Strategy

We kicked off our annual Dell Technology Leadership Summit last night. At this three-day event, we invite CTOs from existing and potential partners to share technology visions and strategies with the clear aim of encouraging joint development efforts.  

Presentations will focus on direct partner engagement and sharing long-term product plans, initiatives, and innovation strategies with the goal of promoting close collaboration in the industry.  

Participants will discuss topics such as Alternative Client Computing, Storage and Server Technology, the Datacenter, and IT Simplification. Will be updating Inside IT throughout the conference with posts from the event. 

Chris Evans, the Storage Architect, had an interesting post last week about how two airports in Europe were closed recently because a couple WWII bombs were found.  He then goes on to discuss data storage "time bombs", one of the biggest threats to archived data.

Data archiving repositories are probably the best hedge against losing data in the digital dark ages.

I've thought that archiving services are the best option for most businesses.  Why do this yourself if you don't have to?  I would rather not be responsible for the details if there are others who are going to specialize in it.  Security and privacy concerns have to be addressed as do redundancy and survivability.

It was nice to see this article today by Scott Campbell of ChannelWeb.  Skeptics like Xenochron find it difficult to believe that we are doing as much as we can to grow the channel, but we are.  FWIW, I've since connected with Xenochron on an email back channel and we had a good conversation.  His company decided not to buy from EqualLogic after the acquisition was announced last year, believing that Dell would wreck EqualLogic.  That hurt a little bit, but I understand - people haven't alway had good feelings about Dell.  He told me if the big company machine doesn't screw us up too much we will be in the running for the next purchase.  All I can say is we'll see you later, Xenochron.

But Dell is changing and it is good to be a part of that change, both in the channel business as well as in the storage business. Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic was a strategic move and as the Dell EqualLogic storage business grows, people will see how important it was to Dell's new vision. It was great to see the early results yesterday  but there is still a long way to go.

As an insider I'm very encouraged to see quotes like this from the ChannelWeb article:

"It was more about them listening to us. They did a brief introduction, opened up with a presentation and then after the first slide, it turned into a discussion," said Tim Hebert, president and CEO of Atrion Networking, a Warwick, R.I.-based solution provider. "They let the whole thing play out to get the feedback they were looking for. You had three or four people running it, but another 20 people were writing notes, listening. After the break, they were coming up to get more clarity and detail. They came across like they don't have all the answers."

Brett Ortega faced a challenge. He is the redevelopment and project manager, of American Baptist Homes of the West.

ABHOW's mission is to enhance the independence, well-being and security of older people by providing housing, health care and supportive services.

Brett discusses their increasing technology needs - all over wireless access, adding more servers without adding data center space are a few examples.  His team of 8 IT pros and 7 technicians did it. And saved a bunch of money and went green at the same time.

Omar Sultan from Cisco wrote yesterday about the importance of broadening the skills set among data center workers.  Here's an excerpt:

I believe that the IT infrastructure and the IT organization need to be mirrors of each other. I don’t think you can successfully transform your data center while clinging to existing notions of organizational structure (i.e. network gal, server guy). Some of our more forward thinking customers have seen good results by integrating into “critical teams” that span technologies. I think this is a best practice that would benefit many of our customers.

Full agreement here - you definitely want to foster a holistic perspective in IT. 

What's interesting is that there are many, many admins who work for companies that are not in the Fortune x00 and they will tell you they are covering every aspect of ITalready.  Amazingly talented people who get it from knife-edge OJT instead of cross-training.  Some of the most effective effective and creative architectures I've ever seen are constructed by brilliant SMB people.

That's why it is so critical to simplify IT technology - people moving from skill to skill need to be able to understand all technologies with sufficient depth to make good decisions.