Kevin Rollins DELL's CEO and a former partner at Bain Capital before joining DELL in 1996, is out. Michael Dell is back in.
DELL is far too important to the IT ecosystem for it to be off on the wild ride it's been on for the past year or two. What's interesting is that from where I sit DELL's problems don't appear to be the usual one of awful execution. You order, they ship. That's DELL in a nutshell, moving product is their art and they're damn good at it too.
This isn't like HP screwing up their ERP consolidation project thereby killing their ability to process orders, blaming partner SAP for everything on a results call which in itself was hilarious as hp.com was plastered with ads for their HP Adaptive Enterprise for SAP wares, and nearly facing a firing squad of irate customers who's orders were lost or just not processed during a contentious HP World.
Which makes one wonder the nature of the problems DELL are actually facing? AS EMC learned from experience back in 2000/2001 it doesn't matter who you are or how high you're flying eventually gravity gets it's way and down you tumble. It happens to everyone. Always.
I wouldn't expect Mike D to hang around for too long since he's been dragged out of retirement to hold things together, so if any of you out there want to run a sell 'em cheap, rack 'em high box builder now might be a good time to give your resume a polish before emailing it to Round Rock.
That's the big question now isn't it? It's also something people tend to throw out there when they're looking for some juice for a story. Having heard this question asked and having read about it all over the place I'm going to let you in on EMC's acquisition strategy going forward just so the guessing will stop.
EMC is looking to buy half.
That's right folks no matter what it is, even if it doesn't involve information infrastructure, the company will make an offer on half. Cool cars, sunny days, the family pet, EMC wants in for half. Why stop at just the family pet? For the right price it'll buy half of your family.
Yes I'm being glib, but the fact of the matter is that numerous times per month I end up seeing EMC's name attached to all sorts of things and it's usually just wishful thinking. Like little orphan Annie seeing dollar signs when Daddy Warbucks comes rolling into town you can't blame people for trying, but if they spent as much time looking at the integration points of what the company has already bought it would make for more interesting reading.
Being in the information business means you're in the business of ideas.
Part of my job is looking at what's going to be available within the next 12 to 18 months. I see a lot of roadmaps, EMC's, it's partners, other vendors and I listen, read, and try to absorb as many ideas from all these different parties as is possible. That's the reason I find myself being overly cautious when I blog. "It's not for me to comment on.." is my answer when I know times, dates, places, and faces, but feel like I shouldn't open my mouth in case something drops out of it which really shouldn't.
I've had a couple of questions at a few industry events which have been clear cases of someone trying to get more information out of me than I should be willing to give them. If getting that type of information is part of the person's job description they'll be clever about getting it too.
At one event I had two people ask me the exact same deadly question. The first was Storage Admin who saw my badge, then just walked up and asked "So when are you shipping Symm 7?", my answer to which was to point in the general direction of Storage Products chieftain Dave Donatelli, who was walking by at the time just after finishing up a talk, and say "That's his announcement not mine." That was the end of that conversation. Even speculation on that topic could be akin to grasping the third rail with both hands. And my teeth.
Obviously looking like an easy mark I was speaking with someone else later that night when I started to realize that I was being steered towards the inevitable Symm 7 ship date question, but this time I was the one inadvertently providing all the forward momentum while they turned the conversation in the direction of what they ultimately wanted to know. People have a tendency to fill the empty gaps in conversations by volunteering information in order to keep things going, so if you know this and are clever you can turn the gaps into blanks you want filled in. Having spotted the blank quickly enough I let the conversation stall at the critical moment, so the other party had to drag the question across the finish line themselves. There wasn't an EMC big wheel in my line of sight, they were probably off doing what corporate big wheels do, so I just slammed the blast door shut on that topic of conversation myself.
What I've learned is when you see enough roadmaps and absorb enough ideas you're smart enough to know that only real products ship. People say a lot of things but the only truth is that real products ship. It doesn't matter if it's feature complete and is rolling off a production line, being imaged onto optical media, or being uploaded to a site on the net as I type this. In my mind only real products ship and if it's not shipping or it hasn't been announced when it's due to ship then it's not a real product and shouldn't be discussed like one.
So that's the mantra when I find myself in situations where saying less about upcoming hardware or software products, features, or technologies will probably help keep me employed.
Chris Evan's lives in a world where technologists and early adopters drive mass market adoption of technology.
It's a world where the Macintosh, BetaMax, LaserDisc, and IMAX all became the standard in their field. A world where the technology which early adopters & geeks were enamored with won. It's commonly known as dreamland to you and I.
Technologists and early adopters between them don't have enough spending power to drive standards on their own, indeed in large organizations if you show me a technologist I'll show you the business person responsible for turning down their funding requests. Technologists and early adopters also support the losing technology on a frequent basis, it wasn't the mass market buying Betmax or MiniDisc.
To hammer the point home, technologists and early adopters were using digital audio players long before the iPod, DEC created the first commercially sold hard drive based MP3 player, but it was Apple's marketing machine which pushed the idea into the mainstream, and they did so by fixing all the issues technologists were happy to live with. Terrible user interfaces, poor software design, and USB 1.1 as a transport.
Chris would have us believe that it's technologists who are driving the adoption of 1080p televisions because "they say it's the best". No Chris, 2160p or Quad HDTV is currently "the best" as you get four times as many pixels per square inch than you do with 1080p. Even then it's not "the best" as I've already seen some prototypes which go beyond that.
So what's driving 1080p television sales? It's not technologists, it's show room picture quality. It just looks better in the window when you've a PlayStation 3/XBox 360 game, Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie playing, but what most people don't realize is that everything looks better on those sets. HD or no HD. In reality very few sets are marketed as supporting 1080p, in Europe it's the HD Ready sticker which people look for. Why? Because you're not getting real 1080p/60 when you're watching a 1080p TV, there are no fast refresh 30Hz or 60Hz transmission broadcast standard in use.
Sets ether output a 1080i signal while dropping half the vertical resolution, or they'll use DLP to rapidly refresh two lines of 960 horizontal pixels to simulate 1920x1080 resolution. Why are they pulling all these tricks off and calling it 1080p? Because it costs a fortune to provide the bandwidth required for a native 1080p/60 resolution, a lot of the large displays aren't large enough to display the required pixel perfect image, and most HDTV content is captured at 1080i anyway.
So in reality you're buying marketing, not technology. So much for the technologist's immunity to marketing.
Getting away from the technology, the upcoming HD edition of the Spider-Man movies on Blu-Ray Discs will sell more HD TV sets and Blu-Ray players than any technologist or early adopter we can care to list.
Now as for the great iSCSI debate of 07 which has been going on, from the outside it looks like a bunch of people arguing 220V Vs 110V. Sorry boys, it's all just electricity to me.
What? Q1 a bit slow for you all?
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Sticking with security, NIST have announced that they are going to run an AES style competition to replace the SHA-1 hash function. We're talking 2012 before they anoint a set of new functions, so in the interim we'll start to see a steady migration towards the SHA-2 series.
But then a lot of stuff has moved to SHA-2 already and you probably never even noticed.
I recall my parents having the same reaction.
Interested in EMC Avamar?
There's a free hour long webcast covering EMC's Global De-Duplication technology running on the 24th of January, the details of which you can get here.
People are asking questions about Symantec CEO John Thompson's share transactions in the light of Symantec's recent quarterly numbers.
I can hold John Thompson guilty of one or two things, telling the world that 1995 was going to be the year of OS/2 WARP when he was running that business at IBM for example, but insider trading is a nasty slur to throw around.
CEO's are just like employees, you get bad ones and good ones.
One sometimes wonders if this is a corrosive line of work we're in?
In recent months I've noticed an increased number of IT professionals from different companies large and small who've just left the business completely. No moving jobs in the same sector, nothing less than an absolute exit from the industry.
Personally EMC's new products coupled with the Billions it's spent on acquisitions has suited me down to the ground. I've been pretty fortunate to always have a vast array of new technology to examine, new people in different segments of IT to speak to, and new products to work with so there's no time for boredom. All of which suits me just fine.
Seeing so many people head for the exits is somewhat disparaging though. There's a lot of talk about shortages in the fields of IT, Engineering, and Sciences so hopefully this is nothing more than expected attrition and not an acceleration of an ongoing trend.
Searchstorage have an article up discussing LTO-4. Yes, yes denser media and faster native transfer rates but that doesn't change the tape recovery pain point, it just means you have even more positioning to do on restore if you've been multiplexing your backups.
Captain Obvious says:
Keep operational backups, the stuff you need often, on disk. Any data which lands on tape should immediatly be heading out the door to your vault where you hopefully won't have to see it ever again. Or see it for a few years at least. End of lesson.
The new issue LTO-4 brings to the table is that of encryption key management. It seems that everyone has their own take on key management, you can do it in the application like Symantec have chosen to do with MESO for NetBackup via the embedded CoreGuard technology they've licensed from Vormetric. You can do it with the Key Managers offered by the network device encryption vendors such Neoscale & Decru. You can even do it in the tape library or at the drive level via various vendor apps. I know IBM uses an app they've developed to generate and revoke keys which they write in an encrypted form directly to the media used by their TS1120 drives.
Now keys are like weeds. You start with one, and before you know it they're springing up all throughout your environment. If you're under some form of mandatory retention of backup & archival data (God forbid I use the big C. No not Cancer, Compliance), you'll end up with who knows how many keys as time moves on. And while employees may come and go keys will have to endure. Safe, secure and available every second of every day until the value of the information, and the liability involved in it's loss, reaches zero. Which may take a day, a week, or a decade depending on the business process issues involved.
While everyone else was focusing on EMC entering the Authentication business or buying encryption technology with it's purchase of RSA I was busy reading up on RSA Key Manager. The time is rapidly approaching where a lot of your Information Infrastructure components both hardware and software will require something to manage the key lifecycle.
From creation to rotation to destruction.
