Storage Nation

Success in business is essentially based on differentiation: doing something faster / better / cheaper than the other guys who are competing for the same business. It shouldn't be hard to see that one of the core strategies for achieving differentiation should involve some form of innovation

The question is very simple: are you going to be dragged by the business people in your organization to introduce SaaS solutions into your IT management environment, or are you going to lead your organization to it?

As we start to move to more pooled and cloud-like models for enterprise IT infrastructure, the age-old "chargeback" discussion is once again popular, but in an entirely new context. Most people assume the chargeback discussion is all about how you pay for the cost of IT.  That's somewhat true. Some people think that taxes are only to pay for the cost of government.  Other people see it as a way of encouraging good social policy.  Both are right to a certain degree.

A while back, I asked for a few suggestions on potential topics that I could explore in this blog.  Some people left comments, but most contacted me directly. One of the better suggestions came from Bill Bonin, a fellow EMCer. He observed that I probably spent more time with senior IT executives than most people he knew. As a result, maybe I could offer up a few observations as to what most IT executives see as the most valuable skills that they're looking for in their organizations going forward?

I was pleasantly surprised to see this article where some hands-on reviewers were favorably impressed with RSA's extended DLP (data loss prevention) capabilities. Yes, it's a pretty cool set of capabilities.  And we could do a feature-by-feature comparison of our stuff vs. their stuff and probably come out ahead. But it becomes an unfair comparison where we take these capabilities, and put them in the broader context of EMC's emergent stack