Overcoming challenges, struggle and even humiliation can serve to both discourage and inspire. Having been fired from the company he helped to found, Steve returned and ultimately transformed Apple into much more than a niche manufacturer of “over-priced, over-designed”(as some would say) personal computers for artists and teachers. In the past 10 years, Jobs and his leadership team literally reinvented the way we use, and even think about, what a phone is and what it can do for us. They reinvented the ways in which we listen, buy and share music with the iPod. They even have changed the ways, and even the places, in which we work with the iPad.

I think we often forget that the technology that surrounds us is simply a set of tools, a means to an end, and at its most effective, technology should simply fade into the background so that we can get on to the real work or fun, we need or want to do. Apple’s products, Steve’s products, do that more often and more consistently than any I know of.

Steve Jobs was more than just a corporate leader who helped to design and market great technology, though, which is why millions of people are pausing today to remember his life. Steve inspired us not only with his products, but with his persona. Can you name another corporate leader that is truly inspirational? Does your wireless carrier’s CEO inspire you? Perhaps your bank’s President makes you want to do more than you thought you could? What about your country’s president? Being a leader is difficult enough, but being an inspiration is something truly different. Inspiration is also something very close to Hitachi’s core beliefs, in fact our corporate slogan, “Inspire the Next”, reminds us of our true role as an employee of this global, and extremely diverse, 100-year-old company.

True, leaders must have vision, but to be effective and to affect change, they must be people of action. One of the hallmarks of a great leader, perhaps the greatest, is to instill passion in others, to inspire other people to do great things for, and with, you and for others.

Perhaps in his departing this world, as in his life, Steve Jobs will inspire us and the next generation of great entrepreneurs and leaders to do better, do more, go farther…and to always “Think Different”. Part of me, a big part, believes that Steve is already on to his next great adventure, and ready to inspire others.

Wherever he may be…

From the predominantly text-based sites of the 1990s to the dawn of interactivity as Flash emerged, I’m sure we can all recall what early AOL sites or the bouncing balls across page headers looked like. It seems, in some ways, the past 20 years has passed in a flash.

In the early 2000s, Java allowed for more interactivity in page design but also most consistency across different browsers – this accelerated the creation of more pages and drove more people to the web – in other words, scalability.

If anything, the past 10 years has been about “mobilizing” the web – in 2008 for the first time, mobile access to the web exceeded desktop access. We want our information anytime, anywhere we happen to be, on any device we happen to use.

In the simplest terms, this is the business HDS is in – we enable companies, organizations and people to share, manage, protect and access the valuable information they want, when they need it, with the highest reliability and availability you can find.

Our solutions like the recently announced Hitachi Converged Data Center Solutions enable customers to deploy server, storage and networking infrastructure faster with more predictability. So that when someone in Hong Kong or Stockholm or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean needs to access their bank account or tweet from their smartphone, it just works.

Source: KISSmetrics

I’ve written before (here and here) about the competitiveness between Apple, Google and Facebook in the mobile markets, but in the cloud space other companies rule. Although Apple was one of the first major computing companies to offer cloud-like services,  it’s languished and not evolved while other services have been born or matured. Although Apple rebranded its suite of services as “MobileMe” in 2008, the relaunch was bumbled so badly that Steve Jobs fired the executive in charge of the launch on the spot and apologized publicly for a service that was “not up to Apple standards”.

In the three years since the relaunch of MobileMe, not much has changed. Meanwhile internet veterans like Amazon and Google have launched and developed user-friendly and powerful portfolios of cloud and streaming music services.  Meanwhile, upstarts like Dropbox, Box.net and others have created disruption by giving users lots of space in the cloud for cheap or free with easy file-sharing options. Online photo and video-sharing sites are now a dime-a-dozen too and the major ones work seamlessly across laptops, smartphones and tablets.

So, in this space, Apple is not the high-flying market leader it is in other segments (smartphones, tablets, etc). As more users come online, as more smartphones and mobile tablets are sold and as more of what we do everyday migrates to the cloud, Apple better get its act together. And they had better give something to users for free, like Google, Dropbox and others do.  (Not to mention seamless integration across OS X, iPhone, iPad and web.)

Five years ago, $99/year was “ok” to spend for a few GB of online capacity for a place to share photos and videos with family. Two years ago, $99/year was “hmmm… why am I spending this much again?” Today, I’ve got 6GB on Dropbox, 20GB on Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Facebook is where I send my parents and friends to view the latest family photo. I don’t spend a dime for any of it. But I still can’t stream my iTunes library to my iPod, iPad or any of the other 10 Apple devices in my home.

I guess we’ll find out next Monday if Cupertino has finally figured out the cloud. Stay tuned for updates after next week’s announcement.

What do you think? Will iCloud finally see Apple getting its act together? I would love to hear your thoughts and thanks for reading!

Enterprises ask a lot from their SAP deployments. They must be highly available, responsive to business needs, and able to accommodate limitless data growth. HDS provides the perfect complement to SAP with a unique combination of hardware, software and services that enable you to meet performance and scalability requirements at the lowest overall cost. HDS is the only vendor that can provide a single, virtualized and scalable storage and data management infrastructure for the complete lifecycle of SAP production, test and development, and archival data.

While SAP and Hitachi Ltd. have had a strategic alliance since 1994, the enhanced global technology partnership between SAP and HDS is focused on helping customers roll out new SAP deployments more quickly and at lower total cost with HDS solutions.

One of the coolest joint solutions we have is Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) with SAP NetWeaver® ILM. This solution is built to support multiple storage tiers of active and archived unstructured content, all on a single integrated and fully-virtualized platform. We’ve also developed a new starter package for SAP ILM, so customers can test ILM in a production environment at SAP’s data center with HCP, lowering the risk of the SAP deployment and reducing implementation time for lower total cost.

For enterprises that have existing SAP operations built upon HDS storage infrastructure we are focused on optimizing these environments for our joint customers and striving for faster conflict resolution when issues do arise.

While our partnership is built around technology, the HDS Global Solution Services (GSS) team offers expert SAP storage consultants to help design and implement a complete, flexible storage system that can support the entire lifecycle of SAP data through development and testing to production, archiving and support systems. These GSS consultants apply best practices and proven methodologies to ensure your SAP environment fully benefits from a dynamically tiered, virtualized infrastructure.

GSS also can perform storage or performance assessments, migrations and onsite or remote management and support. GSS also provides hands-on training classes at your site or at a Hitachi Training Center and can assist with SAP certifications.

Because SAP plays such a critical, and growing role in the health and survival of business operations, build your SAP deployments upon the most reliable, efficient and scalable virtual storage infrastructure available – from HDS.

You can read more about HDS solutions to help manage SAP environments and information.

I recently had an exchange with someone (let’s call him “Bob”) on Facebook about an article Techcrunch had posted about Flipboard being the iPad “2010 App of the Year”. He felt that apps like Flipboard and Pulse would “unfortunately…kill newspapers and serious writing even faster.”

That claim is a variation of “killing the messenger” when they deliver bad news; or perhaps insulting the messenger for the poor grammar of the message before killing them for delivering it.

I, for one, think newspapers are no longer useful, but there has never been more of a need (and opportunity) for serious writing to be created and shared on a global basis – it’s not an issue of quality, it’s an issue of scale.

Newspapers and Flipboard share a common lineage – they’re both mediums for finding and digesting information. Stone tablets and network news fall into that category as well. Flipboard, Pulse and similar tools are just that, a forward step in our evolution, much as large national daily newspapers, which to me seem so archaic (it’s yesterday’s news for gosh sakes!), were a forward step from local radio programs, word-of-mouth, and if you go back far enough…stone tablets.

In fact, Flipboard and Pulse to me are far superior to a printed issue of the Wall Street Journal or The Economist because they allow me to read more of only those topics that interest me, and do so more quickly, while enabling me to share the most interesting bits with friends and colleagues. Compare that to your average Sunday Times, a scissor and a copy machine to save the few articles relevant to you, and the US mail to share that “must have” recipe or interesting story with Mom. There is no comparison. Using Flipboard or Pulse is like having a newspaper of unlimited length delivered to you on-demand with only the content you personally find interesting.

Bob also commented that “quality writing” would suffer with the advent of Flipboard and real-time media. Again, to me this is short-sighted. Why would the method by which we consume information negatively impact the production or quality of it? If anything, I would think that today’s democratized media world where virtually anyone, not just the few who have access, can record a video or write a manuscript and post or publish it to the web immediately would encourage more individuals to do so and we’d discover even more quality writing.

The Proper Perspective

The perspective I favor is that the amount of data sources available to us today is exponentially greater than in previous generations and so the tools we use to gather, filter, preserve and share this data and information must adapt and change. As recently as 20 years ago, the local newspaper and nightly television news were the only sources most people had for gathering insight – today we can have access to virtually every newspaper, magazine or periodical published globally with a few clicks. Can you imagine trying to read all those sources in printed or physical form?

The tools we use have evolved (printed local newspaper vs. instant access to global content) along with us. Gathering raw data, information, and expertise has become much easier (in fact, sometimes it’s overwhelming), but perhaps at the cost of insight or knowledge. There is more “volume” but perhaps less understanding and so we need new tools.

In business, the stakes are even higher. Take for instance healthcare – the skyrocketing cost of administering care is one force driving providers and payors to seek new tools to manage the explosion of new types of patient information such as digital MRI and CT scans, or 3-dimensionally extruded full-body images, while at the same time striving to improve the quality of care. “Better care, faster”, could be the tagline.

Hitachi Clinical Repository (HCR) is one example of how technology can be used as a multi-faceted tool to address several challenges.  In many ways, HCR enables the medical equivalent of Flipboard – HCR aggregates data, information and metadata from multiple sources, and in turn, provides healthcare professionals with on-demand, instantly understandable information providing context, meaning and answers when and where they are needed. In a hospital or on top of a glacier.

Once the raw data is consolidated, HCR enables providers to have a “longitudinal” or historical view of a patient’s complete medical profile through a single UI from within a single secure digital archive.. Leveraging the power of Hitachi virtualization and the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and allowing for openness to integrate with any number of third party software apps, HCR illustrates how new tools can fundamentally increase the amount of raw data we can process while we search for the valuable nuggets of information therein. New times call for new tools.

You can read more about HCR here and how Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen, one of the largest hospitals in Austria, trusts Hitachi to store and protect patient records but also to provide the unique longitudinal view of patient’s medical history to help improve care and reduce costs.

This short post is to invite you to visit the HDS Facebook page where we have started a new feature, “Question of the Week” (QoTW). We are on week two of this feature, having kicked it off just last week. This week’s question is “How much HDS storage are you currently using?” Please be sure to visit and vote, or just engage with the broader HDS team.

If you have an idea for a QoTW, we’d love to hear it. These questions are geared toward the community of HDS users, customers, and partners, so if there are any questions for which you’d be interested in seeing the community response, we’re all ears. These questions don’t have to be exclusively tied to HDS products either – questions around industry trends and events are all fair game. Please leave your ideas in the comments below and thanks!

Now, back to business!

What I also take away from this infographic is how much our “connectedness” has become mobile. Although analysts’ estimates vary, most show about half as many mobile Internet users as fixed line Internet users today, but mobility is certainly the trend. One recent report I saw from Cisco forecasts an increase of 26 times in the volume of mobile data between 2010 and 2015.

I suppose what’s crystal clear is that data is really the raw resource of our economy and, increasingly, our lives. Information – data that has context, purpose and meaning for us – therefore, becomes more and more valuable to us, the more we create and share it, or consume it. That’s really the business HDS is in – protecting the most valuable asset businesses and individuals create.

I’d always like to have more time to read about and actually write about the blend of digital and natural ecosystems I spend most of my days within, but perhaps that’s a topic for another day, another blog. Or, I could just grab my iPad (gen 1), and Droid X and go sit in my favorite chair and surf away. Mobility is freedom.

HDS has made great progress in the past year. We will have an excellent group of HDSers with us including Hu Yoshida, Miki Sandorfi, and even some new faces. We hope you’ll follow the live stream of tweets and blog posts that emerge next week and find them interesting and educational.

You can preview the HDS Blogger Day agenda here and please check back at the same site next week for live blogging, tweets and more. You also can follow the event @ #HDSDay on Twitter.

The current list of distinguished bloggers making their way to Sefton Park, UK for the event includes:

• Chris M Evans – @chrismevans – www.thestoragearchitect.com
• Devang Panchigar – @storagenerve – www.storagenerve.com
• Greg Knieriemen – @knieriemen – http://infosmackpodcasts.com/
• Nigel Poulton – @nigelpoulton – www.nigelpoulton.com
• Jason Boche – @jasonboche – www.boche.net/blog/
• Fabio Rapposelli - @fabiorapposelli – www.juku.it/en/
• Enrico Signoretti – @esignoretti - www.cinetica.it/blog/
• Ilja Coolen – @icoolen – www.iljacoolen.nl
• Stephen Foskett – @sfoskett – www.blog.fosketts.net/

See you next week guys!

Apple arrives while Google evolves. Everything Apple does from products to events to their retail stores is well-designed and perfectly orchestrated. Whether you’re a fan of Apple or not, the company and its products evoke strong emotions and display a mastery for marketing and not simply selling “a thing” but an experience, a lifestyle and image. When Apple announces a new product or even an update to an existing product, like the iPhone 4 or recently announced iPad 2, it’s a major, often global, event time after time.

Taking a different approach, Google is the proverbial experimenter, releasing Beta versions of products into the wild, maintaining a very transparent Google Labs where users can test drive still in-development ideas. Google’s outward persona is very much like that of its engineers – a little rough around the edges perhaps, but brilliant, and always thinking, changing and evolving even with its “flagship” products like Gmail and Google Maps. Even the most important Google announcement in recent history, the announcement of Android 3.0, “Honeycomb”, felt more like a large conference call in a conference room than an event.

What’s remarkable to me is how quickly Google’s Android OS has evolved and matured, with 4 major versions being released in the past 15 months. Their ascendancy to capture the #1 spot isn’t as much of a surprise given their business model (more on that below).

Apple hasn’t exactly been sitting still, releasing a new version of its iOS software which runs across the iPhone, iPad and iPod devices, regularly, along with a new iPhone generation roughly every 12 months.

The two, however, have very different approaches to nearly every aspect of the product lifecycle and go-to-market.

Google leverages an agile development method to iterate their products very quickly, hold to short intervals between releases (typically 6 months compared to 12 or 18 for other vendors) and the result is a much more fluid product cycle. Google adopted an open source approach to the Linux-based Android OS, but is also open in how it licenses the OS to phone manufacturers. This results in dozens of Android models in nearly every conceivable shape, size, color and price point. Android-based phones are more customizable than iPhones with countless color schemes, font themes, UI layouts and even totally different builds of the core OS, called ROMs available for anyone to try.

There is basically one iPhone, but it single-handedly changed the face of the mobile industry when it was first introduced in 2007. Four years and four generations later, people still wait in line to get the latest and greatest when it’s released. Apple’s dedication to product design and user experience is both legendary and admirable, and the company typically doesn’t deliver until it’s ready (the introduction of the iPhone 4 and antennagate notwithstanding). The consumer is all but guaranteed a consistently great experience from day one with any Apple product, although the iPhone is often criticized as a closed product. Apple approves all apps before their release to the App store, for example, in addition to keeping 30% of the revenue from sales. It’s a curated experience – Apple promises you a great product, but you have to play by its rules.

There are, of course, downsides to both approaches. Apple benefits greatly from “1st-mover advantage” – getting a game-changing product (iPod, iPhone, iPad) to market ahead of its competitors and capturing significant market and mindshare. The longer intervals between its product releases, however, means that users have to wait a year or longer for the next shiny thing to come. The closed nature of Apple’s products also seems to be gaining more detractors – Wired magazine called the iPhone a “jeweled masterpiece locked in a sleek protective shell,” while others have derided design choices like the inability to allow users to easily change the iPhone’s battery.

Android was “a seed meant to grow a new wireless family tree.” And like a tree would grow to have dozens of different branches, or in this case, UI variants (Motoblur, HTC Sense, Samsung’s Life Smart). Google doesn’t charge manufacturers for its software, which makes it attractive for both handset manufacturers and carriers hence the dozens of Android-powered phones from nearly every carrier on the planet.

Choice is something consumers love, but maintaining consistency in how and when those different devices receive software updates has proven challenging and frustrating to users.When Google releases a new Android version phone manufacturers take it, test it and tweak it, adding their own customized apps or UI and make sure it runs across their many devices and then begin to push it out to the handsets. Even the app developer community has expressed frustration with the Android model. The difference is Apple is managing this process for a single device, while the Android ecosystem is much larger and therefore more complex and becoming more fragmented every day.

In the end, I think it comes down to choice and risk – choice for everyone across the value chain from developer to manufacturer to consumer. But also risk since less mature products are less stable and with a vendor who adopts an evolving technology, what you buy may more quickly become “yesterday’s tech”.

As a technology company do you pursue the “arrive” philosophy of making a big bang with your product introductions, trying to define and own a market niche and reap the rewards of 1st mover advantage? The developer and consumer are rewarded with a stable development environment, polished and a highly-refined product that “just works” as long as they don’t mind playing by the rules.

Or do you move quickly – constantly iterating along multiple branches, taking a long view but favoring time-to-market, flexibility and the law of evolution over the big bang? With this approach, consumers certainly have the benefit of choice in the market, but as the ecosystem may become more fragmented and costly for developers or partners to participate; is there enough justification (read: revenue) to sustain the pace?

HDS, I believe, tries to strike a balance between arriving and evolving to reduce the risk that our customers face but to also give them the most innovative products and solutions available without compromising quality. For example, the VSP is at once a game-changing product in what it enables our customers to achieve in terms of performance, efficiency and scalability but marks the 5th generation our market-leading storage virtualization engine and of the crossbar switch architecture that underlies it.

So perhaps there is both a life lesson and a business model lesson to be learned from Apple vs. Google…balance might be the key to happiness…just not necessarily market dominance.

What do you think?

Have you thought about the Apple / iPhone vs. Google / Android models and care to share your thoughts and perspectives on it?

Do you think Apple’s adherence to its “curated” design philosophy will continue to deliver win after win?

Will Google’s “open” approach and #1 smartphone position dwindle in the face of developer frustration and mixed user experience?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

The Honeycomb event  showcased some of the new features that Google is delivering to app developers and tablet manufacturers. A second major front in the war for your geek dollars is opening. It’s been iPhone vs. Android-based phones the past couple years, but now get ready for iPad vs. a slew of Android-based tablets from dozens of manufacturers. The ways in which we create, share and consume information continue to evolve and expand at a rapid and accelerating pace.

The consumer angle of this catches most headlines, but many enterprises and IT departments are wrestling with growing usage of tablets on their LANs. Tablets are ultra-portable, but bring with them a slew of new security and access challenges and will likely accelerate  support for and adoption of cloud services. Tablets are the next evolutionary step in devices that allow us to create, access and share information and mobility of access really demand the flexibility that cloud-based services and storage provide.

Beyond the headlines Apple and Google are very different companies with remarkably different approaches to product development, design strategy and go-to-market models. I’ll contrast Apple and Google’s strategies more in an upcoming post, but to simplify the differences here: I like to say that Google “evolves” – releasing new, incrementally improved versions of its products on an accelerated timetable; Apple, on the other hand, “arrives” – with 12- to 18-month intervals between product releases that are always launched to fanfare and marketed as “the next big thing” (and often are). In fact last week’s Honeycomb event looked like an impromptu meeting of a few dozen developers in a conference room somewhere in the Googleplex (which it pretty much was, I think).

Two separate, but optimized versions of Android will allow Google and the smartphone and tablet manufacturers it supplies compete more aggressively with Apple. That said, having spent part of my career in product management and having navigated through a major OS branch-and-merge project, the complexity (and cost) of developing, managing and marketing Android versions with different interop matrices, different features and different code will undoubtedly increase.

From a developer and consumer perspective Honeycomb looks really sharp and should offer another great platform to develop upon – and that might be just what undermines, or at least slows, Android’s momentum. Splitting the Android developer community along two code trees, two SDKs, OS versions with similar but different feature sets and divergent application libraries isn’t headline news, perhaps but will most certainly impact Android.

Whether this will be a positive or negative development over the long-term remains to be seen. While Google’s development agility and rapid iteration of the Android code has helped it quickly mature and become competitive with Apple’s iPhone, it seems to have reached a maturity and stability point in its lifecycle where Google feels a code split is more beneficial than risky. Google certainly doesn’t want to fiddle with the Android formula, which surpassed Apple in both market share for smartphone OSes in November 2010, and the influential mobile ad impressions for the first time in December 2010.

Google has promised to widen the gap between Android versions to make it easier on developers and device manufacturers – and probably less confusing for consumers with dozens of devices to choose from and more appearing every day. So it will be very interesting (and yummy) year for geeks with Honeycomb, Ice cream, iPad 2 and many Android-based tablets to compete with it.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on it as it plays out, and sharing my thoughts about what impact the tablet wars will have on IT and enterprise information.