Posted: January 23, 2012 at 12:24 pm
Some tech marketing succumbs to what has been described as the T-Rex problem. That is, some brilliant thinking but very little in the way of positive outcome. Why T-Rex? Well, a very big head, which for the purposes of the metaphor equates to a big brain, and very small arms which metamorphoses as limited execution. Supposedly this had something to do with the disappearance of the beasts. They could see what they wanted to eat but couldn’t catch it (or maybe it was a meteor that did them in, I am never too clear on it). But anyhow it is a useful analogy for some tech marketing which apparently looks great on paper but results show different. Creative marketing certainly can result in effective marketing, but not always.
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Posted: January 18, 2012 at 11:49 am
The news today is that Accenture have won a contract to deliver a cloud implementation for the French Directorate of Legal and Administrative Information (DILA), part of the French Government. It has been named the G-Cloud, presumably G for “Gouvernement”, though I guess it could stand for “Grand” or “Génial”, since it is big and quite possibly brilliant. It will provide citizens with the ability to access government information easily and securely and be on-line by March. Read about it here. I assume that this is currently a tier one application, so it’s transference to the cloud is significant. We hear a lot about application leakage to the cloud and there are a plethora of examples of companies taking their messaging systems or other tier two type apps and putting them in the cloud, both private and public. There are not quite so many examples of tier one apps like SAP and Oracle being moved into the cloud, though it is a trend that is gaining a lot of momentum.
So the G-Cloud is a good example of how the compute models are changing the world over. The so called “consumerization of IT” is in the drivers seat. Anyone familiar with paying for on-line backup or putting their songs in the Apple iCloud wants to know why this can’t be a model for IT resources in business. Well it is and the Service Providers together with their compute, network, storage and software partners are leading the charge. Accenture is working with Cisco, NetApp and VMware on this project and this powerful combination of partners brings the “best of breed” approach to the max.
It is also worth noting that this is a trend where perhaps public sector is leading rather than following for once (which has been the case for the last fifty years or more) . We know that the US government last year mandated all departments to think “cloud first” for their IT systems, a move which raised some eyebrows amongst analysts but signaled the coming of age for cloud computing models. The UK government is also getting in on the act and its creatively named G-Cloud framework is moving from plan to reality this year. In fact over 500 companies have submitted proposals to be part of it – so you if you wanted evidence that the cloud is more than just hype, that should do it.
Posted: December 15, 2011 at 12:45 pm
I was scrawling through the past postings on my colleague John Rollason’s blog when I came across his review of the Oracle on Netapp Summit in Berlin in January this year. Read it here. In it he discusses a presentation by one of our joint customers, CERN, who outlined the absolute criticality of the Oracle on NetApp implementation that has supported the Large Hadron Collider project for many years. The data numbers that John reports that are generated by the LHC are truly staggering: 300,000MB per second of data being ingested which results in 15PB of new data per year. As he points out, one database even has 2.2 trillion rows. That’s a case for Big Data if ever I saw it.
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Posted: November 18, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Keep it simple stupid: Invest in SATA, Turn-on de-duplication and buy LESS storage.
That seemed to be the main technology messages that Dave Hitz, co-founder and EVP of NetApp wanted to get across at the NetApp Insight event in Rome this week.
Dave is our Storage Efficiency Czar and is on a mission that he’s been on since 1992 when he started the company. How can we help customers buy less storage?
Weird, no? Why would we want them to buy less of the stuff, when it is primarily what we sell? Well, not surprisingly there is method to this seeming madness.
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Posted: November 18, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Copyright: Graham Lee Photography
NetApp Insight 2011 in EMEA finished yesterday, and more than 2000 NetApp partners and employees have been wending their way home from Rome. With two thirds of the attendees coming from channel partners and technology alliance companies, the conference had a very eclectic, international and varied appeal to it.
Yes, all roads do lead to Rome for NetApp partners. And, for those of us lucky enough not to be on striking Alitalia flights, they also led back home.
This is a technologists conference, designed by technologists for technologists. It was short on marketing messages but long on technical training, best practices and networking.
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Posted: November 9, 2011 at 1:29 pm
Sometimes, in moments of introspection, I look back at my career and wonder whether anything I have done professionally has actually added any value to society. I am sure I am not alone in that. I have had a very satisfying time of it to be honest, but it’s not like I am a doctor helping save lives, or a teacher educating the next generation or even a public servant keeping society running. I have only worked for private companies focused on adding stakeholder value, and even then, principally for stockholders. Back when Documentum was a start-up I remember the co-founder telling me that his vision for the company was to “find the cure for cancer”.
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Posted: October 31, 2011 at 4:25 am
On 27th Oct The Great Places To Work Institute announced the results of their latest rankings, the Multinational best places to work list. NetApp was ranked #3. You can read about it here.
Every company has a culture of one sort or another. In its most basic form culture is a set of norms and values inculcated within the organization and espoused by the majority of the staff. Most often the culture is defined top-down. That is, the founders set the tone and executive management perpetuate it. Culture, like it’s biological namesake, is of course not static. It will get molded by outside influences such as the industry and the economy, but generally speaking once established it tends to perpetuate. For some companies it is a deliberate strategy to set a culture and be very transparent about it. For others it is something that evolves and it’s exact nature may be debated within the company. NetApp is squarely in the former camp.
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Posted: October 21, 2011 at 10:46 am
First I have to admit that I have been out of the infrastructure game for a couple of years. I had moved “up the stack” so to speak. But where there’s tin’ there’s cash, as a nineteenth century Cornishman might have said, and I felt the lure gently tugging me back, re-entered that world earlier this year. During my sabbatical outside I used VMware on my Mac and was pretty impressed with its capabilities, but to be honest I really lost track of what was really happening in the virtualization space. As I was parking my storage knowledge on a shelf for a while, VMware were just taking vMotion to market and talk was still of ESX servers and a vaguely articulated desire to create the Virtual Data Center operating system. Since then of course, the world has changed. That vision has been reshaped by the emergence of the most disruptive and fundamental development in IT since Client-Server in the 1980s – that of Cloud Computing. During my hiatus, VMware have quietly positioned themselves as the infrastructure layer for the cloud, whether public, private, hybrid or (a new one on me), compute. So I was pretty keen to return to VMworld after a three year gap and find out quite what is hype and what is reality.
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Posted: October 12, 2011 at 7:21 pm
There is no doubt that adoption of cloud architectures is gathering momentum. There can be very few large scale organizations that are not seriously looking to reduce their IT costs and increase business flexibility by implementing an on-premise or off-premise private cloud. Some are also taking their less mission-critical applications and putting them on public clouds from the likes of Google and Amazon. In Geoffrey Moore terminology we have probably crossed the Chasm with cloud and the early adopters are being joined now by the early majority. In truth though, it is largely enterprises of scale who are taking their first steps in the world of the cloud.
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Posted: October 6, 2011 at 9:30 am
Despite being in the industry for close to 30 years I never had the experience of seeing Steve Jobs in person. It is surprising as I have either met personally or seen on stage at a conference or exhibition, every major leader of IT companies during that time. Apple’s decision to host their own events and not attend industry jamborees and a life spent in B2B meant I never got the chance. However if there was one luminary that I would have wanted to meet over all those years it would have been him. He did things his own way and was not bound to convention like those that went before him and those that were his peers and competitors.
As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am a massive rock music fan. I can trace my “starstuckness” back to the moment I met John Bonham in the early 1970s when he moved into my road, and on occasion gave me lifts in one of his many classic Jensen Interceptors. I have seen some of the greatest musical innovators like John pass away young but who lived lives that were fuller, despite their shortness, than most of us would experience if we lived to 200.
Steve Jobs was a rock star.
Waiting for the next version of the i-Device was like waiting for the next Zeppelin album. The anticipation, the theater around the launch and ultimately the consumption and use were all electric. He made IT desirable. He brought a design philosophy which appealed to the masses. Yes he hired brilliant designers like Jonathan Ive (rated the most influential Briton living in America by the Daily Telegraph a few years ago) and I am sure he had teams of brilliant minds behind him, but it was his vision that created the route for others to follow. No he didn’t create the personal music player, the tablet device, the personal computer or the WIMP interface and a host of other categories. Most of these were created in the labs at IBM, Xerox’s PARC and Sony and other companies with deep R&D budgets. But what he did was design them for the masses. That is why Apple is the most valuable company on earth. Design is and was everything.
Working for Adobe for a few years gave me an interesting perspective. Steve’s decision not to allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad was a major bugbear for us. It would have been easy to personalize that decision and set Steve up as some kind of anti-hero, proprietizing his market and creating closed-walls. True Adobe did point out that without Flash Apple denies users the full web experience, but we were always careful to depersonalize the stance. A true rock god rarely achieves that status without some anti-social behavior or contentious action. Steve ploughed his own furrow, took no notice of detractors and had an unswerving belief in his convictions. Yes we had our differences with Apple but were always respectful.
Steve was the only true IT rock star and the industry is decidedly the worse off without him in it.
Some tech marketing succumbs to what has been described as the T-Rex problem. That is, some brilliant thinking but very little in the way of positive outcome. Why T-Rex? Well, a very big head, which for the purposes of the metaphor equates to a big brain, and very small arms which metamorphoses as limited execution. Supposedly this had something to do with the disappearance of the beasts. They could see what they wanted to eat but couldn’t catch it (or maybe it was a meteor that did them in, I am never too clear on it). But anyhow it is a useful analogy for some tech marketing which apparently looks great on paper but results show different. Creative marketing certainly can result in effective marketing, but not always.
