Chuck's Blog

The Challenge Of Opening Your Company

I was reading posts by Elias Khnaser and Nigel Poulton over breakfast this morning that were imploring one of EMC's historical competitors -- HDS -- to "open up" their company and start engaging more with the communities around them.

Both Elias and Nigel are absolutely correct -- and their suggestions very helpful -- but opening up your company is a lot harder than it looks.

Trust me on this.

Private Cloud: From "What" To "Why" ... To "How"

I've been living with the private cloud journey since well before my first public post at the beginning of 2009.

The appeal of the private cloud model has steadily grown in the last 18 months, and shows all signs of becoming the primary cloud adoption model for most typical enterprises.

And, over that time, I've seen my dialogue with customers and partners evolve from...

"what is a private cloud and how is it different from other proposed cloud models"

to ...

"why you should consider a private cloud model for your enterprise"

to the more recent

"... and here is how you start planning your journey to the private cloud".

It's a natural evolution of the discussion, if you think about it.  I thought it'd be a good opportunity to bring everybody up to date as to where the conversation appears to be at present, and where it's likely to head.

Another Step Towards Information Governance

Sorry for falling behind the pace here, but there was a recent EMC product announcement that I found worthy of a deeper discussion.

EMC's SourceOne group just announced their new File Intelligence product.  And, as organizations struggle to get their arms around unfettered information growth, we may just have a new and important tool in the arsenal.

You be the judge ...

Cloud Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Lots of cloud chatter this week.  A couple of good industry events.  An interesting new startup offering a cloud operating system for private clouds.  Even the ever-outspoken Werner dissing private clouds as "false clouds".

A lively debate, to be sure!

Time for me to offer up another attempted level-set in this discussion.  It's easy to become lost in the details, and more difficult to see what's really happening here -- or, at least, what I think is happening.

Another Take At Integrated Vs. Best-of-Breed

I was locked away in meetings most of this week, and didn't have a chance to participate in a flurry of posts and discussions on this important topic.

Scott Lowe got the latest wave going with his prognostications on a certain vendor, Marc Farley added a thoughtful post, and Chris Mellor joined in the fun, as well as Storagebod.

But the topic isn't done yet -- we'll be arguing this one for decades to come.

Working as I do for EMC, I'm free to sign up on either side of the debate: EMC offers best-of-breed products for consideration (insert long list here), or conversely EMC is part of an integrated stack (e.g. VCE and Vblocks for private cloud deployments).

So, I'm going to wade here with a decisive statement: both perspectives are right, but what changes over time is where the boundaries of the debate occur.

From Presenting To Engaging

One of the thought bubbles that has been continually floating around the Twitter banter has been the importance of differentiating between simply presenting to an audience, as opposed to actually engaging with them.

More importantly, as we become progressively more online social creatures, simple presentation skills become almost quaint (remember shorthand?) and possessing a wide variety of engagement skills and behaviors becomes far more important.

Journey To The Private Cloud Simulcast

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be part of a high quality customer event: Journey To The Private Cloud.  We all were in a studio, beaming to multiple locations in North America in hi-def and surround sound.  If nothing else, the tech was pretty cool :-)

I thought it turned out very well, and wanted to share it.  After a few weeks, I finally got a DVD of the event, which I promptly ripped and posted here.

It basically has five parts:

• an obligatory introduction from our moderator
• a short piece with me presenting private cloud concepts and rationale
• a longer piece with Sanjay Mirchandani (EMC CIO) discussing how EMC's IT organization is moving to the private cloud
• a short piece from Tom Roloff (heads up EMC Consulting) on how best to organize for success
• a rather long Q+A session that was a lot of fun

There were so many questions we didn't get to them all, so I attempted answers in this post.

I hope you find the discussion useful!

(Sorry everyone, I tried to find a suitable video hosting service, but the file is too big to host on the usual services, so you'll have to download it if you want to watch it. 432 MB, .m4v format.  I'll try and fix this later)

Questions From "Journey To The Private Cloud" Simulcast

A few weeks back, I joined Sanjay Mirchandani (our CIO) and Tom Roloff (heads up EMC Consulting) on a neat simulcast that was beamed to multiple locations around North America.

The content mostly focused on EMC IT's journey -- results, challenges and lessons learned -- but we spent a lot of time answering questions as well.  Despite our best efforts, there were many good questions that we just didn't have time to answer.

So, in an effort to keep the discussion going, I'm going to devote this post to attempting to answer most of them.  If you watched the simulcast, perhaps one of the most entertaining parts was that we all had different perspectives on the issues -- so you'll see some of that here as well.

This "virtual dialog" also gives you a sense where many people are at with this whole discussion, which in itself is rather enlightening.

The Innovator Within

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.

Sure, we can hold the concept of innovation at arms length, and say "yup, that's important all right", but how many of us believe it's our individual responsibility to continually innovate at work?

Perhaps not enough, I'd argue.

Does Your Organization Invest In IT?

Sure, most every organization spends money on IT -- that much is obvious.

I want to know if your organization invests in IT much the same way an investor would think about it.

Why?  Because I believe that the answer to that simple question will tell me much about what kind of IT organization you are, what you expect from vendors like EMC, and -- ultimately -- what kind of IT organization you'll eventually be.