The Saltworks

Are we prisoners of our preconceptions?

Joe Martins — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:13:21 +0000

We wish to express our gratitude to Jonah Lehrer for his permission to share an excerpt from Chapter 7, The Brain Is An Argument, in his 2009 bestseller “How We Decide“. To fully understand the context of the excerpt I recommend that you read the book. Mr. Lehrer wrote, “There’s something unsettling about seeing the brain [...]

How will Iron Mountain respond to Elliott Management’s letter to its BoD?

Joe Martins — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:32:24 +0000

Chris Mellor over at The Register published an interesting article this morning titled “Iron Mountain Hit By Hedge Fund Attack” in which he described the effort of Elliott Management’s Paul Singer to allegedly persuade Iron Mountain to consider forming a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). At least two of the nominees for IRM’s Board of [...]

Revisiting the Value of Information

Joe Martins — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:26:18 +0000

Back in November 2008 we published an opinion about determining the value of information titled “Outcomes and the Value of Information“. Recently, Martin Sumner-Smith published a post titled “The Implicit Value of Content is Realized Through Business Process” to his blog Martin’s Fulcrum Musings in which he talks about the impact of process on the [...]

Understanding the real cost of your business applications

Joe Martins — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:01:12 +0000

Alan Pelz-Sharpe of the Real Story Group, a very reputable analyst firm serving the web and enterprise technology markets, recently published a post titled The High Cost of Support about the annual support fees levied by CMS vendors. In response to Alan’s post I wrote:

On information sharing and value generation

Joe Martins — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:57:06 +0000

Jack Vinson of Knowledge Jolt with Jack recently published a post titled Share it, don’t just store it. We share Jack’s perspective that just storing information is pointless. The value is in knowing what you have, where it can be found and putting it to use. In response to Jack’s post I wrote:

Myopia and self-interest hurt government, business, community and family

Joe Martins — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:48:36 +0000

Vinnie Mirchandani over at Deal Architect wrote another great post titled Alarming IT data points. In it he discusses everything from external dependencies and a lack of innovation at IT companies, to what he believes to be out-of-control costs and a shift in CIO focus. In response to Vinnie’s post I wrote:

Relationships are broken, not just in Big Tech

Joe Martins — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:53:21 +0000

Vinnie Mirchandani over at Deal Architect recently wrote a post titled Big Tech is Broken - badly. In it he wrote that he has “never seen this much acknowledgement that our big technology companies are inefficient organisms” The disappointment and discontentment (with product and process) has always been there. I experienced it nearly every day in my former [...]

Devil’s advocate on open source

Joe Martins — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:17:30 +0000

I just finished reading Mark Taylor’s recently published blog post Open Source: It’s not just cheap!–one of thousands written about the benefits and pitfalls of open source software. In his post, Mark referenced a Frank Scavo quotation from Chris Kanaracus’s July 2010 article about Open Source ERP. Apparently Frank, an IT consultant, wrote the following comment [...]

Storage Awareness: Minimize the economic impact of your business applications

Joe Martins — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:49:46 +0000

Eight years ago my career collided with reality. By way of serendipity–following an unplanned career change–I discovered I had been living the last decade in a product development bubble. Two thousand and two was the year I had transitioned from building information management systems to managing a small storage industry analyst firm. Up until 2002 I [...]

ILM is alive and well

Joe Martins — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:31:47 +0000

I have always enjoyed speaking with David West. He’s one of the relatively few people within the storage industry’s sell-side who genuinely seeks to understand information management - the industry from which I leapt into storage. After I read David’s recent blog post ILM: What’s Old is New Again, in which he wrote about the return [...]