Posted: March 26, 2012 at 12:53 pm
I have long been interested in the intersection of technology and sports. Some sports are heavily dependent on technology but nearly every sport is increasing its dependence, even the prosaic like crown bowls! There are sports where technology is a nice-to-have but not essential, such as rugby which uses touchline technology and football where the debate rages as to whether to sully the purity of the game with such aids. Others like cycling for example use technology extensively in the design of the bikes and in measuring performance of the riders. Could a bike race happen without use of technology? Yes, probably, but not to such great effect. And then there are sports where technology is the very bedrock. For Formula 1, without technology the race team doesn’t get on the grid. It is a data-driven sport. Analyzing great swathes of data in real-time to make pivotal decisions during a race is only part of it. Being able to deeply mine data from past races is essential. F1 rules are constantly evolving and changing. Anyone who saw the film ‘Senna’ will be aware of the real-time nature of some of the rules sometimes agreed minutes before the racing starts. One new ruling this season is the reduction of testing days between races. This means that sometimes the first time a driver gets experience of the course is on qualification day. So, simulations of the race track back at the testing facility and a deep understanding of the dynamics and contours of the surfaces might mean the difference between starting at the front of the grid or not.
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Posted: March 21, 2012 at 7:48 pm
In the last two weeks NetApp in Europe, Middle East and Africa has been awarded the following by The Great Places To Work (GPTW) Institute:
#1 GPTW in Austria*
#2 GPTW in France*
#2 GPTW in Germany
* within their size category
This adds to the #2 GPTW in UK amongst others. Overall NetApp in Europe is ranked #6 on the list of best multinational places to work in the geography. This is no mean achievement for a relatively small company. There is a saying that you are judged by the company you keep, and if you look at the
top 25 in Europe, we are keeping elite company. NetApp is the only storage vendor on the list and along with Microsoft and Cisco, one of only 3 technology companies.
Our competitors, who are mostly noticeable by their absence from being ‘great places to work’ (according to the lists anyway), will claim that these sorts of lists are self-serving and that we put too much focus on them. An understandable position when you are not on them.
Posted: March 6, 2012 at 8:02 pm
What is ‘mission critical’? It’s an overused phrase in business, like ‘strategic’ or ‘leverage’, banded about without much thought to what it really means. I guess you’d say that the work done down at Cape Canaveral is ‘mission-critical’ but that’s only because it literally makes sense.
Many businesses have defined a ‘mission’ of some sort. Usually this is different from the companies’ vision, although the nuances and differences between a ‘mission’ and ‘a vision’ are not always clear.
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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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I have long been interested in the intersection of technology and sports. Some sports are heavily dependent on technology but nearly every sport is increasing its dependence, even the prosaic like crown bowls! There are sports where technology is a nice-to-have but not essential, such as rugby which uses touchline technology and football where the debate rages as to whether to sully the purity of the game with such aids. Others like cycling for example use technology extensively in the design of the bikes and in measuring performance of the riders. Could a bike race happen without use of technology? Yes, probably, but not to such great effect. And then there are sports where technology is the very bedrock. For Formula 1, without technology the race team doesn’t get on the grid. It is a data-driven sport. Analyzing great swathes of data in real-time to make pivotal decisions during a race is only part of it. Being able to deeply mine data from past races is essential. F1 rules are constantly evolving and changing. Anyone who saw the film ‘Senna’ will be aware of the real-time nature of some of the rules sometimes agreed minutes before the racing starts. One new ruling this season is the reduction of testing days between races. This means that sometimes the first time a driver gets experience of the course is on qualification day. So, simulations of the race track back at the testing facility and a deep understanding of the dynamics and contours of the surfaces might mean the difference between starting at the front of the grid or not.
