As I was working with StorageVirtualAppliance, I was reminded of some rules in survey design.

1) Know the purpose of the survey: Lead Generation, Evangelization and Market Awareness, Actionable Information for Product Marketing, Actionable Information for Product Management

2) Think about how you will categorize and summarize the data. Open-ended questions may provide great color commentary or quotable statements, but in large volume are difficult to categorize and summarize.

3) Have an incentive for those that take the time to complete the survey. The incentive could be as simple and inexpensive as a summary of the results, it could be an opportunity to be entered into a prize drawing, or it could be a small cash award.

In addition to helping with the survey, I also offered to help get the survey out to a broader set of participants. So, if you know any IT professionals, please send them to this blog and have them click on this survey link.

Thanks in advance. Participants could win a copy of Eco-Tech Warrior, Greg Schultz’, new book, The Green and Virtual Data Center.

I contrast this company’s approach with the approach of my client, StorMagic, which offers SvSAN virtual storage appliance software as a free download of a permanent license.  And the software is actually ”good enough” for a large set of customers, and the company doesn’t mind saying so.  In addition, the company put huge emphasis on ease-of-use and on integration with VMware’s Vcenter, such that storage can be administered entirely from within the Vcenter console.  For the administrator that has never had to manage a storage area network, this is a tremendous advantage.  It doesn’t mean that StorMagic customers won’t at some point want to upgrade their software to take advantage of larger capacity points and additional features, such as replication.  They will and many already have.  But many others will be happy with what they got and will simply turn on maintenance.

In the case of StorMagic, the software creates what Clayton Christensen termed a new-market disruptor, enabling a new set of customers to do things that were not previously possible: provide continuous data access and application-migration capabilities without the need for an external storage area network.  Over time, the software will also act as a low-end disruptive force on the established fibre-channel SAN market.

My advice to entrepreneurs is to do what StorMagic did, and look for ways to create new-market disruption that can eventually cross over to become a low-end disruptor to established markets.  In the case of StorMagic, their approach appears to be working.  They announced their 1000th software download within weeks of the product launch.

Tek-Tools offers the Profiler Suite of monitoring, reporting, and forecasting tools for servers, storage, applications, files, and, yes, VMware.  Why is it disruptive? Tek-Tools’ Profiler is easy to install, easy to afford, and easy to use, and it’s “good enough” for the bulk of today’s customers.  It does not overshoot current market requirements.  It gives quick answers to important questions like: How much storage do I have installed? How fast is it growing?  How much is allocated? How much is used? When will I need more storage? Where is my performance bottleneck? How old is my data? Who is violating data retention policies? Which virtual machines are using which storage? Which virtual machines are no longer in use? Which physical machines could I consolidate onto a  VMware ESX host, without encountering performance issues? Where is my orphaned storage? (That’s a technical term that means I deleted the virtual machine, but forgot to return the allocated storage to the storage pool.)  

Profiler’s reports are delivered automatically, and they are actionable. They save customers money, help customers avoid problems, and enable informed decisions.  I admit to bristling a little, when someone says, “But Tek-Tools doesn’t automate anything.”   The fact is that you can use the output from Profiler to trigger the running of scripts that you write.  Or Profiler can provide a triggering input into your favorite IT automation tool.  But most companies neither want nor can afford today’s system automation tools.  Good reporting, good monitoring and good forecasting and the ability to trigger scripts is good enough for most customers.  Tek-Tools could have gone down the path of so many others, who burned through 10s of millions of venture dollars overshooting the needs of the majority of IT professionals and pursuing the ”I can automate everything” holy grail.  Instead, Tek-Tools keeps posting steady growth, quarter after quarter after quarter, helping customers make informed decisions.  The company recently announced year-over-year growth of 45%, which is not bad in a down economy.  

It is tempting for founders of startups to promise more than they can deliver.  It is also tempting to succumb to product management that is at the mercy of sales reps that say, “If development would only add this feature, I could sell the product.”  Personally, I like the Tek-Tools model better.

One of the reasons I joined the board of StorMagic was that I saw the potential for the company to be a market disruptor.  Today, StorMagic announced SvSAN software, which, when installed on a VMware ESX server, converts the internal storage of the ESX server into an iSCSI SAN.  VMware leverages the fact that most single applications don’t need all the computing power of today’s servers.  SvSAN leverages that same fact to provide the storage management function within the ESX server, and also takes advantage of the fact that the internal storage capacity of an ESX server, perhaps the least expensive storage you will ever purchase, is more than enough capacity for a large number of VMware ESX server-hosted applications. 

The natural progression of processor, memory, interconnect, hard disk drive, and solid state disk performance and capacity improvements will continue to expand the range of applications that can be run with storage as a feature of the server using SvSAN.  Until then, StorMagic offers simple extension of the SvSAN and automated, non-disruptive migration to external storage, once capacity or performance requirements exceed the limits of the server’s internal storage.

If you took my advice and read Dave Hitz’ recent book, How to Castrate a Bull, you will know that he attributes much of NetApp’s early success to the fact that NetApp filers were simpler to manage than SANs.  StorMagic takes this principle even further by allowing customers to use what they already know how to do.  It’s kind of like, “Why should I have three remotes when one universal remote will do the job quite nicely, thank you very much?”   With StorMagic’s SvSAN, users can manage the shared storage from VMware’s vCenter console – something they do every day. StorMagic has designed a plug in that allows users to select the “StorMagic” tab on the vCenter console and manage the SvSAN, datastores and the internal RAID right from the console. For the typical mid-sized company, that’s got to be better than using three different applications (vCenter, RAID management software, and SAN management software). In addition to integrating the management function, StorMagic has also automated routine tasks like provisioning datastores and configuring high availability.

Oh, yes. There’s one other thing that gives StorMagic the capability to be a storage market disruptor.  The initial software license for managing 2TBs of internal storage is currently free.  Now, go ask your friends over at ESG to tell you what their research showed was the typical storage capacity for VMware customers.

While the SAN market will continue to exist and probably grow for years to come, for some, the SAN just became a feature of the server.

One of my clients was asking about the size of the installed base of Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (GDPS), wondering if it was a market large enough to justify the investment needed to integrate with  their own solution.  They also wondered about the penetration rate for GDPS within the installed base of z/OS licenses.  That’s rather esoteric stuff, unless you cut your teeth on IBM mainframes, as I did.

It’s been more than a few years, since I closely followed the mainframe market.  But, as I said, I am a rather active user of business and social networking sites.  So I decided to push this market-sizing challenge out through my network of friends and associates, collected and maintained over the past 25 years.  I posted the question on LinkedIn, since with the number of out-of-work experts, I thought someone might just be watching the questions pulse by and be looking for an opportunity to demonstrate their unique knowledge.  I also used LinkedIn to push the question to a few specific people I thought might know the answer.  I posed the question under my status update on Facebook.  And finally, I put the question into Twitter, to see if any of my followers might know.  Oh, yes, and I also emailed the question to a small number of industry analysts.

I did all of this Monday night, and by Tuesday night, less than 24 hours later, I had a pretty good idea of the installed base of GDPS licenses and of z/OS licenses.  No, I won’t put the answer here, because a friend at IBM said, “the numbers are not in the public domain.”  But I will tell you how I got to the right-enough answer.  One winning answer came through Facebook. That’s right, Facebook, the application that so many think is just a time waster.  Another right-enough answer came through a direct message from a LinkedIn contact that forwarded the request to a knowledgeable source.  A third came from someone who saw the question on LinkedIn and responded directly. 

For the statisticians in the audience, the answers were reliable – meaning that with repeated “measures,” I got a high degree of consistency.  I also believe it was valid, because when I shared the estimates with someone in a position to know, they said my numbers were very close.

Thank you to all that responded.  Even as I am writing this, a fourth response came from one of my industry analysts friends.  Again, the answer was consistent to the 10%-variability level.

Now, does anyone have a reliable, quality list of EMC Recover Point customers?

Times have changed, and just when everyone should have a lease offering and most thoughtful customers want one, so they can preserve cash on their balance sheet, the big guys that traditionally bought up the bulk of leases have gone packing. So where do you sell off your lease paper now?

I spent Sunday afternoon with friends, including one CFO of a small bank that told me he had decided that his bank should not accept recent offers of TARP bank-bailout funds.  Why?  Well, it turns out they don’t have any “troubled assets.”  He also wasn’t too excited about having the federal government tell him what kind of loans he should or shouldn’t make.

So now you’ve found your funding source for the lease: a bank that actually does deals not on volume, but on the individual deal’s financial merits.  Or have you?  If you are like most companies, and unlike my business partner and co-founder, David, you haven’t spent the past 20 years building up relationships with fifty of the little guys.  But he has.  Which is why, when the tide is out, our business is up.

My brains, his steel, and your strength against sixty men, and you think a little head jiggle is supposed to make me happy? I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.

Today, I updated my suggested reading list to include Dave Hitz’ recent book, How to Castrate a Bull.  In the book, Dave chronicles his life and the life of NetApp, the company he co-founded.  And just like The Princess Bride, I find myself quoting from the book frequently. 

Here are a few examples.

On giving presentations:

Feelings and actions are the goal.

On decision-making:

This is not a vote…I’m going to decide this one myself, but before I make my decision I want your advice.

On concensus management:

Consensus doesn’t mean that you agree 100 percent with the owner. Withholding consent means that you believe the owner’s plan is fundamentally broken, and you want to convince me of that, despite my bias to accept the owner’s recommendation.

On executive change:

When is the right time to fire a CEO?…(T)he first time it occurs to you.

The book is an easy one-plane-ride read.  But, the lessons will stick with you much longer.

In the book, Paul relates that he dictated much of the book into his computer and used speech recognition software to scribe his thoughts.  Since this was an unedited advance review copy, I gained some insight into the state of speech recognition software, which has advanced enormously over the past 20 years, but still makes amusing mistakes.

Paul acknowledges that at the current pace of change, some of the social media marketing tools he describes and the strategies he espouses will become relics and interesting historical perspective in 10 years’ time.   But, as we find ourselves in an economic downturn that appears deeper than anyone younger than 80 remembers, Paul offers some sage commentary on social media marketing that applies equally well to general business strategy.  Paul writes:

There are only two unpardonable sins in the current environment. One is fear…That leads to the other unpardonable sin, which is inaction.

Read Paul’s book and by the time you’re done, you will be gathering at Gather, twittering at Twitter, joining Facebook groups, and spreading link-love from your blog.  One thing’s for sure, budgets are tightening, and you and your companies will have to find innovative and less expensive ways to validate product concepts, find prospects, demonstrate to them what you can do, prove to them that you are alive, well, and can deliver something they want. 

My first client has offices little more than a block from where my sons now attend summer camp.  So this morning, after dropping them off, I stopped by to see my former client.  He’s no longer using the systems we developed for him.  But they were good for more than 10 years.  So that’s not bad.  I met his in-house IT guy, the guy that replaced my brother and our systems.  The new guy says he also takes out the garbage and cleans the offices on Fridays, something we never did. 

“Business is good,” the owner said, but competition is fierce.  His exclusive distribution agreement for silicon sheeting, used in sheet metal bending to reduce blemishes, is no longer exclusive, and his line of teflon-coated fabrics is highly commoditized.  Still, he innovates, with new applications for teflon-coated fabric and finds new customers.  Either he or his brother, I didn’t ask which, is driving a BMW, so business can’t be too bad.  Either that, or one of them is over-extended on debt.

I asked him, if he was using the internet to market more broadly and find new customers.  He said “No.”   Instead, he uses tradeshows and print advertising.  “The internet is too easy to search, so as soon as I come up with a new product idea, if I use the internet, all of my competitors copy it.  And if, I put up my pricing, they all beat it.  Even if I password protect the site, someone will give out the password.  So I just mail ads out.”  I’m curious what my internet-marketing-guru brother has to say about that. 

Ken?

Ken Barth, the CEO of Tek-Tools,  was our first client at Walden Technology Partners.  A lot of people in the computer storage industry know him, and beyond the fact that he has been successful in everything that he has done, everyone who meets him says the same thing: “He’s a great guy.”  Ken’s company provides a superb solution for reporting, monitoring, forecasting, and profiling IT infrastructure.  It’s easy to install, easy to use, and provides immediate value.  What could be better?  

Well, a lot of IT managers know they have a problem, but they don’t all find Tek-Tools.  And even if they do find Tek-Tools, they need to be able to see that Tek-Tools is a solution to their problems. Since seeing is believing, Tek-Tools started developing videos that are posted on YouTube, here and here.  They should probably do a couple more, especially on their agentless offering, Profiler for VMware, which, as the name implies, provides a solution to monitor and better-manage VMware environments.

So back to the story of my son.  With my tail between my legs, I went to Ken, and told him what my son had done.  His response was, “What a great kid.  Give that boy a hug. Let him leave it up.”  That’s classic Ken. So here’s my son’s Tek-Tools video on YouTube, with the tagline, “You may not be able to know everything about your life. At least know what’s going on with your servers. Tek-Tools.”  Ken Barth is such a good sport.  And because my son is a budding entrepreneur, he got me to agree to promote the video and pay him 1-cent per download.  He’s up to 15 cents now. 

My son says the next video will be better. I bet Ken can hardly wait.