Chuck's Blog

When Business Leaders Own Their Information

The subject of this post came to me in a rather convoluted manner.

As I began to work more with organizations who are trying to achieve broad analytical proficiency, I started to notice something that at first appeared both unusual and unsettling.

One or more business leaders in the organization would begin to lay strong claims to "owning" their information.  

They were prepared to invest their cycles and resources towards acquiring more and improving the value of what they already had available.  They could be persuaded to share -- depending on circumstances.

While these leaders were moderately polite to others in the organization who were doing the same, they didn't want to be dependent on other groups (including, to a certain extent IT) as they went forward with their information ownership goals.

As I started to see more of this -- including in my own company -- I had to stop and think: is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

And I've come to the conclusion: it's a very good thing indeed.  It's precisely the right behavior, and should be encouraged.

VMware To Acquire Cetas: Making Analytics Easier To Consume

Today VMware made an acquisition that's extremely interesting from several perspectives: cloud, virtualization stacks, big data analytics and more.  

While certainly no Instagram, I think we'll all look back in a few years and agree -- yes, this was an important one.

Cetas describes themselves as ".. an early stage startup that delivers Analytics-as-a-Service to customers and is driving the democratization of analytics and business intelligence by dramatically lowering the barriers to entry for all companies, from SMB to large enterprises."

Yes, quite true when they were a standalone entity.  

But as part of the VMware (and, by extension, the EMC) family, it gets much more intriguing indeed ...

In Praise Of The Business Process Owner

Take a closer look at any successful organization, and you can quickly spot a half-dozen or more key business processes that really matter.  

Sales and marketing.  Customer satisfaction and quality.  New products and offers.  Global logistics.  

The specific process names might vary, but the patterns never do.  

And if you're a progressive IT leader looking for new opportunities to introduce change into the landscape, I'm going to argue that the people leading these initiatives are your new best friends.

Introducing VSPEX

This morning, EMC introduced VSPEX: a partner-centric pre-configured and pre-integrated infrastructure stack.  

Yes, we're pretty excited.  

Some will inevitably classify this announcement as yet another variation on a popular theme in the IT infrastructure marketplace.  

I mean, isn't every IT vendor packaging up infrastructure in new ways?  

Yes, somewhat true -- but many of us believe that there's plenty of room left for innovation and differentiation in this category.

VSPEX is not only interesting in what it does on its own, but how it nicely fits in to other things EMC is investing in -- like VCE and Vblocks.

Clouds Can Be Confusing For Vendors, Too

A spate of interesting developments recently in the evolution of the "enterprise cloud" market.  

Both IBM and HP have made rather significant announcements.  

Each announcement is interesting in its own way, and -- despite my obvious competitive biases -- I will try and share why I find each so interesting.

And I come away with a simple observation: clouds can easily confuse both customers and the vendors who serve them.

The Dark Side Of Big Data and Predictive Analytics

As a technologist, I'm always drawn to the amazing potential of new technologies and capabilities.  But I've also learned to be on the lookout for undesirable side effects as well.

I'm sure the first cave dwellers thought fire was a magical thing, until someone got burned, or a forest fire started.

Cheap, plentiful carbon energy has done wonderful things for our lives, until we realize we might be melting the ice caps in the process.

Modern mobile technology is transformative and wonderful stuff.  Using smart phones while driving is quickly supplanting alcohol as the #1 cause of automobile accidents.

Social network sites can be amazing things, until we realize just how open we've been with our personal information.

The era of widespread big data and predictive analytics is upon us -- should we be concerned?

Yes.

Connecting My Company To Yours

I often struggle to explain to people what I do here at EMC.  I'm not sure I entirely understand it myself, some days.

But I do see the value, as do others.  The problem is that it doesn't fit nicely into any established orthodoxy.  

My current title of "Global Marketing CTO" is a rather poor attempt at labeling.  I'm not global, I'm not that good at marketing, and I'm certainly not a chief technology officer of any sort.

But you've got to have something on your business card, don't you?

One of the things I now find myself spending more time on is brokering meaningful connections: richer, deeper conversations between my company to yours.  And, increasingly, this has less to do with technology-centric topics, and more about how businesses go about figuring out clever approaches to problems we've all had to face.

Do you have someone doing this (formally or informally) in your organization?  

You might want to think about it, because we're seeing an enormous amount of value, and I fully expect much more to come.

BI-as-a-Service: The New Cool IT Project

Cool IT projects come and go.

Social media platforms used to be a cool IT project. VDI used to be a very cool IT project. Then it was your first private cloud.

As the unofficial customer coolhunting dude at EMC, I hereby annoint my candidate for the next cool IT project: creating a BI-as-a-Service capability and pointing it at your analytical power users.

We're doing it in our own business, and I've now met more than enough customers who are interested in doing the same for their business.

And, just to be clear, this isn't your father's business intelligence.