New Year's Resolutions

I wrote a blog over at IBM called New Year's Data Resolutions aligning popular personal resolutions with things you should do in the data center: Lose weight, Get Fit, etc.

It was fun to write. What actually impressed me was the social media work done by my colleague.

Some useful (data) resolutions as we start off in 2016.

• 5 new years resolutions we should all keep https://ibm.biz/BdHgsg #data #IBM 
•  Follow @DouglasOF’s data advice to achieve data and storage success https://ibm.biz/BdHgsg
• Lose weight with #IBM Cleversafe or Spectrum Archive https://ibm.biz/BdHgsg
• Get fit with #SoftwareDefined Infrastructure and #PlatformComputing https://ibm.biz/BdHgsg
• Do less busy work with #IBM Spectrum Control https://ibm.biz/BdHgsg
• Learn a new skill with #IBM Spectrum and #PlatformComputing https://ibm.biz/BdHgsg<
• Achieve a better work-life balance by looking ahead at deployment options NOW https://ibm.biz/BdHgsg

This showcases one of the rules of content marketing today. Break up content into bite sized chunks with a specific audience or message in mind. She did great job! 

Good to be IBM

This week is I will be at SuperComputing in Austin. (#SC15 for those who know).  It will be wonderful to be back among the brightest minds I've ever met. Those drawn to SC15 are dedicated to solving hard problems with insight and validated computational results. They are rigorous and creative thinkers.

Among the attendees at SC15 are people who modeled turbulent flow problems well before airlines saved trillions with wingtips. Built huge systems to understand climate change before it was a political debate. I will be meeting with scientists and engineers who use the computational power behind the nuclear stockpile to advance drug research and protein folding. SC15 represents those who are relentless in using the latest technology to solve difficult problems.

However, they have an almost universal design flaw. The SC15 crowd is almost never interested in easy or good enough. This puts them at odds with most of the rest of the technology world, which brings me to my point.

The biggest impact of technology is not computational, nor algorithmic, nor mechanical. It is and will

be the human ability to interact, absorb, interpret and control. This is the age of design - and Apple is our Merlin.

My revisionist history of modern IBM starts with Watson - an engineering approach to solving this problem. You have seen the IBM Watson ads. Algorithms and systems so smart that a child, a genius and Bob Dylan can relate to it.

But what if you change the paradigm to focus on the people 1st and engineering second? 

Here is the answer in a  NY Times article on pervasive Design-Think at IBM. The shift from starting with the engineering constraints to the human interaction is profound. Systems and software developed to do what a human wants to do, rather than solve an engineering problem, is innovation, not incremental evolution.

If IBM can continue down this path, it will be a good time to be IBM.

I may work for IBM, but these thoughts are my own. Any resemblance to IBM statements is merely coincidence. 

The important big data

IBM took another step in software-defined storage this week  - announcing Spectrum Scale 4.2. (and a lot more.) This product has a long history of leading performance in scale-out technical computing. (and still growing in that market - See IBM at SC15)  However, this release goes well beyond that installed base. 

It used to be the important big data was the raw data from which great decisions could be made. The old important big data were things like manufacturing simulation, financial risk analysis, genomics, and seismic. Things computers could crunch! 

The new important big data is user behaviors, digital marketing results, output from 1000s of sensors, healthcare records and images -- lots and lots of images, videos, digitized voice. Some of it for big, but most of it we just used to throw away. This data isn't just crunched. It's massaged, interpreted visualized and factored. The inputs are messy and the outputs can be surprising. 

The new important big data needs to be accessed via object because RESTful APIs are easier to program. The spectrum of HDFS tools are needed to walk through it, plus the various commercial plugins to validate and visualize it. The new release of Spectrum Scale has unified object, HDFS transparency, as well as the traditional file support. For the new big important data, file servers don't cut it. 

Going even further, the new important data isn't just for experts. Spectrum Scale  has a UI - and a pretty good one by the look of it. (See Bob Oesterlin's post on his first impressions.) The new important big data needs to be quick and adaptable and multi-application - and easy to use. 

Spectrum Scale 4.2 - a good example of why it isn't just GPFS anymore. 

Cross Posted to Linked-In

On the death of EMC...

"It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes."
Dorothy Parker

The acquisition of EMC by Dell is a tragedy for Boston and the storage industry whose impact on the start-up world will be felt globally.

You need to read Antonio Rodriguez's take on it called Garbage trucks and the death of EMC to get a truly pessimistic view.

Or something a bit more practical, Changes in the IT Industry, from the always spot-on Chuck Hollis. In this light, Chuck's moves from EMC to VMware to Oracle seem logical response to the external stimulus of commoditization.

I am mourning the death of a respected competitor and a true industry leader. EMC's unique culture of arrogance and ruthless determination impacted everyone they could touch, which was many of us and global. EMC does not believe in luck or the mythical 'better product'. They earned every dollar and percentage of market share.

Demanding, but also willing to work just as hard alongside you, is the EMC culture. When I was running operations in dot-com land, they worked me, my board, my partners and even my competitors to surround my little project with EMC. In subsequent years, they acquired well and used their salesforce as a cudgel to introduce technology to companies. Every start-up I've worked with would be pleased - and a little intimidated - to have EMC buy you.

Companies, technology and even people I know have gone to Dell and disappeared. I hope EMC isn't one of them.

"The report of my death was an exaggeration"
Mark Twain

$694M of Respect: Dot Hill & Seagate

The Rodney Dangerfield of storage, Dot Hill, earned the acquisition premium from Seagate. 
Dot Hill never got to be big enough, smart enough, clever enough to be their own brand, but they pushed on as the primary provider of good-enough, clever-enough, robust-enough storage behind many other brands. They never got respect, but a lot of people knew them and liked them.

Dot Hill never created a storage brand for themselves because they didn't have the proprietary software team(s) required to deliver storage for the previous decade. They were pushing the boundary of enterprise storage with new de-dupe, compression, DR technology. They didn't invent new protocols and clustered scale-out systems. They stuck to what they did well, which was a really solid disk array. It wasn't sexy and that's OK.

Times have changed. That software that EMC, NetApp and others locked so tightly into their boxes is breaking free. Software-Defined-Storage of all sorts has cracked the box and all that magic software is now available to run on x86 servers with 'good-enough' storage arrays as the target. Even worse, SDS allows mixing heterogenous storage into single pools that are transparent to the user.

STORAGE HARDWARE IS FUNGIBLE!! 
And, that is what defines a mature, commoditized market.  Seagate has been in that business for years. They know how to extract value from incremental innovations and profit from supply chains.

Dot Hill outlasted, not outwitted. For the next battle, they needed to get bigger. Seagate is bigger.

My reading list:
Joe Landman's few words...
http://scalability.org/2015/08/ma-seagate-snarfs-up-dothill/

El Reg's Take
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/19/seagate_scoops_dot_hill_for_us694_million/

Some Writing

When I first joined my company, I did a few videos and a couple of internal writing projects. Then, I got pulled into some very complex market and product analysis projects that ate up every free moment I had.

I'm entering a new phase to propose a new product roadmap, including another new product launch. The time pressure is different, so I've been asked to write a few pieces again.

Here's the latest published on Solutions Review

Worried About Security in Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery?

It uses Bruce Schneier's quote from several years ago "Security is both a feeling and a reality." 

I'll have to fit his Security Theater material into another one. 

Coffee, Music, Wifi… Work!

 Saturday mornings I drop my daughter off for her job feeding horses and I head to the local Panera to crank through a few hours of writing.

And, what do I do first?

Coffee! Because no matter how often I do this, I am still not a morning person. 

Music! Because coffee isn’t enough to get the neurons firing. This morning it’s Husker Du

 

Wifi!  Because… Well, really I have no real reason for needing Wifi.

Everything I should be working on is already on this laptop: Notes, Files, & Applications.  Everything but the human connection. What is missing is the ritual of checking social media, the latest news, and affirming my place in the herd.

Morning ritual complete, now on to work. 

CLI is to Desktop as Desktop is to Mobile

Reliable Internet Troubleshooting Agent c. 1998

Command line interfaces are great for managing systems. The reason Sys Admins love command line interfaces is because they are simple, scriptable and accessible. Thanks to SSH, they did not have to be tied to a single machine - ever.

CLIs are mediocre for managing Data Centers.   A good UX that provides information on many systems visually is an selling point for even the most jaded of BOFHs. You'd never use your system CLI as the starting point in developing the Desktop app, would you?

Then why do you think a responsive browser interface is enough for mobile?  

A responsive web page is a proof of concept, not a design. Some things I've noticed lately.

1. Use Case details matter. Your user is mobile for a reason. The experience of checking an alert over a pint is not the same as standing next to the CEO explaining why file & sync isn't working.    
2. The experience changes when I rotator type. The available space is different.
3. Hands are different. Zoom, swipe, & drag can be better than point & click.    
4. Bandwidth! I want to use as little as possible to get what I need done. 
5. Security. Most of the devices are BYOD. Build in the safeguards from day one. 

Break out of the box. Your customers already are. 

I'm certain there is a better set of rules out there... Comments & Pointers welcome! 

Easy to Write = Most Popular

Foo's Paradox: 

The blog post that took the least time gets the most attention. [1]

Words are not precious. 

 I am willing to bet that the average reading speed has increased - certainly the pace of creation has.
Save the angst over a well crafted sentence for your first novel.

Making a connection matters. 

Having a point of view is most important. We still crave human connection. This is a cocktail party. Loosen up and say something that gets that girl (or guy) talking to you. Wouldn't you rather be known as the interesting one?

This does not go on your Permanent Record. 

These words may exist forever on a hard drive, but I'm writing for right now, not for humanity. The Internet is a great trash heap and there are no grades.


Stop worrying  and get writing...

[1] : I saw this quote on Twitter, but don't know to whom to attribute it. 

TL;DR

Passing the Scan Test 

With dozens of different presentations, web pages and white papers for different companies in the last few months, I always use the Scan Test.

What did I see First? 

• Where did my eye go?
• What was communicated there?
• Did it actually say anything? 

And, why did I put a picture, change fonts, italics or underline it? 

Did I use a picture to draw the eye down the page....

To where we really communicate what is different and important about this particular product to this particular person and create an emotional attachment or intellectual resonance with the viewer?

Or should we have just used a graphic and accepted that few people read?





On the other hand, I focus on B2B Technology Marketing. Most of my customers actually care about their technology, their job, and their reputation. The people I want to reach are highly-connected information junkies. They read a lot, write often, and value their time.

To reach them, we must provide the in-depth explanation of what, how, and why of the product, the use case and the architecture behind it to be credible. The presentation must be concise with the ability to drill further in the areas where the reader is curious.

 So I write and I edit and a make certain that when you scan, you get something valuable.

Never a Wall of Text...

Heartbleed: Open Source Branding

We all know Heartbleed, the branded, logged version of CVE-2014-0160. The logo is everywhere.

Codenonmicon claims independent discovery of the bug, but they get undisputed credit for branding Heartbleed. The branding package was simple: The name, the logo, a branded URL and a page that clearly communicated the situation in simple text. 

Rather than protect the considerable Intellectual Property a great name and logo represent, Codenonmicon provided the logo with No Rights Reserved. At this point, even the most jaded IP lawyer will recognize CC0.

As a result there are hundreds of millions of instances out there. The value of that is staggering.

It is a brilliant example of the ease of Open Source Branding.

Not everyone can or should Open Source Intellectual Property. My test of whether to do so is very simple:

1. When it's value increases with adoption. 
2. When it is not core to your company's value proposition
3. When you are willing to take responsibility for it. 

Codenonmicon is not in the logo or naming business. They are security specialists who happened into a great idea with a good designer, but I'm now one of the hundreds of millions of links pointing back to their web site. Well done!


Some facts:

• On April 19th, 2014 Google Image search returns about 512 Million instances of the logo on the web. 
• Searching for CVE-2014-0160, returns just over 1.5 Million pages
• The Wikipedia article has 693 edits in the 9 days since it was created. 
• The Heartbleed logo is provided under Creative Commons CC0 license: No Rights Reserved. 
• Heartbleed is an exploit of the Heatbeat function of SSL.
• Codenonmicon is clearly a play on Cryptonomicon.   

I should not have to explain what Cryptonomicon is... 

I miss Snail Mail.

Checking the mail meant something different when the postman was your connection to the outside. no matter how impatient you are for the news, you could only check it in a relatively short window - maybe an hour or two each day as you anticipated the daily rounds of your letter carrier. 

 

These days, you can pretend to be doing something when all you are really doing is waiting for the mail. 

http://xkcd.com/1350/#p:6479d184-b9a0-11e3-b947-94de80a03a39

 

The View from Outside

I'm working with Marshall van Allstyne's students on a start-up business model. I've learned a lot just trying to transfer knowledge. It is the opposite of explaining to your Grandmother what you do for a living.

• The students use modern analogues that I didn't think would fit.
• Which helps me understand our product category. 
• They don't value distribution.
•  Which makes me rethink the sales cycle and cost of sales.
• They assume reaching people is easy.
• Which makes me rethink our marketing

It's all good.

"It will work. I'm a Marketing Genius."

That quote is attributed to Paris Hilton. Yes really.... 

Sometimes, the only cure for writer's block (or typist's demotivation) is just to give up on quality and just pour bad stuff onto the page.

You are going to edit it anyway. 

Early Customers are Easy

Your first sales prove almost nothing about your long term success. 

• Someone you know loves your product vision. 
• Because, you are highly connected to similar people.
• They have a budget line item for you. 
• Because, you use the pricing model of your established competitor.
• You don't need good marketing, channel, support or even sales tools. 
• Because, your best people are focused on making these sales.  

Your long-term success is predicated on learning from those early customers

• Why this is their point-of-pain.
• So you can imagine a _much_ better product or even a new category of solution.
• How they value you.
• So you can build a pricing model that puts your competitors at a disadvantage.
• What they say about you
• So you can help others Discover, Appreciate and Purchase your product.

Inspired by Rich Mironov's Keynote at Product Camp LA.  

Finder, Minders & Grinders: Everyone has Expertise

The phrase "Finders, Minders and Grinders" has a long backstory with the common lesson being that you need to become a Finder in order to rise to the top. Those who bring in the most new business tend to make the most money, but their success is built on top of the Minders & Grinders who actually deliver. Even the best Finder can only sustain a business if the product they are selling is good.

Every organization needs Finders selling, Minders analyzing, and Grinders delivering results.

I'm inherently a Finder. I'm highly networked, willing to talk to anyone, and deeply invested in finding the right Product-Market Fit.

I can be a damn good Minder, but I can't sustain it forever. I get curious about the next thing, rather than being happy about pulling all the money out. Minders analyze what is going on and constantly optimize and tune. Good Minders love A/B testing and empirical results. Mature products in established markets need great Minders. Sustained social media success is built on the backs of Minders.

Grinder is not my strongest suit, but I love working closely with them! It isn't that they aren't brilliant, it tends to be they are focused on what is in front of them. Grinders are Engineers who enthused about their new feature. A good Finder or Minder needs to help them get that story out there to the right audience. Everyone should love the feature, but really only certain users in certain contexts. Finders help Grinders see a bigger picture.

VMware ruined my Summer

August used to be the last lazy days of Summer. Like children getting ready for school, we'd ramp up planning, campaigns and events for the crucial Fall season. VMware changed all that.

To avoid competition for time between September and The Holidays, VMware placed their annual conference the week before Labor Day. They threw a good party in in San Francisco, so we didn't mind at first. We'd work hard for VMworld, then take the long weekend of Labor Day in the vineyards of Napa or down the coast to Carmel. It became Summer's last hurrah.

That didn't last long. Since virtualization became the number one driver of IT refreshes, VMworld became the epicenter of the Enterprise IT sales and announcements. Companies planned their announcements - or even their funding rounds - around VMworld. For marketing and product teams we'd focus for 6 months on it and scramble to get the demos right in August.

The inevitable happened. Just as VMworld moved earlier in the year to find some white space for their conference, the industry has done the same. To get press before VMworld, many turned to Flash Memory Summit. Previously a niche vendor-to-vendor event, many used the event to rally the press and bloggers to their cause. This year was their biggest - and I predict more next year.

Then, EMC turned the tables. Realizing that Labor Day only counted in the US, they staged their major product launch the following week in Milan. I can think of worse places to end up in early September.

If they make it an annual event, maybe I can go. I can plan the long weekend in the north of Italy. It won't be the last hurrah of Summer, but the recharge after all the hard work of July and August.

Yes, VMware has ruined Summer.

Yes, you should go to a Meet Up!

Never been to a Meet Up because no business gets done there? 
Here are three reasons you should go & two why you should not. 

Preface:
Meet Ups are the physical manifestation of the Internet's skill at "ridiculously easy group formation"[1]   The barrier to creating one is low and the membership is self selected. The organizer is deeply invested, has expertise and enthusiasm. On the other hand, attendees have at least a passing interest in the subject, and the unscheduled time to attend.
This is not the formula for high quality business networking, but you should go anyway.

Three Reasons to Attend a Meet Up

1. Learn something new. Since most of the people attending are probably dilettantes, be one too. Find a speaker, a technology or an idea about which you are curious and get exposed to it. It is cheaper than a TED talk and much more fun than an online webinar.
2. Uncover a new perspective. Meet Ups draw a diverse crowd. There will be students and many who are not in your field. Embrace the opportunity to explaining what you do, why you do it and how it matters to someone new. You will learn from it.
3. Rediscover what you know. If you are an expert in the subject, a Meet Up is revisiting your Freshman classes. You may not learn anything new, but you will have a chance to revisit the fundamentals from which you can refresh your approach to the problem. 

Two Reasons Not to Go

1. Job Interviewing. If the only reason you are going is to find a job, don't. (For career fairs - try Greenhorn Connect) Yes, there will be someone at a Meet Up with opportunities, but they aren't there to interview you. Meet Ups are a great opportunity to discover new companies. Absolutely follow up, get the interview, get the job, but don't attend 'looking for a job'  Everyone is tired of that conversation.
2. Making a Sale. It is rare to find someone with dedicated budget and decision making authority at a Meet Up. If they had budget, they would have the vendors come to them on company time. You will meet the influencers and hear the inside stories of why certain technologies or services are or are not being chosen. Meet Ups can provide good intelligence, but this isn't selling.  

No two Meet Ups are organized the same way, so choose a couple to try. Whatever subjects you choose, you need to participate. Be ready to ask the first question and start random conversations. Who knows where it might take you. 

Footnotes
[1] Seb Paquet's original blog from 2002
[2] My links to Clay Shirky

Manipulating the Motivation Curve

Motivation is highest when a problem is considered difficult, but not impossible.

My father told me that when I was young. He was adapting Yerkes-Dodson Law for the simple mind. 

I carry a mental model of my motivation curve. The entry and exists are steep. Once I slip toward the bore or burnout slope, the bottom approaches rapidly. If engaged, I drive myself toward optimum by expanding the scope of strategy. Being a Myers Briggs Extravert, I expand my motivation through interactions, goals and deadlines. I like complex problems, but sometimes I find myself slipping over the edges.

In this month's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell covers a biography of Albert O. Hirschman. Hirscham was an economist specializing in development, but Gladwell starts with an analysis of human endeavor. Quoting Hirschman "Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened."  As he further explains, 

"The only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be."

Delusion may be a critical tool for motivation.  If one properly grasps the difficulty of the situation, one falls into Anxiety; and performance plunges. To improve personal productivity, just lie to yourself: "that's not hard" 

Brings a new depth to motivational strategies, heh?

Tech Marketing Pablum

I am sitting in sessions at Red Hat Summit watching the same uninteresting product positioning scroll across the screen. "Enterprise" "Highly Available" are endless and are being used to refer to every single product. Oh boy! Aren't these table stakes for software?

They are asking me to pull cash from my pocket and all they can offer is 'it won't embarrass you"

Compelling marketing needs to be built on a tangible and understandable customer benefit.  The best advice I've heard is to pull quotes from your customer testimonials as a starting point. If you can't find any you are in the wrong job.