In this episode, my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid and Associates (twitter @brucerave) recap the recent SNW conference and series of pod casts. Our conversation also covers importance of networking and career tips (Bruce is an executive recruiter aka career advisory consultant) for those of you that are new and upcoming, as well those of you who are seasoned veterans to standout in a crowd.
Bruce also talks about his internet music radio show called Go Deep on moheak.com along with up and coming bands to keep an eye and ear open for in 2013. Check out Bruces sites at ravid.com and godeepmusic.net as well as listen to his internet radio show that airs weekly Sunday evenings 7 to 9PM PT on moheak.com.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid and Associates (twitter @brucerave) meets up Sr. News Director Dave Raffo of TechTarget and Search Storage in the SNW trade show expo hall. Our conversation covers past and present SNWs along with other industry conferences, industry trends, software defined buzzwords, Green Bay Packers smack and more.
This is the sixth (here is the first, second,third,fourth and fifth) in a series of StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast discussions from Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid and Associates (twitter @brucerave) meets up with Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi) of Silverton Consulting and Ray on storage blog in the Santa Clara Hyatt (event venue) lobby bar area. Our conversation covers past and present SNWs along with other industry conferences, shows and events, along with social networking, technology, being a soccer dad with teenage kids who are aspiring actors and more.
This is the third (here is the first and the second) in a series of StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast discussions from Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, I’m joined by my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid & Associates (twitter @brucerave) as we catch up and visit with David Chapa (@davidchapa) Chief Technology Evangelist (CTE) of Quantum Corporation (@quantumcorp) in the Santa Clara Hyatt (event venue) lobby bar area. Disclosure note, Quantum has in the past been a client of StorageIO.
This is the second (here is the firstSNW 2012 Waynes World) in a series of StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast about Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, I’m joined by my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid & Associates as we catch up and visit with Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Starboard Storage Systems Karl Chen in the Santa Clara Hyatt (event venue) lobby bar area.
This is a StorageIO industry trends and perspective audio blog and pod cast about Storage Networking World (SNW) Fall 2012 in Santa Clara California.
Given how at conference conversations tend to occur in the hallways, lobbies and bar areas of venues, what better place to have candid conversations with people from throughout the industry, some you know, some you will get to know better.
In this episode, I’m joined by my co-host Bruce Rave aka Bruce Ravid of Ravid & Associates as we catch up and visit with SNIA Chairman Wayne Adams in the Santa Clara Hyatt (event venue) lobby bar area.
I often hear people say how small the storage and networking (or other adjacent technology) industries are, and how everybody knows everyone. That might be true in some circles or sub-communities where everybody knows each other, however the industry is larger than many realize. As you listen to these series of pod casts what you will hear is a recurring theme of people meeting others at events, including some who may have passed each other in hallways for years yet never have had a chance to meet, or put a name to a face.
In case you are not familiar, degrees of separation refer to how you are connected to other people.
When you know somebody directly then you are a first connection, and you are a second degree of separation from people that they are directly connected to. The theory goes that via a mix of the number of people you are directly connected to, as well as how well they are connected to others, that you are only so many degrees of connection separation from many (if not millions of people) and if you go out seven degrees, that could be billions.
If you are familiar with or use Linked In and are directly connected to somebody like myself, which is a first degree. For example in the following image, person A is a first or 1 degree connection to person B, person B is a direct or first degree connection to person C who in turn is a direct connection to person D. Person A is 2 degree from person C and three degree from person D.
The reason I bring this up is not to say or play games around who is connected to whom, or compare contacts or the number of them, rather to use the idea of degrees of separation in the context of where and how you get your information. For example, you may get your information, insight or experience directly from what you do. On the other hand, you may get information or knowledge directly from the source or person involved with it, which would be 1 degree of separation.
You could also get the information from somebody else such as a friend, coworker, blogger, analyst, consultant, media journalist, reporter, vendor, VAR or other person who got it directly from the source, which would be 2 degrees of separation. Another example would be you get your information from somebody who cites a report, study, survey or some research that came from another source that involved another party who collected and analyzed the data.
At each point, there is the potential for the information to be changed, adjusted, reinterpreted, misunderstood, or simply adapted to meet particularly needs. What if person A gets their information from person B who in turn got their information from source C, and that comes from person D who got it directly from person E? Assuming that the information was collected and passed along as is, person A should get what was given from person E to person D. However, along the way, various interpretations, more material and views can be applied resulting in a different message.
There is also another variation, which are your spheres of influence or circles of contacts. For example I get to talk with lots of IT pros around the world live in person, virtually and via different venues, those would be direct or no separation. When I hear from a vendor or PR or some pundit telling me what they heard direct, that’s 1 degree however if they heard it from their marketing who heard it from a sales rep or other source then it’s at least two.
Another example of degrees of separation is where you are in relation to technology timelines, evolution, revolution, industry adoption vs. customer deployment. For example, if you are a researcher or development engineer, you are further along on a technology evolution curve than others are. Somebody then takes the researchers work and productize it including making it manufacture able on a cost-effective basis. Along the lines there is also the different degrees of separation between the researcher, initial publicity of a technology breakthrough, general industry adoption and later customer deploy and subsequent success stories. For example, to a research something that they did many years along with those who follow at that point may view what is emerging for real customer deploy as old and yesterday’s news.
On the other hand, for customers getting ready to deploy a new technology, product or service, some breaking research may be interesting to hear about, however it may be out several years at best from customer actual use. Also on that theme, the customer of a component can be a manufacturer that in turn test, qualifies and sells a finished solution to their customers. Thus, there are different degrees of separation between industry adoption (e.g. talking about and awareness) and customer deployment (actually buying and using on a mainstream basis) in the technology supply chain.
Yet another degree of separation is between you and your information or data. Some of that data is very close in your own memory (e.g. brain), perhaps others written on note pads (physical or digital) with a copy local or remote including at the cloud. Depending on how your data and information are backed up or protected, there can be added degrees of separation between you and your information.
Thus, there are different degrees of separation between you and your various forms of information.
Your ability to learn and share information, meet and interact with various people from across different sections of environments is bound by what you are willing to engage via various mediums including social media involvement.
If you are comfortable with where you are at, or what you know, then stay in your comfort zone, or sphere of influence, otherwise, take a chance, venture out, learn what you do not know, meet who you do not know, interact and see new things, or have some dejavu and share what you have seen or experienced before.
After all, knowledge not shared with others is useless if kept only to you. Of course, for NDA material, what is not generally known about, or understood is not discussed and let us leave sleeping dogs lay where they rest. ;)
How good or reliable is your information or G2 that you might be using for forming opinions or making informed decisions around?
In the spirit of Halloween and zombies season, a couple of thoughts come to mind about vendor tricks and treats. This is an industry trends and perspectives post, part of an ongoing series looking at various technology and fun topics.
The first trick or treat game pertains to the blame game; you know either when something breaks, or at the other extreme, before you have even made a decision to buy something. The trick or treat game for decision-making goes something like this.
Vendor “A” says products succeed with their solution while failure results with a solution from “B” when doing “X”. Otoh, vendor “B” claims that “X” will fail when using a solution from vendor “A”. In fact, you can pick what you want to substitute for “X”, perhaps VDI, PCIe, Big Data, Little Data, Backup, Archive, Analytics, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, eDiscovery you name it.
This is not complicated math or big data problem requiring a high-performance computing (HPC) platform. A HPC Zetta-Flop processing ability using 512 bit addressing of 9.9 (e.g. 1 nine) PettaBytes of battery-backed DRAM and an IO capability of 9.99999 (e.g. 5 9’s) trillion 8 bit IOPS to do table pivots or runge kutta numerical analysis, map reduce, SAS or another modeling with optional iProduct or Android interface are not needed.
StorageIO images of touring Texas Advanced Computing (e.g. HPC) Center
Can you solve this equation? Hint it does not need a PhD or any other advanced degree. Another hint, if you have ever been at any side of the technology product and services decision-making table, regardless of the costume you wore, you should know the answer.
Of course the question of would “X” fail regardless of who or what “A” or “B” let alone a “C”, “D” or “F”? In other words, it is not the solution, technology, vendor or provider, rather the problem or perhaps even lack thereof that is the issue. Or is it a case where there is a solution from “A”, “B” or any others that is looking for a problem, and if it is the wrong problem, there can be a wrong solution thus failure?
Another trick or treat game is vendors public relations (PR) or analyst relations (AR) people to ask for one thing and delivery or ask another. For example, some vendor, service provider, their marketing AR and PR people or surrogates make contact wanting to tell of various success and failure story. Of course, this is usually their success and somebody else’s failure, or their victory over something or someone who sometimes can be interesting. Of course, there are also the treats to get you to listen to the above, such as tempt you with a project if you meet with their subject, which may be a trick of a disappearing treat (e.g. magic, poof it is gone after the discussion).
There are another AR and PR trick and treat where they offer on behalf of their representative organization or client to a perspective or exclusive insight on their competitor. Of course, the treat from their perspective is that they will generously expose all that is wrong with what a competitor is saying about their own (e.g. the competitors) product.
Let me get this straight, I am not supposed to believe what somebody says about his or her own product, however, supposed to believe what a competitor says is wrong with the competition’s product, and what is right with his or her own product.
Hmm, ok, so let me get this straight, a competitor say “A” wants to tell me what somebody say from “B” has told me is wrong and I should schedule a visit with a truth squad member from “A” to get the record set straight about “B”?
Does that mean then that I go to “B” for a rebuttal, as well as an update about “A” from “B”, assuming that what “A” has told me is also false about themselves, and perhaps about “B” or any other?
Too be fair, depending on your level of trust and confidence in either a vendor, their personal or surrogates, you might tend to believe more from them vs. others, or at least until you been tricked after given treats. There may be some that have been tricked, or they tried applying to many treats to present a story that behind the costume might be a bit scary.
Having been through enough of these, and I candidly believe that sometimes “A” or “B” or any other party actually do believe that they have more or better info about their competitor and that they can convince somebody about what their competitor is doing better than the competitor can. I also believe that there are people out there who will go to “A” or “B” and believe what they are told by based on their preference, bias or interests.
When I hear from vendors, VARs, solution or service providers and others, it’s interesting hearing point, counterpoint and so forth, however if time is limited, I’am more interested in hearing from such as “A” about them, what they are doing, where success, where challenges, where going and if applicable, under NDA go into more detail.
Customer success stories are good, however again, if interested in what works, what kind of works, or what does not work, chances are when looking for G2 vs. GQ, a non-scripted customer conversation or perspective of the good, the bad and the ugly is preferred, even if under NDA. Again, if time is limited which it usually is, focus on what is being done with your solution, where it is going and if compelled send follow-up material that can of course include MUD and FUD about others if that is your preference.
Then there is when during a 30 minute briefing, the vendor or solution provider is still talking about trends, customer pain points, what competitors are doing at 21 minutes into the call with no sign of an announcement, update or news in site
Lets not forget about the trick where the vendor marketing or PR person reaches out and says that the CEO, CMO, CTO or some other CxO or Chief Jailable Officer (CJO) wants to talk with you. Part of the trick is when the CxO actually makes it to the briefing and is not ready, does not know why the call is occurring, or, thinks that a request for an audience has been made with them for an interview or something else.
A treat is when 3 to 4 minutes into a briefing, the vendor or solution provider has already framed up what and why they are doing something. This means getting to what they are announcing or planning on doing and getting into a conversation to discuss what they are doing and making good follow-up content and resources available.
Sometimes a treat is when a briefer goes on autopilot nailing their script for 29 of a 30 minute session then use the last-minute to ask if there are any questions. The reason autopilot briefings can be a treat is when they are going over what is in the slide deck, webex, or press release thus affording an opportunity to get caught up on other things while talk at you. Hmm, perhaps need to consider playing some tricks in reward for those kind of treats? ;)
Do not be scared, not everybody is out to trick you with treats, and not all treats have tricks attached to them. Be prepared, figure out who is playing tricks with treats, and who has treats without tricks.
Oh, and as a former IT customer, vendor and analyst, one of my favorites is contact information of my dogs to vendors who require registration on their websites for basic things such as data sheets. Another is supplying contact information of competing vendors sales reps to vendors who also require registration for basic data sheets or what should otherwise be generally available information as opposed to more premium treats. Of course there are many more fun tricks, however lets leave those alone for now.
Note: Zombie voting rules apply which means vote early, vote often, and of course vote for those who cannot include those that are dead (real or virtual).
Where To Learn More
View additiona related material via the following links.
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My how time flies, seems like just yesterday (back in 2008) that I did a piece titled Politics and Storage, or, storage in an election year V2.008 and if you are not aware, it is 2012 and thus an election year in the U.S. as well as in many other parts of the world. Being an election year it’s not just about politicians, their supporters, pundits, surrogates, donors and voters, it’s also a technology decision-making and acquisition year (as are most years) for many environments.
Similar to politics, some technology decisions will be major while others will be minor or renewals so to speak. Major decisions will evolve around strategies, architectures, visions, implementation plans and technology selections including products, protocols, processes, people, vendors or suppliers and services for traditional, virtual and cloud data infrastructure environments.
Vendors, suppliers, service providers and their associated industry forums or alliances and trade groups are in various sales and marketing awareness campaigns. These various campaigns will decide who will be chosen by their customers or prospects for technology acquisitions ranging from hardware, software and services including servers, storage, IO and networking, desktops, power, cooling, facilities, management tools, virtualization and cloud products and services along with related items.
The politics of data infrastructures including servers, storage, networking, hardware, software and services spanning physical, cloud and virtual environments has similarities to other political races. These include many organizations in the form of inter departmental rivalry over budgets or funding, service levels, decision-making, turf wars and technology ownership not to mention the usual vendor vs. vendor, VAR vs. VAR, service provider vs. service provider or other match ups.
On the other hand, data and storage are also being used to support political campaigns in many ways across physical, virtual and cloud deployment scenarios.
Let us not forget about the conventions or what are more commonly known as shows, conferences, user group events in the IT world. For example EMCworld earlier this year, Dell Storage Forum, or the recent VMworld (or click here to view video from past VMworld party with INXS), Oracle Open World along with many vendor analyst, partner, press and media or blogger days.
Here are some 2012 politics of data infrastructure and storage campaign match-ups:
Speaking of networks vs. server and storage or software and convergence, how about Brocade vs. Cisco, Qlogic vs. Emulex, Broadcom vs. Mellanox, Juniper vs. HP and Dell (Force10) or Arista vs. others in the race for SAN LAN MAN WAN POTS and PANs.
Then there are the claims, counter claims, pundits, media, bloggers, trade groups or lobbyist, marketing alliance or pacs, paid for ads and posts, tweets and videos along with supporting metrics for traditional and social media.
Certainly, there are vendors vs. vendors relying on their campaign teams (sales, marketing, engineering, financing and external surrogates) similar to what you would find with a politician, of course scope, size and complexity would vary.
Surrogates include analyst, bloggers, consultants, business partners, community organizers, editors, VARs, influencers, press, public relations and publications among others. Some claim to be objective and free of vendor influence while leveraging simple to complex schemes for renumeration (e.g. getting paid) while others simply state what they are doing and with whom.
Likewise, some point fingers at others who are misbehaving while deflecting away from what they are actually doing. Hmm, sounds like the pundit or surrogate two-step (as opposed to the Potomac two step) and prompts the question of who is checking the fact checkers and making disclosures (disclosure: this piece is being sponsored by StorageIO ;) )?
What this all means?
Use your brain, use your eyes and ears, and use your nose all of which have dual paths to your senses.
In other words, if something sounds or looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
Likewise if something smells funny or does not feel right to your senses or common sense, it probably is not or at least requires a closer look or analysis.
Be an informed decision maker balancing needs vs. wants to make effective selections regardless of if for a major or minor item, technology, trend, product, process, protocol or service. Informed decisions also mean looking at both current and evolving or future trends, challenges and needs which for data infrastructures including servers, storage, networking, IO fabrics, cloud and virtualization means factoring in changing data and information life cycles and access or usage patterns. After all, while there are tough economic times on a global basis, there is no such thing as a data or information recession.
Keep in mind and in the spirit of legendary Chicago style voting, when it comes to storage and data infrastructure topics, technologies and decisions, spend early, spend often and spend for those who cannot to keep the vendors and their ecosystem of partners happy.
Note that this post is neither supported, influenced, endorsed or paid for by any vendors, VARs, service providers, trade groups, political action committees or Picture Archive Communication system (e.g. PACs), both of which deal with and in big data along with industry consortiums, their partners, customers or surrogates and neither would they probably approve of it anyway’s.
With that being said, I am Greg Schulz of StorageIO and am not running for or from anything this year and I do endorse the above post ;).
As part of a recent 15 city event series sponsored by Quantum (that was a disclosure btw ;) ) titled Virtualization, Cloud and the New Realities for Data Protection that had a theme of strategies and technologies that will help you adapt to a changing IT environment I was asked to present a keynote at the events around Modernizing data protection for cloud, virtual and legacy environments (see earlier and related posts here and here).
Since late June (taking July and most of August off) and wrapping up last week, the event series has traveled to Boston, Chicago, Palo Alto, Houston, New York City, Cleveland, Raleigh, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Los Angeles, Mohegan Sun CT, St. Louis, Portland Oregon and King of Prussia (Philadelphia area).
The following are a series of posts via IT Knowledge Exchange (ITKE) that covered these events including commentary and perspectives from myself and others.
Data protection in the cloud, summary of the events Practical solutions for data protection challenges Big data’s new and old realities Can you afford to gamble on data protection Conversations in and around modernizing data protection Can you afford not to use cloud based data protection
In addition to the themes in the above links, here are some more images, thoughts and perspectives from while being out and about at these and other events.
While I was traveling saw this advertisement sign from Datalink (who is a Quantum partner that participated in some of the events) in a few different airports which is a variation of the Datadomain tape sucks attention getter. For those not familiar, that creature on the right is an oversized mosquito with the company logos on the lower left being Datalink, NetApp, Cisco and VMware.
When in Atlanta for one of the events at the Morton’s in the Sun trust plaza, the above sculpture was in the lobby. Its real title is the goddess of fertility, however I’m going to refer to it as the goddess of data fertility, after all, there is no such thing as a data or information recession.
Traveling while out and about is like a lot of things particular IT and data infrastructure related which is hurry up and wait. Not only does America Run on Dunkin, so to does StorageIO.
When out and about, sometimes instead of looking up, or around, take a moment and look down and see what is under your feet, then let your imagination go for a moment about what it means. Ok, nuff of that, drink your coffee and let’s get back to things shall we.
Just like virtualization and clouds, airplanes need physical engines to power them which have to be energy-efficient and effective. This means being very reliable, good performance, fuel-efficient (e.g. a 757 on a 1,500 mile trip if full can be in the neighborhood of 65 plus miles per gallon per passenger with a low latency (e.g. fast trip). In this case, a Pratt and Whitney PW2037 (could be a PW2040 as Delta has a few of them) on a Delta 757 is seen powering this flight as it climbs out of LAX on a Friday morning after one of the event series session the evening before in LA.
Not sure what to make out of this image, however it was taken while walking into the Mohegan Sun casino where we did one of the dinner events at the Michael Jordan restaraunt
Here is an image from one of the events in this series which is a restaurant in Cleveland where the vault is a dinning room. No that is not a banker, well perhaps a data protection banker, it is the one and only (@davidchapa) David Chapa aka the Chief Technology Evangelist (CTE) of Quantum, check out his blog here.
Nice view just before landing in Portland Oregon where that evenings topic was as you might have guessed, data protection modernization, clouds and virtualization. Don’t be scared, be ready, learn and find concerns to overcome them to have certainty with data protection in cloud, virtual and physical environments. Cloud, virtualization and data protection modernization is a shared responsibility requiring team work and cooperation between service or solution provider and the user or consumer. If the customer or consumer of a service is using the right tools, technologies, best practices and having had done their homework for applicable levels of services with SLAs and SLOs, then a service provider with good capabilities should be in harmony with each other. Of course having the right technologies and tools for the task at hand is also important. Moving your data to the cloud or a virtualized environment should not feel like a walk down a long hallway, that is assuming you have done your homework, that the service is safe and secure, well taken care of, there should be less of concerns. Now if that is a dark, dirty, dingy, dilapidated dungeon like hallway, then you just might be on the highway to hell vs. stairway to heaven or clouds ;).
There continues to be barriers to cloud adoption and deployment for data protection among other users.
Unlike the mountain ranges inland from the LA area coastline causing a barrier for the marine layer clouds rolling further inland, many IT related barriers can be overcome. The key to overcoming cloud concerns and barriers is identifying and understanding what they are so that resolutions, solutions, best practices, tools or work around’s can be developed or put into place.
Hmm, breakfast of champions and road warriors, Dunkin Donuts aka DD, not to be confused with DDUP the former ticker symbol of Datadomain.
In the spirit of not treating everything the same, have different technology or tools to meet various needs or requirements, it only makes sense that there are various hot beverage options including hot water for tea, regular and decaffeinated coffee. Hmm, tiered hot beverages?
On the lighter side, things including technology of all type will and do break, even with maintenance, so having a standby plan, or support service to call can come in handy. In this case the vehicle on the right did not hit the garage door that came off of its tracks due to wear and tear as I was preparing to leave for one of the data protection events. Note to self, consider going from bi-annual garage door preventive maintenance to annual service check-up.
While not part of or pertaining to data protection, clouds, virtualization, storage or data infrastructure topics, the above photo was taken while in a quiet section of an airport lounge waiting for a flight to one of the events. This falls in the class of a picture is worth a thousand words category as the sign just to the left of the sales person talking loudly on his cell phone about his big successful customer call says Quiet Zone with symbol of no cell phone conversations.
How do I know the guy was not talking about clouds, virtualization, data infrastructure or storage related topics? Simple, his conversation was so loud me and everybody else in the lounge could hear the details of the customer conversation as it was being relayed back to sales management.
Note to those involved in sales or customer related topics, be careful of your conversations in public and pseudo public places including airports, airport lounges, airplanes, trains, planes, hotel lobbies and other places, you never know who you will be broadcasting to.
Here is a link to a summary of the events along with common questions, thoughts and perspectives.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the events including attendees, as well as Quantum and their partners for sponsoring this event series, look forward to see you while out and about at some future event or venue.
Dan Tynan has a good piece over at InfoWorld discussing the 9 most endangered species (e.g. skill sets) in the IT workforce. His article is along the lines that the IT job landscape is evolving rapidly and provides some ideas and points for discussion how to avoid becoming extinct.
Check out Dans article to see what the other endangered skill sets are, along with other perspectives by myself and others as well as what you can do to avoid becoming extinct. Hmm, maybe read a book? ;)
Following up from my last post over at InfoStor about metrics that matter, here is a link to a new piece that I did on storage vendors benchmarking and related topics. This new post looked at an storage performance council (SPC1) benchmark that HP did with their P10000 (e.g. 3PAR) storage system under assertions by some in the industry that they were short stroking to meet better performance.
Last week here in the U.S. was the independence day holiday also known as the 4th of July which means vacations, out side fun, backyard parties and barbeques, time in and around the water and other forms of fun. It also means fireworks which tend to be on the evening of the 4th, however some towns host their fireworks shows and events the day after or the day before.
One such town is Marine on St. Croix Minnesota which if you saw Grumpy Old Men when Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon (aka Putz and Moron) where racing to the wedding, you saw main street (hint, if you blinked you might have missed it). Sometimes we go the few miles to Marine by land and watch the 3rd of July fireworks from main street, sometimes as we did this year we go up the St. Croix River a few miles to watch fireworks via water. As a reference for, the St. Croix flows to the Mississippi which in turns flows to the Gulf of Mexico for those of you who are not geography majors or navigators.
Anyway, as the saying goes a picture or video is worth a 1,000 words.
While not one of the major metropolitan areas, check out part of the Marine on St. Croix fireworks grand finale video here for what IMHO is a great event.
Recently I was asked by Dell to moderate and host their North America storage customer advisory panel (CAP) session (twitter #storagecap) that followed their 2012 storage forum (see comments about 2011 storage forum here) event in Boston (Disclosure Dell covered my trip to Boston).
This was an interesting event in many ways because it was a diverse group some of whom were long-time EqualLogic and Compellent (both before and post acquisition) customers of various size or customers of Dell who have yet to buy storage from them.
Click on above image for video feed
Beyond the diversity of types of customers and their relationship with Dell, what also made this event interesting was that it was live streamed with professional produced video and audio in addition to twitter and other social media coverage. However what made the event even more interesting IMHO was the fact that being a live event (watch replay here) in video with audio as well as on twitter, the attendees were urged to speak freely with conversation among themselves providing feedback and commentary for Dell.
Sure there were songs of praise when and were deserved, however unlike some made for social media vendor events that tend to be closer to sales pitches, this event also included some tough love feedback and comments for Dell, their products, services and events planner.
Oh, did I mention that other than some members from the Dell social media team (@dell_storage) who were in the room to help facilitate and coordinate the event itself, the real discussions were free and independent of Dell employees (other than to remind not to avoid going into NDA land while live on the video and audio feed). Dell had @ThinkLink doing live illustrations capturing as images the discussion themes, topics and points of interests during the events that you can see examples of in the following images.
Kudos to Dell for having the courage, conviction and confidence to have a customer advisory panel event live streamed, that also allowed the attendees to speak their mind free of a script or talking points guide. The session included having each participant taking a turn of putting themselves in the general managers chair and saying what they would do, why, and how they would address customers and prospects. After all, its one thing to sit in the cheap seats, playing arm-chair quarterback saying what you want, it’s another saying why you need it, what the priority and impact are or would be and how to get the message to the customer. Some of the topics covered included Appassure for data protection, Compellent, EqualLogic and other recent acquisitions, products, service, support and community forums.
