. The S&P is one-half of its high 18 months ago, and headed further down today. Unemployment at 8.1% is the highest in decades, but the new treasury secretary can't find anyone who wants a job working for him.
Congress is drunk-dipping our collective ATM cards, the president is partying hardy at the white house every night, the US is on its way a People State, and Atlas is damn close to shrugging.

For goodness sake, what are we doing? 8570 earmarks-do you think that's ok? Do you seriously think that increasing taxes on people who create value, and then spending it on pork barrel projects, unemployment benefits, and welfare, will lower the deficit and increase employment?

Do you honestly think nationalizing banks will make people invest in them?

Do you think taking away the fear of failure and the benefit of success will motivate acheivers?

When has that assinine theory ever worked?

…”the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money…” Obama press conference, Feb 2009.

Good heavens, do you honestly believe that?

Have we forgotten the lessons of the last century, that coerced self-sacrifice causes a society to self-destruct?

Where are the men of the mind? Has Galt spirited them all away?

Hey John, don't forget me...I'm packed and ready for the call.

Brickbats and Bright Shirts

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:24:16 PST

First off, thanks to Chris Mellor for 'encouraging' me to get back to StorageSanity. It is nice to be missed. I heard that while I was away Yuck went about patting a bunch of storage bloggers on the back - I guess I don't even rate condesention...oh, well...shall endeavor to be more painful in the future.

A guy named James wanted to post a comment about my trade show suggestions - I rejected it because he's a marketing consultant of some sort who wanted to plug his website. But, it turns out I am an idiot. According to Jame, the only thing that matters in IT today is credibility. Wearing bright shirts doesn't get you cred. Better to be the quiet one in the corner, oozing cred. It seems we marketing fluffballs have lost sight of the truth - If you offer real value (and have lots of cred), the market will line up at your booth. In fact, all you really need is a fax number for the PO's to start pouring in. After all, that's all Google and Apple need to do, right.

You - tiny little, cred oozing, startup that you are - can't do better than copy both of them. So ignore my previous advice, please, and quietly ooze cred.

I just came back from VMworld this week. Guess what the VMware folks were wearing...screaming green and prison orange shirts...

I am SO out of here....

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:05:05 PST

Just came back from whirlwind tour of Europe – 6 cities in 7 days. The financial collapse happened while I was away so you can’t blame me. It was fascinating how many Europeans, learning I was American insisted that I tell them what was happening. Why were we doing this to them?

As I was sitting in a pub in London, eating a $15 cheeseburger and drinking and $5 diet coke, I saw a bus go by with an advertisement for 6.7% interest on a passbook saving account. At home, the same account pays something like 0.03%. So I wondered– ignoring currency exchange risk – why would anyone put money in a US bank? Another advertisement offered 200% returns on money invested in Dubai real estate.

And I got to thinking that perhaps the real problem is that Whackaminijob from Iran might be right. America might be coming to the end of its dominant power position in the world. We might be facing a British Empire type demise. After all, we import obscene amounts of petroleum both in the form of oil from the middle east and plastic from the far east – while exporting nothing much more than ethereal cash that we borrow from both and promises of future cash which we have no clue how we will get. It’s probably an oversimplification, but if you picture cash as fluid, it seems to me the tide is flowing in the wrong direction and the reservoir is getting low. At some point, (maybe now?), there won’t enough cash left in NY to keep the system operating. Printing $750B will help for a minute, but it will also instantly deflate the value of each dollar by 5% or more. Can anyone spell Argentina?

Here in the US, we used to have a fairly well rounded set of value-adding functions that combined to create wealth -- natural resources, hard work, innovation, technology and tools, pluck, etc – mixed with a pride and sense of fear in not accomplishing something. If you didn’t work and succeed your family went wanting. Now, it seems we’ve squandered that American wealth building machine. A sense of entitlement replaces fear of failure. Distrust of those who have succeeded in accumulating wealth, and a desire to punitively tax them back to a lowest common denominator status, replaces ambition to join them at the higher strata of society. American innovation seems sort of a hollow concept lately –incremental vs. transformational.

I guess I am just an old geezer now, cranky and unforgiving. I don’t feel sorry for people who didn’t finish school, don’t work hard, and don’t create their own wealth. I don’t feel that my lifestyle – which I studied hard for 22 years, and worked harder for another 30 to achieve – is the right of every American, hard-working or not. It's certainly not the right of the criminaliens.

My hard work has created jobs for dozens or perhaps hundreds of families. My teaching has helped hundreds more build careers and create value for themselves. I don’t feel the least damn bit guilty for what I have accomplished or acquired, and I don’t feel selfish for wanting to share it my family rather than having it stolen by the government and redistributed to strangers who have not created enough value to provide for themselves.

Frankly, I am shocked and dismayed that 52% of the American voting public seems to disagree with me. But time will tell. Socialism fails - human spirit is too strong to put up with it for long. The sad thing is that historically when socialism fails, it destroys the underlying country that allowed it to spawn. I, politically incorrectly, pray to my chosen judeo-christian God that we find a way to avoid that fate this time.

The one good thing resulting from the global economic meltdown is that waterfront property in Iceland is cheap now. If the socialists win on Tuesday, I just may head off to Reykjavik to wait it out in a cottage by the shore.

The importance of new school lunchboxes

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:12:01 PDT

Remember when you were a kid and one of the most important decisions affecting your life was what lunch box you were going to carry when school started in September? I’m talking about real lunch boxes here, the pressed steel ones with the plastic handles that held a thermos bottle for cold milk – or if you were on the geeky side like some of us, hot soup. The kind of lunch boxes that are so collectable today.

Remember you couldn’t possibly show up on opening day of school with last year’s model – heaven forbid. And, if you, or more probably your mother, chose the wrong pop star, band, or action hero lunch box the entire success of your school year could be put at risk. It was a momentous decision. The Beatles beat Herman’s Hermits, GI Joe blew away James Bond, Barbie must have out-blonded some other doll, but I have to admit, I didn’t pay attention to girls or their lunchboxes. Back then, to us girls were like Linux to the MSFT legion – weird, inexplicable, and coodie-ridden.

Funny how things don’t really change that much (well not the girl part, that changed pretty dramatically, I mean the lunch box thing). It’s Fall again, so for the storage industry, that means its school lunch box time again. The first day of school is now the first day of Storage Decisions, and every kid on the block has a new lunchbox.

I was so excited to see all those solid state disk lunch boxes – all with (I told you so two years ago) flash inside. Violin seems pretty cool – fast, dense, relatively cheap – and I love that they are co-opting the term, Tier Zero, which I (we) coined a few years ago. I have decided to farm myself out as an industry term coiner for hire. Let me know if you have a challenging concept that needs a catchy term – or better yet a three or four letter acronym. I am really good at creating techno-babble…but I egoistically digress…

Acceleration is another big lunch box theme this year – sorry I just don’t see how this is a product and not a feature. Overtime, all these specialty acceleration appliances converge into layers of value added services delivered on multi-service platforms. I wouldn’t have invested in this stuff myself, but perhaps there is a build and sell model that will work for a few of these startups. Like a Gary and Pacemakers lunchbox– I predict it will look dopey by Christmas vacation when they haven’t had another hit, but could be an awesome collectable by 2028. Ditto encryption – (Freddie and the Dreamers).

Thin provisioning is sort of the Rubberman/Fantastic Four lunchbox – stretches to fit. The problem I have with the idea of faking out the application and underprovisioning capacity is the holy hell to pay if something unexpected happens. I know, I know. Oh, Kirby, you are such a worrier – the statistical probability of the system melting down is negligible. It won’t happen, our algorithms are sound. Well maybe, but trying selling that logic this week at Lehman, AIG, ML, and Bear -- or the families on the London Eye when Rubbie lets the Sliver Surfer get the better of his temper for that matter. I like my bytes to be real bytes.

Cloud storage. Hmmm. I’m foggy on clouds, but didn’t we try this 10 years ago? Is this perhaps the Grateful Dead lunch box? What a long strange road…and all that? Or maybe the lunchbox with the big marijuana leaf on the cover? If our next new generation of storage marketing genii can finally convince enterprise customers to store their data on dirt cheap white box storage in questionably operated remote data centers – when we couldn’t convince them to store data on Symmetric systems in our professionally managed raised floors environments, then I will eat my SNIA founding member card, and my lunch.

Speaking of cafeterias–the food at Storage Decisions still reminds me of Lunch Lady Land.

Thoughts Aweigh...

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:12:49 PDT

Been on vacation. Finally got the boat sorted out and took it to Nantucket. Wow.

Finally found out where everyone disappears to after they take their storage company public...

Stopped along the way in MV and took David parasailing. Wow.

Been spending a lot of time thinking about virtualization - again. Still think Kirby's Law applies - now having given it some thought beyond just storage. But...here's the thing. Its not really the virtualizing itself that means anything. Virtualization is decoupling. Seperating logical access from physical location. a proxy. whoopdeedamndoo. It's the services you can inject into, or maybe more respectfully to Kirby's Law...under, the decoupling layer that matter. Services can be simple - provisioning, federation, migration of the virtualized resource for instance. Or they can be more complex and presumably higher value - directed access, security, cleansing, etc. And given enough horsepower, you might even host applications in the virtualization layer - CDP/Backup, Indexing, etc.

All of this presumes however that you respect Kirby's Law and virtualize resources from the layer above. Decoupling a resource from itself makes no sense, and injecting cross-resource services into an individual resource itself makes no sense either. What does that mean pracitically? It means you will eventually learn to decouple physical storage from servers and decouple physical servers from the network using seperate, purpose built virtualization/service delivery platforms. And it means that the services aimed at managing those physical resources will eventually come to reside in the service delivery platform not the underlying physical resource layer.

I'm right - but it may take a while for the physical resource layer guys to admit it. They will have to find another way to make money before they do.

Now, if I can only figure out how to beat them to it, I think there is 150 foot slip waiting for me at the Nantucket Boat Basin....

Eulogy for Norman

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:27:49 PDT

I realize this has nothing to do with storage - but you know what, this is my damn blog so I guess I can post anything I want, right?

My wife's grandfather died this week -at 94 bless his heart - and these words somehow found their way to my keyboard. I gave this eulogy today at his funeral, and enough perfect strangers came up afterward to tell me how it helped them, that I think maybe it will help you, too. If not, skip it and wait for more of my acerbic storage wit later...

Recollections on a Real Corker

My first introduction to Norman Appleyard’s larger than life persona occurred back in 1986. I was visiting my dear friend Jef Cole at his parent’s house on Cape Cod. Many of you may remember Larry and Barbara Cole from this church, and the Weston Golf Club.

During the visit, I casually mentioned that I had just met a girl – and I had an odd sense that maybe…just maybe… this was THE girl. Since she was from Weston – like the Coles – I asked if they happened to know her.

“Pam Rice…Pam Rice…” Larry said…Hey, Babb’s isn’t that Norman and Lillian Appleyard’s granddaughter?

“That must be Linda’s daughter! What a small world. Linda used to babysit for Jef when he was a baby. We’ve known them forever!”

Small world, indeed.

The conversation went on for an hour – with stories of weddings, funerals, golf and card games, and various happy and scurrilous activities going back 40 years. I began to get the sense this Appleyard clan was a pretty amazing family, led by a pretty amazing man.

I asked the Coles to put in a good word for me. Which they must have done, because I was soon invited to meet the Appleyards face to face. To the best of my recollection that first live meeting happened in their kitchen down at Quail Ridge.

I was terrified.

I felt like I was going on the most important job interview of my life.

And, looking back now, I guess I was…

So there I was all spruced up in my best Sunday-go-to-meetin’ blue polyester suit, my hair cut short, shoe’s shined, white shirt, red tie, sitting up strait in one of those little yellow bamboo chairs…

Shaking like a leaf, and sweating like a cold coke bottle on a Boynton Beach summer day.

And let me tell you, Normie was a tough interview.

He wanted to know about my family (who in reality were dirt-poor Maine dairy farmers)…

My education (incomplete and embarrassingly weak at the time)…

My athletic ability (simply pitiful)…

My aspirations in business (to pay my bills at the end of the month)…

My intentions with his granddaughter (well heck, I was 29 years old, she was (and still is) SMOKIN’ hot – so I think we all know what my intentions for his granddaughter were…

Anyway - at the end of an excruciating hour of my fidgeting in the chair - and fibbing most of my answers

Norman announced, “Well Pammy, it looks like you’ve got yourself a real corker here!”

I was not quite sure what a ‘real corker’ was, but from the way he said it, I surmised I had somehow passed the test.

I never dared to ask him, but I would like to believe that twenty odd years later he was still happy with his initial assessment of me – however misguided it might have seemed at the time

Looking back, he must have seen something in me; I did not even see myself. He was like that…

Over the years, I came to know Norman on many more levels – as an astute businessman, occasionally as a grumpy old sod, sometimes, surprisingly, as a sensitive new age guy…as a community leader, and, of course, as a family patriarch.

In distilling all my experiences with him, I see a few defining traits that, to me, made Norman Appleyard who he was:

The first is Intelligence – Norman was gifted with an utterly amazing brain. He had a near photographic memory – for names, for jokes, and for cards – as anyone who has played bridge against him knows only too well.

He loved to tell stories of playing high stakes poker with some of Boston’s shadiest characters all-night down at the meat market…

And - the way he told the story anyway - always coming home with tens of thousands of dollars in winnings.

Which brings me to Competitiveness – boy, oh boy, Norman loved to win – from Tuesday morning golf, to the daily word jumble, to the season ending championship hockey game, he was driven to win. Norman had the unique qualities of a winner – focus, passion, knowledge, commitment – and he did win, often.

He was Athletic - Norman had the right stuff – Fast twitch muscle fiber, amazing hand/eye coordination, body awareness, strong heart/lung mechanics, a natural golf swing – whatever that certain DNA magic is that makes an athlete, he had it in spades.

I was once in Hawaii on a business trip and got roped into playing golf with a group of Japanese executives.

I called Norman in a panic – as you know, I do not play golf –

“What should I do so I don’t embarrass myself?” I asked.

He laughed, “Well there, I’d say you’ve got yourself in quite a pickle, kid. About the only thing I can tell you is, keep your head down when you swing – and try not to hurt anyone…”

There was that famous Bobo sense of Humor.

To be honest, my first dinner with the Appleyards, that night, sitting in those little yellow bamboo chairs in the kitchen at Royal Tern Lane, was a bit of a shocker…

I simply did not know how to react when Norman started telling his unbelievably baaad jokes….

You know what I am talking about; I mean his jokes were baaaaad.

You could not help but laugh – boy, he knew how to tell a joke, clean or not - but phew, I must have turned ten shades of red that night.

And, of course, imagine my surprise when little miss Lillian over here starts matching him with her own, even worse, little ditties…

I mean…hello

I must have turned purple.

Well, I know this is supposed to be a somber occasion – but I hope you, and Norman, will forgive me for having a little fun at his expense – in fact, knowing how large a part humor played in his life, I am sure he already has…because he knew how to take a joke as well as how to tell one.

More seriously, when I think of Norman, the word Compassion comes to mind – Norman knew instinctively how to make people feel at ease, he drew you to him, he almost forced you to like him – just would not let go until he turned you into a friend.

Call it charisma, call it “just being a great guy,” call it whatever you want…he had it.

Norman loved people and knew how to make people love him.

Because first and foremost, Norman was a Leader. He understood he had been blessed with intelligence, talent, the willingness to work hard, and incredible good fortune.

He believed in giving back.

He was a leader in the community – as a founding member of this beautiful church, and even our own Broomstones curling club.

He was the leader of his family. To each one of us he gave his knowledge and guidance

(Ok, a LOT of guidance – especially when it came to running the water pump in Maine…)

And most importantly, he gave his love…

He taught each of us to lead, and he will expect no less of us now that his physical presence is gone.

Because in a very real sense, he really is still right here, right now.

Look around.

I certainly see him in each of you – in your undeniable faces, your voices, your values, and your love for each other.

He is living and breathing right here and now in his children, your children, and mine.

I see his amazing brain in my honor roll college student.

I see his talent and competitiveness in my multi-sport varsity athlete.

I see his irascible sense of humor (and so I hear, his natural golf swing) in my budding young Arnold Palmer with the long hair over there.

I see his compassion, love of others, and ability to instantly make friends in my beautiful and amazing daughter.

Yes, He is here. He will always be here. In us.

And I am sure you all agree, he still is and always will be a real corker.

Virtualize this…

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:16:47 PST

Interop, Las Vegas – the mere whisper strikes either fear or joy into the hearts of every high tech marketer in America. People in this business don’t set their watches by it, they plan their calendars around it. Vacations, meetings, training events, and even weddings (!) sway in accommodation for this annual IT pilgrimage to the Mecca of all things bright and brazen.

As we’ve discussed, I hate trade shows. Trade shows are dead or dying. And as previously stipulated, I am never wrong…

Well…

Is it possible to be a little tiny bit wrong?

Visiting Mandalay Bay for a quick in and out last week brought me up short.

Here 25,000 people, mostly card-carrying, paid-up members of Geek Nation (my favorite buyer persona), herded around cattle fields full of vendor booths sniffing crop loads of black boxes with blue blinky lights. Old geeks, hairy geeks, bald geeks, creepy tattooed geeks, geeks in jeans, geeks in suits, geeks in patent leather(!) all sniffing and poking, pawing at the ground, mooing and ahhhing occasionally. A technomarketers sweaty palmed dream come true.

Major OSG kudos to vendors who subscribed to my Dozen Dirty Tricks for Trade Shows – the place was overrun with booth models, golf simulators, free tee-shirts, and blinky-lights as vendor after vendor strove to be REMARKABLE.

A tiny training company with a 10x10 booth, and a tiny marketing budget takes home the coveted First Annual Kirby Award for best-of-show promotional remarkability this year.

On the first day of the show, their promo models proudly wore skin tight tees emprinted with simply, “Virtualize This…” (or was it Virtualize These...? I was afraid to look.) on the front, which generated a solid buzz.

They outdid their own buzz factor, and every other exhibitor large and small, when the next day, the models arrived in bikinis, and lounged around on beach towels in the booth, (their giveaway theme was an island vacation).

But, I have to admit, when they broke out the Twister game, I retired my tradeshow number to the rafters, and packed it in.

Flourescent shirts have nothing…nothing at all on this.

Maybe my OSG heart was a few sizes too small?

Maybe tradeshows do have some value after all?

Speaking of virtualization

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:20:40 PDT

The kids in my High-Tech Marketing class at Babson got me thinking about the impact of Second-Life like technologies on how we communicate with the market.

We were discussing a case dated way back in 2002 – before 25 million people created an alternative persona and started wandering around the virtual desert – back when it was pretty cool that you could buy a program that would let you build a simulated dollhouse or roller-coaster.

They pointed out that since Pong went on sale 34 years ago, the public has shown an insatiable appetite for improved interfaces, richer gaming experiences that move inexorably closer to simulating every bit of our sense and sensibility. Remember when Doom was cool?

There is a chilling snippet on YouTube for the PS-9 – a multi-sensory gaming experience best described as a handheld Holo-Deck – that puts this melding of mind and machine in perspective. Take a look.

It’s easy to dismiss Second Life as a bunch – ok, a huge bunch - of losers in first life looking for something virtually better in another try at the wheel. The story of the guy in NY who dumped his real wife for his V-wife is pretty sickening on the surface, but it’s no different than women falling in love with prison pen-pals and abandoning their families to pursue jailhouse marriage – which has been going on decades. It’s not the medium that makes nuts act nutty.

The recent CSI show about Second Life stalkers becoming First Life murderers was a great story, but it's unfortunate that millions of viewers who had never heard of SL were exposed to it as a dangerous playground for nut jobs and assassins – and as an aside I found it annoying that the writers twisted and abused the actual technology and interfaces for dramatic effect, but I digress.

I have a different perspective on where this is all headed. We’ve had chat rooms, Notes, and bulletin boards for-virtual-ever. Stripped of the gaming aspect (primarily economic competition) virtual lifespaces are simply a better way of interfacing, albeit much, much, much more useful and interesting.

The opportunity to communicate in this medium is becoming irresistible to marketers – me included. I want to hold all my tradeshows in SL – giving away virtual tee shirts at my massive and brightly colored virtual booth. I want every sales call to be made online. I want prospects to come into my SL store and demo my products (and please buy them in 1st life, thank you).

Already schools like Babson are holding classes in SL. Why not do our product training in SL? Virtual installs, including virtual screwdrivers…today we need to ship a truckload of gear to teach an onsite class…

Remember ‘Brickbats and Bouquets’? Live sessions at user group meetings like DECUS where customers ganged up on the vendor to tell them all the things they were doing wrong and a few of the things they were doing right…

Imagine how much richer the experience would be if we held online SL virtual vendor stonings…

The end of the world as we know it...

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:17:48 PDT

Here’s a fun read on the end of storage as we know it:

There's no drought in storage perfect storm

The technology solid state memory technology IBM is calling Racetrack Memory uses ‘magnetic moments’ to represent 0/1’s. According to IBM research, these magnetic moments are created by manipulating and detecting spin-polarized electrical current on a nano-thin wire. Taking us full-circle to wire spool audio recording, which dates back to 1878, when Oberlin Smith first recorded telephone signals onto steel piano wire.

The difference of course is that spintronics offers the promise of allowing all the data ever created to be stored on a fingernail…

Pretty much wipes out the storage industry.

Hopefully, I make it to the beach before then

Right Again...Wrong Again....

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:12:19 PDT

As we have previous stipulated, my timing stinks.

At Storability, my collegues and I refined and evangelized the idea of managed storage services. Hell, we invented it. The folks at Storage Networks notwithstanding, the idea of managing storage, rather than renting it, was ours. If not for a few economic meltdowns – both internal and external – we’d still be doing it today. The idea was and is sound, and a few folks like my buddies at Arsenal made it work long enough to hit escape velocity.

SNW this spring was a déjà vu experience. A new generation of soon to be OSGs yapped endlessly about managed storage, storage depots, and storage virtualization and used words like disruptive and innovation – gag me – I wrote the book on this stuff in 1999.

But, there is something very new happening that will and arguably is revitalizing managed storage – finally making somebody (not me, again) bazillions. What is now clear, that was very fuzzy in 1999, is the demarcation of static and transient data.

When we were mucking around offering managed storage services in 1999, data was live, valuable, mission-critical, potent stuff. No enterprise in their right mind was going to let us host their core application data on our equipment. No way. No how.

Back then, the demarcation point between static and transient was backup. When we ran a backup, we created a static copy of the transient (mission-critical data). While the data itself was invaluable, the static copy wasn't. The copy was important, but not vital. Management of a static copy of the data was outsourceable. Managed service providers offering backup services made sense.

Today, we got ourselves a new ballgame. Sure, sure mission critical transient data is still important, and still isn’t outsourced…and won’t be…ever. But, now we got a different kind of computing going on. Now static data isn’t necessarily created by a backup. It isn’t even created by the enterprise itself, static data isn’t owned by the enterprise, and it is now accessed by external users that don’t pay a dime to have their photos hosted or to download someone else’s grainy home-made porn.

Static data is now created and uploaded by people who don’t work for the enterprise.

Static data is now relatively worthless. Wow, that’s a switch. Worthless data.

Well, ok, it’s not worthless to the owner maybe, but essentially worthless to the enterprise storing it.

If Walgreens loses your vacation pictures, they lose the few pennies they might have charged you to print them, but what the hey – losing your files ain’t gonna crash the fed wire money funds transfer application, if you get my drift.

If youporn.com loses your…well, your whatever…what are you going to do, sue them? Oh, wouldn’t that make you a big hit at the next PTO meeting…

In the new world of ‘cloud computing’ web 2.0, SOA, virtual world of virtualness, IT models – individual static data files have little or no intrinsic value. The collective might and metadata extracted from the collective might, but your personally uploaded MP3 of Cartman singing ‘Sail Away’…un uh.

IDC called it ‘depot storage’, some people call it ‘Google storage’, whatever you call it, it’s going to be huge. Picture legions of pie-eyed, ipod-ensconsed, gen-z’ers pushing shopping carts full of disk drives, skateboarding up and down oceans of racks, stuffing drives into slots as fast as they can.

Backup? Ha, right. This stuff is static. It doesn’t change. Its worthless. You don’t back it up, you let it virally copy itself onto two, or three separate locations and hope for the best.

The whole model is perfect for managed storage.

In fact, I heard a rumor that Iceland plans to build massive geothermal powered and cooled datacenters to house all the world’s static files. Good for them – depending who wins in November a good number of US citizens will likely be sneaking across their borders to become illegal alien IT workers. Cold vodka, hot babes, big fish...so what's not to like about Iceland?

A boatload of old and new names is emerging to play in this new MSP bubble – err, revolution. Ooo, I know, let’s call it MSP 2.0… Equipment manufacturers, integrators, Telco and cable…it’s starting to look like 1998 ISP mania redux.

I can almost hear ghosts of executives past screaming, “We’ve got to start executing in Internet Time!”

I think I still have the original venture capital pitch deck from Storability saved on a floppy somewhere in the basement. I wonder if it’s time to dust it off and start making some calls…

VM varoooomm...!

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:34:00 PDT

Was happy to see that Autotrader is switching over from iSCSI to NFS for its VMware storage layer. Good to see that Main Street is catching on.

Remember Kirby’s Law?

Simply stated – the proper location for virtualization is in the layer immediately above the resources to be virtualized.

You want to virtualize a bunch of servers, do it in the network connecting the servers.

You want to virtualize a bunch of processor cycles, do it in the software running on the processors.

You want to virtualize a bunch of storage arrays, do it in the network connecting the storage arrays.

You want to virtualize a bunch of disks, do in the controller connecting the disks to the network.

I am getting a kick out of xen-vm-ness being so screaming hot – saves $5k per instance per year, green green green – gotta do, do, do it, hot, hot, hot…

ya ok…go nuts…have fun

This ain’t rocket science – we’ve been virtualizing stuff since the sixties. You would think the vm-zen-whippersnappers invented it – hell, I was writing about why virtualization made so much sense before most of those little sh*ts got their first Gulfstreams.

Now – fair warning. There are a lot of nefarious speaker-posters who for various self-serving reasons are going to tell you that virtualization of one particular resource should be done several layers above it, in it, or below it – server virtualization software should be used to virtualize disks or some such hoowee.

Nonsense. You still doing disk mirroring on your host servers, are ya?

Kirby’s law always applies. Virtualize your storage in the layer right above it – not in it, not two levels above it.

If you are smart enough to understand that files are the smallest manageable logical storage entity to have business context, then you may already know the right place to virtualize storage today is in the network connecting the file servers to the application servers. If not, you soon will – as soon as you realize how limiting 16TB really becomes in a virtual server environment, for instance.

If you are virtualizing processor power with some sort of vm-zen-ness – good for you. However, before you go down the path of connecting virtualized servers to virtualized raw disk, consider that doing so means that you are ultimately going to be reliant on server virtualization to virtualize the raw disk two or three layers below.

This abrogates Kirby’s Law, is probably dumb, and will ultimately lead you down an ugly dark dead end path inhabited by proprietary ghosts and prohibitively expensive goblins.

If I am right, in a few years, the world will realize that using iSCSI or FC SAN with vm-zen-ness is stoopid.

Are you still hard-coding access control into your COBOL applications? No Duh…

Was I right about Flash? Yup…

If you are virtualizing your server environment – use NFS as your storage protocol. It’s better, period, end of story. Don't beleive me, ask Nick Triantos at NetApp. If you are ok with limited storage capacity, let a NAS storage controller virtualize your disk and present NFS to your virtual servers. If you want to protect yourself from lock-in and the pain of provisioning beyond a single NAS controller, do your virtualization in the network connecting your storage arrays to your virtualized servers.

People this is simple stuff – do not let the vendor obfustication blind you to the light.

Obey the law.

If you think I am wrong, see previous posts. I am not wrong.

My only question is how do I put my money where my mouth is this time?

Where the demons dwell and they do live well!

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:23:35 PDT

Howard Marks writing for Information Week about Netapp's rebranding today called it "a stunning demonstration of branding over substance"

Wow - that's wrong. Here's why. And, I cannot for the life of me beleive I am going to defend these guys - but coming from me, especially, this oozes cred..

The reason for the rebranding isn't about the brand its about redefining the market - and, yeah, the n logo stinks. Did anyone see the re-runs of Spinal Tap on TBS this weekend? You can't look at the n and not think Nigel Tuffnell. BTW - does a Netapp filer go to 11? oops... I digress....

The point of the exercise is to reposition the company as a player in a larger market. Netapp is currently the dominant player in a finite market - their johnny-one-note tune is getting a little tired - and they need to move beyond selling storage (beyond NAS actually) and be viewed by customers as capable of solving problems in a larger market context.

After a while, even market leaders start running out of market. So as you reach the limits of stealing marketshare, you have to redefine yourself to enable customers to think of you when they have problems outside your previous niche.

Maturing markets don't often endure challenges to the market leader - so it's not a great surprise that customers don't seriously consider Netapp for block storage. EMC owns that space in the market's phrenology. Likewise NAS - Netapp owns that bump of market brainmap that responds when a customer thinks NAS.

EMC attempting to sell NAS, or Netapp attempting to sell block is a fool's errand. Both have to redefine themselves as offering solutions for a new larger market. In so doing, they have an opportunity to establish the definition of the future market in their own terms.

EMC was able to establish a foundation for moving beyond storage without a major rebranding - EMC as a brand element is a relatively empty vessel - it has no context other than that given to it by EMC itself. So it was easy to add the tagline, "where information lives" without rebranding the entire company - and poof, they went from a company that sold devices "where data is stored" to a company selling solutions "where information lives" - now their market includes all form of information management services, tools, devices, etc.

Network Appliance had a bigger challenge. Appliances have a definition in the mind of the market. They are boxes. So to support a larger future market that should include all forms of solution delivery - at least well beyond NAS and block boxes - they needed to establish a more loosely defined brand - but couldn't abandon their heritage either. So Netapp makes sense.

This effort is not at all without substance. It is a critical step in order for Netapp to move beyond the confines of the storage array market and become viewed in the mind's-eye of the customer as capable of offering solutions for more than storing data.

It will be interesting to see how Netapp defines that future market - one hopes it will be in a very broad context supporting vastly larger revenue streams, and not just another tortured umbrella excuse for continued shilling of sheet metal and spinning disks.

In any event - it was good enough to get Jay out of the OSG doghouse.

Shame

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:16:24 PDT

I am whimping out and taking Jay off the hall of shame.

To be fair, he has earned back his OSG priviledges. The rebranding, remessaging, repositioning exercise was well done (yeah, the logo is terrible, but who really cares?). He's done a fine job in a short time as CMO and I'm impressed with the results.

gawd that hurt...