Friday, June 15, 2007
Bigco likes me better...so I'm better...
One might assume (making an ASS out of U and ME) that just because super-big company, market leader, chooses to partner with a startup that the startup must have good stuff. Funny that.
We might suppose that Datacore had the best off controller block virtualization technology in the business when both IBM and HDS chose to partner with them. Ah...but then maybe not....
I can't make the arguement for or against at this point. I honestly don't remember who had what back in 200x dark30 when the deals were done. I do know that a bunch of companies had similar stuff - some still do - Falconstor, StorAge, StorageApps, etc. My point isn't which was better then - who knows, who cares now. The point is that in chosing Datacore - neither HDS nor IBM was necessarily chosing the best technology.
What?
Think about it like this - startups are disruptive by nature. Their technology is intended specificially to attack a weakness in the established Bigco offering. Per se, if Bigco was doing a great job, Startup would not exist.
When Startup rudely and loudly announces its product an inexorable process begins. This happens with such routine frequency that its actually predictable (and somewhat boring) to those of us to who live in this world.
1) Bigco resists - makes a good case for why its offering is ok
2) A few customers buy from Startup, Bigco starts making noise about Startup being a startup (oooohhhh, scary scary....)
3) When that doesn't work anymore - if customers are continuing to buy from Startup -Bigco makes noise about how this new technology is immature and while interesting, not ready for prime time
4) Bigco partners with one of the startups (while promising its big customers it is building the 'good stuff' itself)
5) Bigco either buys Startup or dumps Startup and launches own product based on 'good stuff'.
Let's dig into #4 a bit.
Why does Bigco partner? Because they have had an epiphany and now "get it" and see the disruption as inevitable and decide to get a leg up on their competitors by fulfilling customer demand for the new disruptive technology by reselling the great new technology?
Ah, that would be a NO...
Bigco partners to buy time. To paper over the gap in their offering while they figure out whether it is a permanent gap or a temporary roadbump. Bigco is not happy about disruption. Bigco is pissed off.
So...ask yourself - if you are Bigco, and you are pissed off, and you just want the problem to go away, or you just want to buy some time - do you really want to partner with the best of the disruptors? Do you really want to bring a strong new disruptive technology to your customers?
Or, is your real motive to make a public statement, have a defensible public position, send a message that sure looks like you "get it" without actually putting your core business at risk?
Hmmm...
So maybe you do the ultimate head fake instead. Maybe you partner with a weak sister in the disruptive space, one you can control and manipulate? Maybe you use your Bigco marketing strength to falsely promote the weaker technology, slowing down adoption, attempting to cut off the air hose of the stronger (and more dangerous) startup that you are really worried about. If you are really an evil Machiavellian, maybe your plan is to drive the stronger startup out of business so you can pick up the strong technology at a firesale price? Or buy time until you can figure out how to build something good enough yourself.
Ultimately, it comes down to Bigco's corporate culture, and that ultimately comes down to Bigco's core values. And that, Kids, I ain't touching with a ten foot pole.
Either and anyway...the fact that Bigco partnered with (or didn't partner with) StartupX tells you more than might think - to sort it out, look under the covers at Bigco's motivation, history, reputation, and style.
PS - occassionally - very occassionally -Startup kicks Bigco's ass. Customers love Startup, several Bigco's realize they need Startup technology for something or other, Startup gets traction. If lucky, Startup IPOs.
PPS - If this happens, Bigco gets really, really, really pissed. Bigco CEO might even hyperventalate during an analyst earnings call and make an ass of himself without U and ME...
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Speaking of great marketing
I am ashamed to call myself a marketing expert - I am a marketing wannabe in comparison to the team at Bud who made this...perfect segmentation, perfect message, perfect execution....and just painfully funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaswudWsIhU
Guys - when you get fired for this, call me. I will find you jobs. You rock.
Mommy! Mommy! Ziya stole my cheese! Make him give it back!
I gotta laugh and shudder at the same time.
I learned my lesson about accusing BigCo of ripping off ideas the WAY hard way. It was years ago, but I am still not talking.
Lawyers? Kids...it ain't the lawyers that you need to worry about when you start pokin' that stick in that eye...
(Really, I promise, never again...I was only kidding...OpenWide? all yours...really? those 200 visits from your engineering team? hell, we were just talking about the weather...really...any semblance of resemblance? totally just a little co-ink-ee-dink....totally...I swear on my mother's grave! you never even took a cup of coffee with asking please...it was all yours...I swear...please...I have kids, a wife...)
But the good folks at IBM are nice (see?) and HDS is gentlemanly (gentlepeoplely?), so there is no need for personal bodyguards down there in Fort Lauderdale...just yet. But, honestly, Geo and Co, baaaaddddd idea. really. really. bad. trust me on this...
That's the shudder.
The funny is that Datacore rose a phoenix from the ashes of Encore – very similar block virtualization technology concepts and almost the same core engineering team – same Fort Lauderdale location, same naming convention. One real difference is that Encore had tried to sell the virtualization technology as a big honking hardware box with its own disks and failed.
Encore was sold to SUN for around $150M in the mid 90s. (I wanted to buy it at DEC, but we could only come up with a justification for $30m) Sun tried to sell the big honking box – the 7000 series? – but failed, so it turned out a good thing we didn't buy it after all...
What a twisted tail-eating snake! – the original Encore virtualization ideas (from Ziya, et al) were sold to Sun and lost or buried there, independently reborn again as software (from Ziya, et al) at Datacore, used by HDS as a model (not reverse engineered or stolen, but more likely modeled and learned from) to create products which HDS now OEMs back to SUN…
Now if we could just get HP to OEM SVC from IBM it might cause a breech in the matter/anti-matter quantum barrier field reversing the time/energy continuum flow, and maybe even slow down global warming...
Gawd, I love the storage business….
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Even worse than I predicted...
The Sanity bottom line - good for Grandpa - so you shook 'em up a little...what the hey, at least they will remember you are in the hunt.
We were treated to another yuckle this week. Which set off the smarm alarm. No surprise.
Maybe I should just read some Dickens and forget about all this Storage Sanity stuff...
Anyway - here goes.
Rule #1 - don't lecture a lecturer...especially...good heavens, not on the subject of storage marketing...
Those that nurse at the corporate troth for decades, do so because they never venture out of sight of that corporate troth, and they've learned to strategically dive under their desk whenever change, or its cousin risk of change, walks by. People who create change, create opportunities, and opportunities create turmoil.
Those of us lucky enough to have them, proudly wear the shank scars from being stabbed in our backs by trothsuckers. It's exactly because we've pushed the limits, because we know that every day is a new game, because we've risked it all and survived, that we have the perspective to see that the Emperor occasionally really does have no clothes, and we've proven occasionally to have had the courage to point out a better way.
Professor Kirby's alternate take on recent events:
- any press that creates controversy about whether or not you are number one in a market is good press. Period.
- the storage press corps have a pretty short memory, especially for cornball antics. This is not a smack at their intelligence at all, its an acknowledgement of the pressure they are under to absorb an avalanche of BS coming at them every day from a hundred or so storage vendors, cull anything remotely interesting out of it, and get it out to the readers - every day. Keeping a running tab of over the top announcements in the process? hmmm...not likely. I'm confident the next time grandpa has something interesting to say, they will cover it fairly.
- every company in the business announces new product in the spring and the fall - product announcements are compressed around a few storage shows - Storage Decisions and SNW mostly. Why? I have no idea. We in the trade call Fall, the back to school season. You can't go back to school without a shiny new lunchbox. Spring? I dunno, been that way for 20 odd years. Used to be Gartner Storage Conference that drove it - before corporate hubris imploded that show. Anyway - almost all storage related products are announced within a few week time line in the Spring and Fall -every year.
Honestly, public product announcements are an afterthought in this business nowadays. The success of a new product has little if anything to do with the press attention or web hits on announcement week. Adjusting announcement timing due to a (bigger or smaller) competitor? Not...
- When a customer is willing (finally) to let you do a press release...it's news, baby. In today's age, it is like pulling teeth to get press approval. Speaking of the press - there is only one thing that really gets the press interested - and that's customer stories. All the rest is over-the-top breathless hype. So, the next time you read that a customer (a real customer, not the CEO's cousin's brother's Tailor, or a Community College) is happy with a product - especially a startup's product - put the news into perspective. It proves the company has a decent product, has figured out how to sell it to someone, it pretty much worked as promised, and the company's service wasn't embarrassing. That - kids - is a huge step forward for a company just starting out. Sure - it means less when BigCo announces its 3zillionth customer. duh.
- passion and speed are the domain and only defense of the startup. Change agents cannot be unclear or dispassionate on technology vision, wishy washy on execution, publicly accepting of the competition. Their cause is evangelism, plain and simple.
- don't insult the industry analysts. Do not infer that they are not fair and balanced. This is dumber than insulting the intelligence of the press. (I do break this rule sometimes because I become overly passionate and the devil has his way with me, but we are not all sinners in our own way?)
- positioning is as positioning does. In the US, at least, customers want to know, and ask specifically why you are better than the competition. Honesty with attitude is the only thing that works. If you get caught lying - and I have had this happen to competitors of mine - reasonable customers will likely cut you out of the deal. To win, you have to be upfront. You have to cut as deep and straight as you can with as sharp a knife as you can get. When you go for the jugular, don't miss. This problem of not being squeeky clean is in my experience much more prevalent in Bigco.
- and finally, what if the hokey-pokey is really what it's all about?
(it's the rash...really)
Thursday, June 7, 2007
I told you so...again...
Chris Mellor - who is in the top rungs of my "professional storage press who actually know what they are writing about" list - reports today on the marketing ironies of who's claiming to be first in storage. Chris correctly points out that EMC is by far the market leader in external disk systems. While HP is claiming it's number one in total disk revenue. I am fully expecting a press release from Dot Hill any moment claiming it is the market leader in disks powered by 42vdc uninteruptable power supplies...
Boys and Girls, the market leader in disk is Seagate, period. Everyone else is "vending tin" as my friend who runs storage for one of the largest banks in the world says. To my mind, the measure of the market is who is ultimately pulling home the purchase order - not who supplies what to whom.
And Kids - with all due respect to IDC and Gartner(Dataquest) - there is no big magic eye in the storage sky counting every system shipped and tallying every invoice. Each analyst firm has, or claims to have, a proprietary methodology for determining market share.
Let me open that can of worms and let a little light in there.
In the 1990s, I ran the world wide marketing organization for the 'then' market leader in storage. Back then - before dirt - the proprietary methodology of the market reporting analyst firms was to call a guy I will call Kris (actually I can't remember his real name, which is probably safer for both of us anyway) who worked in my organization. Kris would whisper some revenue numbers to his friend at the analyst firm, who in turn would machinate predictions, apply theories, and ultimately report that we had sold about what Kris had told him.
I didn't invent this process, I inherited it. Kris had worked for the company for 20 years, presumably leaking similar information to similar analysts for most of that time. Of course, I didn't officially know about this leak - didn't condone it and would claim Mad Cow now if forced to testify anyway - besides it was way, way, way before SOX, the company doesn't exist anymore, and I am pretty sure the statute of limitations has run out - but I betcha a donut that somewhere, somehow it's still pretty much the same process, albeit much more detailed, complex, and electronic.
I'm confident the industry analysts ask channel partners for revenue numbers, count trucks leaving the vendor factories, talk to customer purchasing agents, dive in garbage cans, dissemble financial statements...and then ultimately make a bunch of phone calls to a bunch of Kris's...and punt.
Given all that effort, they may actually be sorta kinda directionally correct - but within a few percentage points? Kids...get real.
And, the nonsense about HDS hardware being sold by HP and Sun, and EMC being sold by Dell?? Nothing's changed there. We aren't interested in who sells the most disks - I already told you...it's Seagate. We want to know who is gaining traction with the customer as the go to "trusted advisor" for storage related purchases. That relationship is where the money is, not in who sold how many tons of tin this year.
The interesting thing - and beleive me I am not an IBM cheerleader as much as this blog is beginning to sound like it - is that after getting the storage business ripped out from under them 15 years ago by EMC, IBM is crawling back on top as that trusted advisor for all (many) things storage.
Beleive it or no, my take is that HP is second in this holistic (and I think pragmatic) view of market leadership.
Sun reminds me of a smart kid with ADD - something I know a little bit about - it has all the ingredients, everybody seems to like it, all the teachers and coaches want it to succeed...because it has great promise...we all know it could make it...IF IT WOULD JUST APPLY ITSELF!!!
And, yes, I agree EMC still sells a bunch of disk systems.
But, I'll know for sure if I can just find Kris' phone number...it's gotta be around here somewhere...
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
See...nice works
Lots of poo-pooing (again, with the poo-poo word?) will occur this week. The competitors will discount the findings - oh, well, we don't care about tape anyway so its not fair...they are taking credit for our NAS systems so its not fair...they don't make their own arrays so its not fair...
Uuuugh! I am so glad I am not in the marketing departments of the losers today.
The truth is that IBM can still sell tape - they know how to milk a laggard market segment like nobody's business. They have a strong virtualization story. They are leveraging the heck out of their NTAP and LSI relationships. They know how to deliver services. Bloody good for bloody them. Way to kick some disk, blue!
HP was rudderless for most of 2006 - a cynic might argue, much longer than that...(Good luck turning the battleship, Dave, we are rooting for you!!)
Sun dropped the STK tape lead balloon on its own toe...ADIC disappeared...
You all know the environmentals.
Meanwhile , IBM is like a big vacuum cleaner, sucking up business around the world, by making storage simple, and being nice.
I'm sure honestly, that nice really did have a lot to do with it. Wouldn't you rather buy your storage from nice, clean, well-dressed, seemingly honest people, who earnestly are trying to help you?
A sure sign of my OSG-ness is that I am losing my edge for absolute lowest price in everything. I used to work for hours on the internet to get the best price on every little thing - until I realized somewhere along the OSG line that the time and effort spent searching for the lowest price - and the risk I was taking buying from Joe's Cheepo Hifi.com wasn't worth the time away from other more interesting and useful pursuits - like writing a blog for instance. So, now I look for value - as measured by low-risk, ease of access, pleasurable transaction, and quality product/service.
My OSG take is that the storage industry is maturing too - just like us OSGers in it.
Storage customers want solutions to business problems - like unrelenting data growth, and spiraling management costs. Sure, they want the coolest, best technology in their storage infrastructure - just like I want the coolest, best technology in my boy-toys (er..old man toys).
But...(remember the BUT)...the numbers don't lie - customers are voting with their wallets and clearly are buying simple stuff that works from nice people who want to make them happy...