Cool IT Guys

I get to meet with customers on a frequent basis.  And I like to share my thoughts and impressions of these experiences here on Ye Olde Blog.

Yesterday, I had the chance to meet with a group of real cool IT guys. 

They weren't talking about next-gen IT, they were doing it.

And it made me think.

I Don't Want To Say Too Much

And for a good reason.  They believed that -- because of their approach to IT -- they had a substantial competitive advantage over the others in their industry.

Now, that's great in itself -- the recognition by senior management that IT could be (and was) a strategic differentiator, and that they had some unique IP that really mattered. 

How often do we see that?  Not enough, I'd say.

They Hadn't Visited EMC In A While

They view EMC the way most people start with EMC -- a trusted storage vendor.  They had made a decision a while back that we were pretty much it, and -- unless we really bobbled the ball -- that was fine with them.

No vendor olympics.  No multi-vendor strategy driven by purchasing to potentially save a buck on acquisition and lose a bundle on complex operations.  They felt they had more important things to do than become experts on storage, so they left that to us.  And we responded in kind.

But we really hadn't updated them on what we'd been up to in the last four years.  A few acquisitions here and there, to be sure.  Maybe a few new thoughts to share?

We had a lot to talk about.

I Had To Bring My "A" Game ...

We usually can bring a dozen or more new ideas to the table when we engage with most customers.  But these guys had already cracked the code on most of them, and had put them into practice.  So I had to work harder than usual to find the fit between what EMC did for a living and what they did.

One great discussion area was around SOA.  You see, they weren't just talking about it.  They had done it.  Everywhere.  They had one big honkin' backbone that was running their business, and had been for a while. 

Fortunately, we had a fair amount to say on this topic, loosely organized around SOI (service oriented infrastructure) concepts.

How resource management and service orchestration was different in a SOA world, and the importance of model-based management (EMC Smarts et. al.).

How business continuity was a bit more difficult with multiple transactional entities that had to be protected and recovered in a consistent fashion, and how "enterprise rewind" might be useful going forward (EMC RecoverPoint, et. al.)

How new concepts in information security were really beyond SOA, and had to be thought of differently (RSA, Tablus, Authentica, etc.)  Given their particular industry, the overall security discussion was so rich I decided to just move on and let the RSA pros handle it a bit later in the day.

How rich content was going to be important in two ways -- one, they needed to think of it as a full participant in their SOA architecture (we came up with a few practical examples), but -- more importantly -- they'd need to start thinking about the new needs of their workforce, and how they're becoming knowledge workers who want to interact with workflow and content in new ways.

It wasn't just a transactional world anymore.

And The We Got Into A Bit More Exotic Topics

I teed up the discussion around operational BI -- making DW/BI and analytics part of your real-time business processes, rather than just an advisory function -- and what the new technology stack might look like in that world.

We got into the whole VMware discussion, and they had already come to grips with many of the observations I've made here on this blog, including -- yes -- even the thin client discussion.

Whew!

It was a workout.  They weren't the average IT shop -- far from it.

But it was great to see an IT organization that lived in a very different reality from the norm. 

And it was even better that we had something to talk about ...

Comments

[Alani Kuye]

see..IT guys can indeed be really cool too.