Storage Nation

The other news item I alluded to in the previous post is a little company called Nasuni.  I chatted with them at the urging of the smartest PR person in the business, Judy Smith at JPR Communications, a couple of days ago and I thought I would share my views here. Here is a pretty picture

It's most definitely an uncomfortable topic for many of the IT organizations I meet with on a regular basis. More often than not, I find myself asking how IT governance is done in their organization? And I've begun to see a very strong correlation between good governance and good IT.

So much of the IT infrastructure discussion today is focused on costs.  Paradoxically, the majority of IT time seems to be spent on the most commoditized aspect of infrastructure: hardware costs. Software costs seem to get less attention, even though they're arguably more amenable to IT negotiations.  More interestingly, improvement of operational processes seem to get almost no attention at all.

In case you didn’t see the articles by Chris Mellor or Jean-Jacques Maleval, Dell looks likely to be picking up the IP of Exanet for $12M.  Investors had already pumped $70M into Exanet to produce a file system/NAS clustering technology, but the company applied for Chapter 7 in December, having failed to ink a $20M investment arrangement from, you guessed it, Dell. I’m

We've now moved beyond the vision and enabling technology discussion with private clouds.  We're seeing more and more IT organizations start to put adoption strategies in place. And, with large numbers usually comes inherent patterns . In this post, I'd like to talk about the three primary adoption models we're seeing, and some of the context that leads to their choices

So many things are tantalizing mixes of unknown opportunity and unknown risks.  And, certainly, for many enterprise IT organizations, the topic of "cloud" certainly fits this description. You can't hide your head in the sand.  You can't plunge headfirst into it and ignore the obvious risks. In between these two extremes is the notion of governance: a policy-making function that attempts to assess opportunities and risks in a dynamically changing environment.  Several years ago when I was doing the corporate social media strategy thing, I found that a good governance model can accelerate change.

I'm pleased to see that EMC's getting more and more credit for innovation: not only for our technology, but our overall strategy and business model as well.  We're even getting some nice credit for how we've embraced social media as a business tool. Today, I'm going to take on the relatively sensitive topic of "marketing" in our industry.  And I'm going to openly share with you how EMC is approaching innovation in marketing. I know, that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's not.

I'm pleased to see that EMC's getting more and more credit for innovation: not only for our technology, but our overall strategy and business model as well.  We're even getting some nice credit for how we've embraced social media as a business tool. Today, I'm going to take on the relatively sensitive topic of "marketing" in our industry.  And I'm going to openly share with you how EMC is approaching innovation in marketing. I know, that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's not. Maybe you'll find this interesting, maybe not …

Way back when, I thought it useful to do two courses of study.  I wanted that CS (computer science) degree, but the whole topic, while fascinating, seemed so self-contained. At the time, I thought adding coursework in economics was the right thing to do.  Even way back in the late 1970s (yes, I'm that old), I could see the two interweaving in very interesting ways.

For those of you who have been following what’s going on – there are large investments being made in EMC and Cisco personnel to support our VMware-focused go-to-market (if they strike you as large, they are DWARFED by investments on the engineering side).   Note that this doesn’t mean we don’t have a go-to-market around Hyper-V (see my post on that here ), and that you won’t see activity with other partners (e.g. Dell for EMC, other storage and management vendors with Cisco)  but rather that there is overwhelming customer demand for more “VMware/Cisco”, “VMware/EMC”, and “VMware/Cisco/EMC” (VCE) resources. The way this works is that at EMC we have a team we call “vSpecialists” that focus exclusively on VMware/EMC.   People colloquially call the vSpecialist team other things: “Chad’s vArmy” (I’m not a super-fan of this one – not because I don’t support the military, but rather because the analogy is a bit off: one is recruited or is conscripted into an army – whereas on our team one volunteers; the military thrives on hierarchical structures – whereas on our team there are leaders, not managers) “vGeek Squad” (more my cup o’ tea as I’m a geek These operate at a theatre level, but are tightly aligned with our divisional resources.  They support engagements with customer that center around VMware/EMC – working to make sure our technologies come together to help the customer, and outside/before any “paid professional services” (there are literally more than a thousand VCP certified at EMC now if you include delivery).   They get to play/use all the latest technologies, in fact, are mandated to be using those that are 6-12 months ahead of GA. The goal by the end of 2010 is that there are roughly 304 of these vSpecialist folks around the globe