Storage Sanity

Why We Are Patriots

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:27:05 PDT

Boston is a tough little town – always has been.

We face down Mother Nature’s worst - blizzards, hurricanes, fire, and floods (both water and molasses).

And human nature’s worst - unjust rulers, criminals, bigots, and downright scoundrels.

A decade ago, we faced the devil incarnate.

Every time we walk through American Airlines Gate B32, we get a shiver up our spine knowing the bastard himself was right there at 7am on September 11, 2001. Walking down the same jet way. Breathing the same air.

Yesterday, we faced him again.

Whose body he possessed this time - what color skin, what religion the poor fool followed, what country he lived in before the devil hopped on board – all that is irrelevant.

People don’t do this. Religions don’t do this. Countries don’t do this.

Evil does this.

Only pure, unadulterated, evil.

We Bostonians hate evil. We hate it in errant kings, corrupt politicians, crime bosses, busing bigots, gang bangers, preying priests, marathon cheaters, and baby-shakers.

Now we hate it in IED detonators, too.

Now, every time we walk through Copley Square (because we will, you bastard),

Every time we take our kids to skate on Frog Pond (because we will, you bastard),

Every time ride the elevator to the top of the Pru, take in a game at Fenway, or race in the Head of the Charles (BECAUSE WE WILL, YOU BASTARD),

We will get a shiver up our spine knowing you were here, on April 15, 2013, walking down the same sidewalk, breathing the same air.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a Patriot as a person actively opposing enemy forces occupying their country. We are patriots. Boston survives because we will not allow the enemy to occupy our town.

While we are rallying, ranting, raving, and proclaiming today - let’s please, please remember that this time, just like every other time, the enemy is nothing more, and nothing less, than evil itself.

We send our hearts to the injured, our pride to those who ran forward, our hope to the future.

A storytelling masterwork

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:14:43 PST

I'm really excited about the new focus on storytelling in marketing - Coke is doing amazing stuff - loved the race in the desert idea-and they're online storytelling presence is awesome.

We've been talking a lot lately as an industry about storytelling. I am a big fan of stories as marketing tools. It's so much more interesting and engaging experience a story rather than a pitch. Yesterday we saw a dozen great storytelling adverts on the Super Bowl.

None more powerful emotionally than The Farmer

Everyone - including Gary Sinese loved it. But I say, it's a lousy commercial, and a poor use of storytelling. Why? Quick, what product was it pushing? A pickup truck, good. Which one? Chevy? Ford? No wait...Ram Pickups? hmmm...doesn't Fiat own that brand now?

The commercial was well executed. Paul Harvey, great. But the connection of the brand to the story? Not so much. Chrysler could have woven in all the great stuff they have done for farmers over the years...it must be more than trucks, right? Well, a quick search doesn't show that much actually. Chrysler doesn't appear to have a farm equipment focus. In fact the only tractor related Chrysler connection was an old news story about Chrysler strong-arming a tiny mid-west tractor manufacturer into giving up its Plymouth Tractor brand.

Bottom line, great execution, but no brand hook other than repetition, equals lousy marketing storytelling.

Compare that to the NZ lottery story-ad here. This is an unforgettable story-directly and unequivocally tied to the Lotto brand. It tugs at your heart, makes you laugh, and provides a believable, yet completely unexpected plot twist that slams home the point and stabs the brand forever into your cerebellum - the lottery changes lives, it could change yours, and by god after watching this video, I bet a dollar to your donuts that you are going to go out and buy a ticket.

A true "storytelling as marketing" masterwork.

Looking forward to more, and better, marketing stories. Off to pat the dog...you can never be too loyal!

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:16:09 PST

One lousy touch point destroys the entire customer experience

One unsmiling attendant, one lonely French fry on the floor, one hair left in the hotel bathtub…one lousy little snag in an otherwise perfectly planned and carefully choreographed system is all it takes to collapse the entire enterprise into mediocrity. Whether you are paying millions of dollars in advertising to attract frequent flyers, or staffing the cash register at your own boutique, the experience you provide customers is a layered house of cards. One little puff of ill wind sends your entire creation crashing down on itself

Case in point.

On the flight home from our annual sales kickoff this week, I flew USAir. I flew them because the schedule was convenient. Check out their policy on customer service here. Nowhere in the policy does it say anything about creating excellent customer experiences, or even trying to be pleasant. And boy does their lack of attention to customer experience show.

Even though I am now gold level, they do not do much of anything to make me feel special like American used to do. They are not funny like Southwest, or fun like Jet Blue, but they do fly nonstop PHX to BOS, so I put up with it. Seats are hard, flights packed full, and legroom is so skimpy I had to get a smaller laptop to squeeze it in behind the seat in front of me so I could work on the plane. They have successfully achieved their apparent goal to deliver lowest common denominator of US airline customer service.

Last Friday, things sank a little lower, and it made me start thinking about the contentedness of customer experience touchpoints, and the great tragedy of one lousy interaction destroying the work of so many.

Coming up to the baggage drop off counter, I followed the instructions on the kiosk, picked up my ticket and waited patiently to be called forward by the attendant. My bag was overfilled with swag from sales kickoff, and weighed in at 53 lbs. The clerk did something unexpected; she took the bag, smiled at me and said, “We’re not really allowed to do this, so please keep it under 50 lbs in the future. Thanks for your business.”

Walking up to the club to wait for my flight, I was feeling good about USAir.

In the lounge, the attendant was extremely helpful, checked our flight status without asking, apologized for a delay, and even researched the cause. Walking over to a comfy leather chair in the lounge, I still felt good about USAir - even though the flight was an hour delayed, and I was going to miss a dinner date with Pam when I got home.

Finally on the plane, we faced additional delays. When the door finally closed, I pressed the power button on my RazorMax, and laid it face down on the seat waiting for it to shut down. The flight attendant came by checking for compliance, stopped at my row, looked at me, and barked, “Whattaya think I’m stupid? Turn it off.” I sheepishly flipped it over, showed her the splash screen shutting down, and looked her in the eye, expecting, I suppose, an apology.

When walked away without a word, I started felling pretty bad about USAir.

Later in the flight, after even further delays, the same flight attendant came by with an armload of beer and soda cans, delivering them to passengers two rows ahead. As she returned, my seatmate raised a hand to get her attention, asking, “Ma’am, may I have another beer as well, when you get a chance?”

At this, she barked again, “Listen Honey, I’ll get you another round when I bring the cart up in a few minutes, we are working as fast as we can.”

My seatmate dropped his hand, and looked at me. “I hate this airline,” was all he said.

At sales kickoff, we spent a lot of time talking about customer experience. We heard Nicholas Webb speak about the efforts great companies like In ‘N Out Burger, and Southwest Airlines put into ensuring every customer touchpoint is aligned, coordinated, and exceptional. He uses the vivid expression – creating delicious experiences.

And here was a vivid example – of how NOT to do it.

Everyone who works at USAir – all the baggage handlers, agents, pilots, mechanics, marketing teams, cleaning crews, everyone – was shafted Friday by one lousy customer touch point – one grouchy flight attendant ruined all their hard work that week. One simple little touch point collapsed USAir’s house of customer experiences for both my seatmate and me.

Why was she rude? – union rules, overworked, tired, poor hiring, poor training, or perhaps because she herself is treated like crap by her employer?

Does not matter. There is no excuse. Her failure brought down the system, and it was an incredible, avoidable waste.

Customer service is everyone's job, at every touchpoint, every time. I'll probably fly USAir again - but I am going to take a long hard look at JetBlue next time. Even though the schedule is not as convenient, they still smile once in a while, and they don't use those damn carts anymore.

99 and 1/2 Days

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:13:51 PDT

Alaskan crab fishing may well be the most dangerous job in the world, but being CMO is the most dangerous in the enterprise. The average tenure of a CMO is 40 months, or 1200 days. You'd be nuts to give a CMO a mortgage.

Today in my 99^th day at Limelight. I only have 1100 days left – to fix the marketing operations plumbing, fill the pipeline with a steady stream of opportunities, increase brand awareness, improve analyst relations, build a user community, build out international marketing, and develop ‘thought-leadership’ whatever the heck that means.

Maybe I should just jump overboard now and get it over with…

Nah. Having too much fun. And, I don’t get seasick. Much.

We did land at least one whale in my first 100 days. Today, we launch our new Digital Presence. And, like hitting one good crab-pot in a string, this one is going to make me get up tomorrow morning and keep fishing.

Check out http://www.limelight.com

Oh yes, it’s a radical departure. Written in a fresh, jaunty style that represents a brand direction for Limelight – confident, approachable, down-to-earth, no BS, but with a sharp sense of humor – it’s good fresh digital bait.

We hope you find our new online digital presence engaging, informative, and perhaps even enjoyable. We’re particularly pleased with the new corporate video – filmed with help from our Tempe employees just last week. You will find it on the Limelight Video Player embedded in carousel frame #6 (Make It Stick.)

The new site tells a story – The Story of the Customer’s Story. It’s about the challenges people face in getting their stories across in today’s digital marketplace, and the value we provide in delivering stories. Every Way. Every Where.

The medium itself stands as a testament to our message. We didn’t just eat our own dog food on this project; we got shipfaced on our own champagne!

Starting with a full-on Digital Presence Assessment in partnership with Limelight Global Services, we stared at our digital navel, and it was not a pretty site.

Getting the story straight was no smooth sail, either. We dumped plenty of fish guts over the whiteboard rails before limelight finally dawned on marketing’s marble head – it ain’t about us, Salty. It’s about the customer, and the customer’s story. We’re just digital bookbinders, Mate.

Once we got that net untangled, the rest of the work was setting the pots. We built the site on Limelight Video Player and Dynamic Site Platform – our SaaS based web content management system. As a long time user of crusty in-house CMS systems, let me tell you this is a thing of beauty to a wave-worn marketing geek like me. I spent days in this CMS, all by my lonesome – editing, writing, posting, fixing – and believe you me, if I can do it…well, so can you.

We integrated social media and hosted the whole thing in our Agile storage cloud. We bridged the site with virtually every one of our internal business systems - the new UCS system, Marketo, SFDC, Live Chat, our NASDAQ microsite, and our support systems.

We did nothing – not one thing – special or difficult to get the site to run on any mobile device anywhere in the world. Try it on yours. Pure magic.

The new site uses, or will soon use, virtually every service and interface Limelight has to offer. It is a holistic example of what we do for our customers.

It is Orchestrate.

We hope you enjoy this first step in Limelight’s digital presence transformation.

For now, it’s back to cutting bait – only 1099 days left in this fishing season.

Wish me luck!

PS - We hid a few surprises around, just to keep things interesting. Hope you get a smile or two when you trip over them.

Why Marketing is So Damn Hard Nowadays....

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:43:07 PDT

Talk about a Limelight bulb going off in your head...

Take a (close) look at this infograph compiled by our friend and colleague Daniel Webster:

Are You Awesome?

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 10:59:28 PDT

Well...not you yourself...of course, you are awesome...

But is your marketing awesome?

Are you engaging your online audience with sizzling, relevant content?

Are you consistently presenting them with an awesome digital experience on every type of screen and device they want to use?

Are you leveraging video and multimedia to improve engagement, lengthen sessions, and tell more compelling stories?

Today - buyers are making 80% of their decisions before they ever talk to a salesperson. And they keep searching, chatting, testing, and exploring at every stage of the buying cycle. With a tablet or smartphone in hand,
your customers are constantly comparing you to every other option and competitor in the market - right up to signing a purchase order, clicking the buy button, or stepping up to a cashier - and then forever after.

Yikes...

To win in today's markets, you must present an awesome digital presence on every
channel, on every screen, on every site - ALL THE TIME.

And you can't control what others say, write, pod, vblog, or rate you on

Presenting a comprehensive, consistent, effective digital presence is hard...

So are you?

Awesome, that is?

Putting Digital First - A guest post from Jason Thibeault

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:01:52 PDT

Putting Digital First

A Brilliant Guest Post by Jason Thibeault on August 10, 2012 in Business, Hypothesis, Philosophy

In my role at Limelight Networks as the Sr. Director of Marketing Strategy, I have been deeply involved recently in the company’s significant market pivot around digital presence management. As I participated in an internal assessment of our own digital presence (which I have been blogging about on the Limelight website) and had conversations with smart people, I came to realize what makes a successful digital presence.

And it might not be what you think.

As companies foray into the digital ecosystem, reaching new customers around the globe and, in general, helping to unite the world in a digital economy, they adopt tools and services that they think represent a fundamental change to their business. Facebook pages. Twitter feeds. Blogs. Digital marketing. “We are changing the way we do business,” they say. “Through our online store and social media efforts we will transform our company into a digital entity.” All that’s fine and dandy, but it’s really just a new paint job on an old car. In order for companies to be truly successful in the digital economy, to truly have an awesome digital presence, they must fundamentally transform. Digital must come first.

Before I qualify that last sentence, let me explain what it means to be digital.

Being digital means that real-time is a state of mind. The blog and twitter feeds are not just extensions of existing ways of thinking and doing. They are a way of thinking. They are a mode of being. Many companies reserve tweets, for example, to represent “meaningful” announcements such as the link to a new blog post or a product offering. But for those who are digital, Twitter represents an ongoing conversation. It’s not one tweet one day and another tweet another day. The same goes for Facebook, Reddit, blogs, and any other online service that supports bi-directional communication. Being digital is about actively starting and participating in the 24/7/365 conversations that permeate today’s global web.

Now, back to that sentence.

For business, putting digital first means that internal processes and ways of thinking must change to reflect the ongoing conversations that are part of beingdigital. Organizational units within companies must flatten. Cross-functional teams must rise. Because if there is a single “gatekeeper” of the conversation within a company (i.e., typically a marketing department) then the company hasn’t done anything to truly become digital. And what if the marketing department left? How would the company continue to participate in the conversations if no one else is truly digital?

Putting digital first then is less about building and enabling digital marketing campaigns and strategies as it is about changing the way companies see themselves and their role in the growing digital economy. And companies that embrace digital first will have an awesome digital presence as a result because the importance of the components that make up that presence will be on equal footing with traditional processes. The perspective on social media won’t be a “hey, we have to tweet some stuff about this new product.” The digital conversations about the product across web, blog, social media, and even large screen will be no different from newspaper clippings and press releases. But it’s important to understand that putting digital first isn’t about one medium over another. It’s not web vs. print. It’s about how the digital world is changing everything. Where we once talked about “messaging to customers”, being digital means “communicating with customers.”

Every company will have people who are already digital. They have personal blogs and twitter handles and are actively engaged both inside and outside of their industry in the ongoing flow of digital discourse around the world. They are agents of change and the “digital virus” they represent has the potential to change the fundamental nature of business until there is no distinction between online and offline, between real and digital.

Are you digital? Are you an agent of change? Has your company put digital first?

The answers to those questions may just determine the success of your company’s digital presence…and long-term viability.

Who’s Side Are You On?

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 18:06:38 PDT

How does your customer service process approach a problem?

On the side of the customer, or your company?

If you start on the side of your customer, you seek to quickly understand and appreciate the concern, put yourselves in their shoes, empathize with the impact on your customer, and empower your employees to do what’s necessary to make things right.

If you start on the side of the company, you defend your processes, systems, and employees. You attempt to convince the customer that they are wrong to be concerned. You try to push the problem customer aside. You attempt to baffle or frustrate them with complex rules of engagement. You blame the system. You tell them you are sorry, but there is nothing you can do.

As consumers, we love the first, and hate the second. And, even in our enlightened, customer centric world, both approaches still abound. Look no further than the airlines for vivid examples of both.

If your business isn’t all you want it to be, take a hard look at who’s side you are on when the chips are down.

Digital Presence?

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:08:34 PDT

Frankly, content delivery seems pretty far outside my wheelhouse.

I am, after all, an infrastructure marketing guy. Sure, I have created or helped to create my share of new market categories – managed storage services, continuous data protection, file virtualization, application delivery networking, and even multi-vendor storage itself, way back in the early days. But, my forte’ has always been selling infrastructure to IT-heads. What the heck do I know about content delivery?

Ah Ha!

As marketing leader, my job is to ensure my companies excel in two critical areas – demand generation and brand awareness.

I know a hundred CMOs and VPMs who share similar objectives.

In order to achieve those two objectives, I push my teams to ensure that our online presence – our website, mobile, social, community, email, every touch-point we have with the market – is the coolest.

My marching orders are simple – “Make us cool, dammit! I don’t care how, just make sure we have the coolest online presence of any company in our market.”

I know a hundred other CMOs and VPMs who’ve demanded the same.

To be fair, I don’t have a good KPI metric for coolness, but nonetheless, I demand it from all my marketing teams.

And I am often disappointed.

The website is never dynamic enough. Social media always feels like a bolt-on. Our use of video and other ‘cool’ interactive media seems sporadic at best. We're still writing in white papers and hanging PDFs on our site, rather than writing for online readers. Our community site rocks, but it isn’t unified with the rest of our online presence, and always seems like a distant, albeit very cool, cousin.

Frustrating.

But more than just frustrating, this lack of online cohesion, this lack of digital presence ‘cool’ is a critical business failure that might be a contributing factor to the high rate of turnover at the CMO level.

Recent research tells us that B2B customers now accomplish 70% of the buying process without ever engaging a salesperson. Customers now vet technology, consider options, make choices, and even make purchase decisions with no direct interaction with a company other than the company’s online digital presence.

So as a CMO, my first question has to be "How can I quickly create, deliver, and manage a monstrously cool online digital presence spanning all my company’s touch-points across web, mobile, social and living room channels?" It's not a lack of skill or will on the team - the problem stems from a lack of tools, technology, and process to support the 'cool' objective.

I believe every organization that operates online must address this challenge of managing its Digital Presence, and making it 'cool'. As consumers and other stakeholders demand their digital interactions move fluidly across those web, mobile, social and living room channels, organizations that want to survive online must project a unified, integrated digital experience.

Users demand performance and consistency in their digital interactions with vendors, suppliers, and other organizations, yet the realities of the market demand that this digital presence be delivered simply and cost-efficiently.

And, I know from personal experience that the problem affects organizational functions well beyond IT, and it is now becoming a strategic top-level issue for the enterprise.

Further, I believe billions of dollars will be invested in the next few years to address this challenge. If fact, I am counting on it.

Digital Presence Management isn’t one function or process. DPM is not content delivery, but content delivery is a critical component of DPM. DPM is not video, or content management, or website platforms, or transcoding, or analytics, or acceleration either, but each of those is a critical component of DPM.

I’ll will be sharing a lot more about what DPM is (and isn’t) over the next weeks and months, but for today, know this…Digital Presence Management is awesome-sauce cool, and it is here-to-stay in a market-making, earth-shaking, stick-a-fork-in-it BIG way.

(Meaning fluorescent green shirts and massive lime-green bouncy-balls can’t be far behind, right?)

Hey Wendy...I’m baaaack!

Eight Arms and a Smile

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:46:15 PDT

“Spiderman, Spiderman, Does whatever a spider can.”

From day one, David, we described you as “Eight Arms and a Smile”, a whirling dervish of cheerful activity.

And that’s certainly as true today as it was 18 years, 5 months, and 30 days ago when you made your first splash into our collective laps.

Literally…a splash.

In fact, Aquaman might have been a better Superhero meme for you if your bursting-forth-still-in-your-bag-of-water birth was any indication of your future.

That was quite a show…even the Doctor laughed.

We couldn’t know at the time what you had in store for us, but that memorable birth certainly gave fair warning that whatever you were going to do, you were going to do it with panache…and splash, and a smile.

Born without an ounce of fat – which most of the people in this room secretly envy you for, by the way - you always loved jumping in the water, but you were so thin that the water made you cold. Did you ever finish that half-mile swim at Camp Kaybeyn? I don’t think so. No, for you, the joy was in the jump and splash, swimming was just a means to get to the ladder so you could climb out and jump in again, and again, and again.

“Can he swing from a thread? Take a look overhead.”

Ah...climbing…climbing out of the crib, climbing up the stairs, climbing out on the roof of the house, climbing up on the roof of the school…make that school(s)…

You scared us half to death. We tried everything to hold you on the ground, but nothing worked. Growing up you must have thought your name was “DAVID!...Get Down From There This Minute!”

And when you weren’t climbing, you were consumed with puzzles. As an infant, you solved simple jigsaw puzzles with amazing speed, then bigger ones with hundreds of pieces, and finally 1000s of piece puzzles would lay on the dining room table for days. So, it wasn’t actually too surprising to us anyway, that you earned the Physics Achievement award from Wayland High.

(We’ll talk about that final Calculus Grade later…)

From jigsaws, you moved onto video games – a more complex multi-dimensional set of puzzles. You and I played together for a time. We had so much fun saving princesses and fighting dragons. At first, you followed me down through caves and up mountains in search of weapons and treasure. When we came to a monster, I would yell instructions, telling you how and when to fight.

Then a funny thing happened. You jumped ahead, finding caves I never saw, figuring out how to kill impossibly powerful dragons, I could not. Soon, you were yelling at me to hurry up and fight.

At first, I suppose I resisted…wanting to be the leader, wanting to protect you…but I soon realized you were not only right, you were far more skilled and wise, and courageous than I.

I realized rather than protecting you, I was holding you back.

So I let go, and you climbed…

With all eight arms and a smile.

"SpiderMan, SpiderMan. To him, life is a great big bang up. Whenever there's a hang up, you'll find the SpiderMan."

And, yes sure, you fell a few times. The dragon got you once or twice. You fell off your bicycle a few times, and you stubbed your proverbial toe now and then.

As we all do.

But no matter what brings you down in a game or in life, you always pick yourself up, dust yourself off, flash that trademark smile, and happily drag around whatever arm, leg, toe, or finger is bandaged, plastered or splinted at the moment - proudly displaying your boo-boo’s for all to see. Cut, bruise, bump, fever, gash, break, pull, tear, sprain – we saved all your emergency room and hospital records up in the attic, in big boxes, lots of them.

And maybe there is a police report or two in there as well?

“Hello, Mrs. Wadsworth? This is Sargent O’Malley, down at the station. Yes, Ma’am…David’s…ah… visiting with us…again, Ma’am. He’ll have to go home. Please come by pick him up.”

Seriously, that’s an old joke – we started telling it when you were about 8 years old. Thank God, it’s still just a joke. And let’s keep it that way, Bub.

Because - apologies to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson - Ladies Decidedly Do Not Love Outlaws…

And above all, you, David, love, love, love, LOVE the ladies.

When you were five, we’d get calls from frazzled preschool teachers, “Mrs. Wadsworth, David was found hiding in a closet with Mary Anne MacGillicudy Again! This time he’ll have to go home. Please come and pick him up.”

At ten, it was, “Mrs. Wadsworth, this is Ken up at Camp Kabeyun. David and a friend snuck out of their tent, walked a mile through the woods in the dark, and were found hiding in a girl’s tent at our sister camp…NowIwannalaya. Again. This time he will have to go home, please come and pick him up.”

At 15, we got, “Mrs. Wadsworth, this is Marcie from the Schenectady Curling Club. Last night, David unscrewed the screens in his hotel room, crawled out on the roof, and was found hiding in Mary Anne MacGillicudy’s room. Again. This time he really will have to go home. Please come and pick him up.”

But no matter what, no one can stay mad at you for long, Wavy Davey in the Navy.

From your whoopee cushions, to your whopping stories, to your infamous full-moons, you know how to make people laugh.

Last summer, as some of you know, we had a bit of localized ‘family tension’ at our house. In the midst of one particularly loud and gnarly disagreement, David came downstairs, buck naked except for a pair of boxers he had strategically rolled up into a makeshift thong, wearing a white Michael Jackson glove on one hand, holding a phone to his ear in the other. He dances in to the middle of the argument, twirled around, moonwalked, and shimmied across the family room. Then smiled, slapped his naked butt-cheek, and disappeared back upstairs.

We all fell on the floor laughing.

Which pretty much put an end to the argument…that day at least...

And, which pretty much sums it up, now.

David is a sprite,

A joy,

A love,

A spider,

A splash,

A wiggling, naked, butt-cheek, just begging to be slapped.

We love him. We worry about him.

We love him. We laugh at him.

We love him. We want to hold him back.

But we love him,

So now, we let him go.

And we pray he climbs.

With Eight Arms and That (big beautiful) Smile.

Adam Ezra - Get out of my head!

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:32:55 PDT

I just asked Pandora to set up an Adam Ezra Group station – the first song it played was by Rob Thomas, which made me smile in an ironic sort of way. I guess it works – similar vocal textures – but if Thomas is a star, and that fact is hard to argue -- then Ezra should have his own private constellation.

Apparently, the music genome project cannot discern the songwriting difference between:

Don't you feel that sunshine?

Telling you to hold tight
Things will be alright,

try to find a better life

And

I've had notions ‘bout this skeleton town

One lucky storm could blow the whole place down

And there you're standing with your eyes like mine

Dare it all to take us down this time

But you will.

Ezra may be the most talented singer-songwriter to come along in decades. You will download Ragtop Angel. You will listen to track #4, Takin’ Off. You will do it now.

Seriously, not since Greetings from Asbury Park, have I been this in love with a new talent and a new album.

Edwin

We caught Ezra opening for another of my favorite singer-songwriters, Edwin McCain last fall at Showcase Live in Foxboro. I have been a huge Edwin fan since way before the schmaltzy wedding songs. I discovered him playing for free in 1995 at Northwestern University. He looked about 20 years old, belting out original tunes with a voice box that sounded like the alien love child of Billy Joel and Joe Cocker. Forget the “I’ll Be” crap, and download his first album, Honor Among Thieves. Listen to Jesters, Dreamers, and Thieves to get a sense for this guy’s early talent.

Edwin, like me has a few more years, and looking in Tyler’s proverbial mirror, a few more lines on his face, now. He can still sing, and his band rocks the socks off a place, but that night last fall, Edwin was sick as a dog, and The Adam Ezra Group burned up the stage before poor McCain and his 101 degree fever ever got a chance.

Ezra’s a little cracked – barefoot, waist-length dreads, lots of flannel. He’d get lost quick in a Occupy Anyplace crowd. Ok, maybe you don’t want him showing up at the door to date your daughter, but good gawd, this guy can play. He’s warm, funny, frenetic, and fun to watch. More impressive is the talent that oozes – literally and figuratively – from every pore once Adam gets wound up. The expression in his voice is exhilarating and heartbreaking all at once. The fingerpicking is odd, syncopated, and well…just odd, but it works. Ezra says he keeps glue-on fingernails on his right hand. As I said, odd.

I first heard about him from my kids – of course. He grew up in Wayland, and went to our high school. Every winter, the school admins bring him back to talk to the kids, and put on a little a show at the school. All my kids are fascinated by the fact that he’s from their town and school – but that doesn’t mean much to me. Sammy Adams – the white hip-hopper who stormed iTunes a couple of years ago – also graduated from Wayland High with one of my sons.

No, the reason I have listened to Ezra’s new album non-stop for two weeks – have not listened to another note of music since Lily brought it home from school – is simple. I can’t stop. It’s like an itch, some weird hunger. I dunno, maybe this is how alcoholics and drug-addicts feel. I hear it in my head when I am not listening, so I listen to make the itch go away, but that just makes the itch worse, and whole cycle starts again.

Honestly, I am beginning to hate the bastard. Dammit all, now I have to go listen to it again.

Ya, it really is that good. Remember the first time you heard Blinded by the Light? 4^th of July? Rosalita? That voice, the sax? It’s like that, but different, maybe better, because its 100% totally authentic. There’s no posture, no pretense, no attempt at stardom. Ezra plays for the same reason I can’t stop listening, and you won't either – he just can’t help it. If he tried to quit, his head would explode. He plays because he has no choice. The music pours out of him.

Listening in the car, you’ll be lucky not to hit something. Your fingers will dashboard drum, your feet will tap the brake and gas, you’ll be singing out loud at traffic lights, and your neighbors will look at you funny. He’s odd, they’ll say.

But you’ll sing out anyway, until your voice cracks, and your eyes tear up.

Because he is that good.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

IT!! - Johnny Angel Wendell

noreply@blogger.com (Kirby Wadsworth) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:31:14 PDT

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, 26 Jun 2012 21:32:04 PDT

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) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:19:12 PDT

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 if you are trying to roll a rollerboard down the aisle, we all know 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.

Rule 5 - If there is 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 have 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 carry on under the seat in front of you, 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 - I said, 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 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, or idiots who ignore Rule #3 will smash their crap into you.

Rule 9 - Once everyone is seated 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. Sit down.

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. Do not drag your rollerboard up the damn aisle smashing it into every empty seat on the way. Pick it up, carry it off the plane and step behind the wheelchairs waiting on the gangway. (there are always wheelchairs on the gangway). Step out of the path of passengers behind you, pull out the handle, arrange yourself and your luggage. When you are settled, cautiously reenter the stream of people headed up the gangway. Keep walking 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.