John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

As a fellow baby boomer, Denise Shiffman’s recent blog post really hit home.  She said, “Facebook is the new email.”  She wasn’t the first to make the connection.  In fact, the Scobleizer has a whole running debate here from October, 2007.  But because I know Denise, and implicitly trust her, she gets credit for getting my attention. 

As a boomer, I live on email, but as my blog readers know, I’m on Facebook now, too.  In fact, it’s about the only way that I communicate with Steve Zivanic, who created this viral campaign for very-traditional Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).  I just checked one YouTube posting of his video that reports 320,000+ downloads.  Good job Steve.  Steve’s left HDS and found a fitting home at myndnet.  He tells me they understand the value of viral marketing. (more…)

The Boston Globe today reported a restructuring of IBM’s Hardware Division around customer types, as opposed to product types.  Personally, the move makes a lot of sense to me.  I spent a good part of my IT procurement career working for State Street Bank, a very large financial services company, and I got used to viewing things one way, the State Street way.  Basically, if anyone could break something, we could. We scaled bigger, and required higher levels of performance, service, support, and availability than 99.999% of the companies in existence.  I remember an IBM systems engineer saying, “You don’t need 5 ms response time from your storage.”  He was wrong, and we installed EMC storage that delivered the performance we wanted.

It turns out that most companies don’t need what State Street needs.  I had to relearn that fact, when I became an analyst at IDC.  It took me a few months to remember back to the days when I used to assemble PCs out of parts to squeak under the $100 capital-budget spending limits of my previous employer, Pioneer Financial, a Cooperative Bank, long ago subsumed in a round of bank mergers and now part of Bank of America. (more…)

Following up on yesterday’s post, I found this blog post from Nick Triantos at NetApp, which provides good insight into NetApp’s view of the strategic fit.  I remember a meeting back in October of last year, in which I spoke with a very happy Onaro customer.  The big problem that Onaro solved for this customer was change-control management.  Basically the environment at this account is so complex and so interwoven that one change in one infrastructure component could affect huge numbers of other systems.  The implications go far beyond the particular application that any server, network or storage component serves.  In big environments, change-control management is top of mind.  (more…)

Things have been very busy in the storage world in Israel lately.  First XIV gets acquired by IBM, and now Onaro gets acquired by NetApp. I’m not going to comment on the strategic fit of Onaro with NetApp or the challenges of integration.  Chuck Hollis at EMC, speaking from experience on integration challenges and claiming to take off his “EMC fanboy hat” (his words, not mine), already did that here.  I’m also not going to speculate on the price paid.  TechMoz did that here.  And I’m not going to try to blend technical insight with humor, as Jon Toigo did here.  You have to admit, he is funny.

NetApp is ripe for a few, targeted acquisitions that add features, functions, and capabilities.  Some will probably work out well.  Others not so much.  That’s something with which every successful supplier has to cope.  It’s value add that takes NetApp into adjacent spaces.  It’s a good strategy, where the benefit comes from execution excellence.  And NetApp has reached a size where some of the innovation may be more cost-effectively developed outside of NetApp and then integrated. (more…)

Mike Worhach, President and CEO of Sepaton, walked into the Starbuck’s where I was meeting  Paul Gillin this morning, and said, “Every time I see you, you’re taking notes.” Confirming once again that it’s important to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself, I was having a follow-on to my meeting with Paul last week.  Paul has been amazingly generous with his time, given that he has started writing another book.  I’m eight chapters into his book from last year (2007, for those of you who are keeping track), The New Influencers, and I wanted to pick his brain on how he might be able to help one of our clients.  But I also got an added bonus, which was getting a few quick tips that could make a big difference for anyone.  Here’s one. (more…)

Congratulations Moshe!

On my first day back from a New Year’s break, I got a surprising number of emails and calls about IBM’s acquisition of XIV announced today.  Thanks to a friend who saw a Globes report in Israel, I got a heads up on Sunday the 30th, regarding the pending acquisition, which gave me a couple of days to consider the implications before the official announcement. For the record, I have no idea how much IBM actually paid for XIV, and if I did, which I just told you I don’t, I couldn’t tell you.  Globes estimates $300-350 million, which, if true, isn’t a bad return on investment for the founders.  That much, I do know. (more…)