Posts (page 2)
I don't think it would play too well in MA, but on the RSA Conference Expo floor you too could win a lite-brite just like the ones which shut down Boston.
I wasn't eligible to enter the raffle. Boo Hiss!
Poor Hasan Rizvi.
I arrived to the keynote a few minutes late only to walk right into a flood of people who were leaving the Hall and watched as they pounced on the drinks & snacks which were still being set up. It turns out that Larry Ellison had the flu and Oracle VP Rizvi was stuck with delivering the keynote.
For all Hasan's charm the audience still wasn't willing to sit through an Oracle product demo they could get at the Oracle booth in the Expo hall, unless it was Larry doing the driving.
I've never seen a room clear out so quickly only to watch it fill up again as people headed back into the hall to listen to CA's John Swainson.
Best keynote of the day? Ray Kurzwell. His book..
..started flying off the shelf in the RSA Conference bookstore just seconds after he finished up. I know this as I was standing in line to buy a copy. His keynote was inspiring stuff.
You may or may not have heard that VMware is going to IPO and EMC will offer 10% of the company on the open market. Yes, IPO. It'll have it's own stock ticker and you'll be able to buy shares and everything.
In one sense I'm glad that other people will be able to get in on one of the biggest success stories in IT, but on the other hand I'm dissapointed that they've chosen offer a sliver of a crown jewel out to the open market in order to get EMC's woefully undervalued stock moving.
It's never dull around these parts.
Though his schedule was packed, EMC's Chief Development Officer Mark Lewis was gracious enough to sit down with me for a few minutes and cover a range of different topics relating to the business of information. Having listened to it back I think there's something interesting in there for everybody, but if there isn't then I only owe you 00:14:33 of your life back. Feel free to sleep in longer than usual tomorrow, and if your boss asks why you're late to work you can just blame me.
I don't think a person realizes how busy the folks at the executive levels are until you see them deal with a room full of reporters & analysts after they've announced some new technology, new service offerings, and an acquisition. I've RSA's Matt Buckley to thank for allowing me to sit in and watch Joe Tucci, Art Coviello, and Mark in action, and EMC's Dave Farmer for indulging me right in the middle of the maelstrom.
And my thanks to Mark Lewis for finding the time.
I'm sitting watching the Cryptographers panel in the keynote room at the RSA Conference, the old monsters of the crypto industry are on fire. If there's a webcast to watch this should be the one, and you can take a look at that here when they convert the media and post it.
My USB cable is sitting in my luggage back in the hotel so no photos at the moment, assuming it doesn't turn out awfully bad there will be a podcast, and I will have a guest.
(A bit) More later.
I was a C64 child, I suspect many readers out there were too. What's noticeable about that generation is how technically far behind we left a lot of our parents generation. My parents were not technical, I on the other hand was sitting indoors hammering out GOSUB commands in C64 BASIC when I should have been outside getting more sunshine.
You grow up, get a job during the boom, and move on with your life happy knowing you're a king in this brave new digital world. That was right up until I hooked up a Nintendo Wii earlier tonight, and all of a sudden the future looks scary.
When you consider that a generation of children are going to cut their teeth not writing software, but on visualizing and consuming information in the fashion which I've just seen, it makes what I'm doing now which is sitting behind a large Apple Cinema Display hammering out stuff on a keyboard, seem pretty dumb.
I decided to check the weather on the Wii Weather channel as I'm flying out to San Francisco this weekend for the RSA Conference. Do I select a list of cities? No. It shows me a map zoomed to where my town is located. Want to check the weather elsewhere? Grab the map and move it around using the Wiimote. Zoom out and notice that it's a globe you're really looking at. Grab the globe, spin & rotate it to view other parts of the world, zoom in when you want to check out the weather in the location where you're currently looking.
Reading the news is a variation on the same theme, you start with the standard list and can then see how many articles are pertinent to specific cities using the globe view.
I'm thinking that in 10 to 15 years the Wii Children are going to be designing ways of finding & displaying information which will knock our socks off. Remember that years from now when you're looking to turn the oven on but find that you've just bought 700 glass Tom Jones figurines from some dude on eBay instead.
Locked away on PowerLink I'm afraid, and I'm not going to start reposting EMC content here, but if you're an EMC customer or are registered on PowerLink you can login and read the fascinating Secure DNA: Enabling Security in EMC Products whitepaper.
For anyone interested in how EMC approaches product security it's a must read.
A warning to the non-technical, it's written by engineers for consumption by IT Managers, IT Security & Storage System Professionals.
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.
