NetApp - Dave's Blog

Design Requirements for NetApp’s New Logo

I love our old logo, and I’m going to miss it. NetApp has been an important part of my life, and I’ve built up many positive associations with that logo over the years. Part of what’s fun is the way some lines are missing; for many people, it takes a while before it “pops” as a 3D image – almost like an optical illusion.

So I’m sympathetic to people who wish we’d kept the old logo. I’ve been asked: Do you like that new logo? What was wrong with the old one? What does the new logo mean?

I’ll answer these questions, but to me they miss the most important point, which is: How do you design a logo that helps drive higher awareness? It’s okay to ask whether you like something, but when you consider a designed object, you should also ask whether it meets the design requirements. Here were ours:

1. visually distinctive
2. memorable and easy to get
3. foundation of a visual system (not just a stand-alone symbol)
4. can absorb meaning and feeling over time

The first two requirements are subtly different. Our previous logo was visually distinctive; I’ve never seen another one like it. But it was hard to remember or describe. Also, the 3D-optical-illusion thing was a problem, since some people never did get it. One person asked, “Why is your logo an arrow pointing down to the left?” Another asked, “Why do you have a forward C and a backward C next to each other?” Perhaps technical talent correlates with 3D visualization skills, because it was mostly non-technical people who saw a confusing 2D image, but that was a problem for our goal of driving awareness in business people.

Visually distinctive does not mean “unique in all the world”; it just means unique within the tech industry. So it’s not a problem that there is a Dutch automotive supply company with a similar logo. Apple Records and Apple Computer had similar names and logos for decades without trouble, until Apple got into the music business. (I love the closing comment from The Register article on this: “Lawyers for the Arc de Triomphe and Stonehenge were last seen kicking the dirt dejectedly.”)

The idea of a visual system is to create a common look and feel that lets you easily spot material from the same company. This before-and-after comparison shows the difference. Individually, the before materials are fine pieces of work, but it’s hard to see that they all come from NetApp.

Notice how we use the logo as the foundation of our visual design. Sometimes we use fragments of the logo, or shapes that are reminiscent of the logo, as in www.netapp.com. Other times a large logo interacts with other images, as a platform to hold them up, or a gateway for them to step through. The complex shape of the old logo was hard to use as anything except a stand-alone symbol.

It’s funny how logos absorb meanings and feelings. Why would two arcs painted a particular color represent food? There is no logic to it, but when I drive down the interstate and see those golden arches, it definitely means hamburgers and french fries. I know that the golden arches don’t inherently “mean” hamburgers, and I won’t argue that they are an artistic triumph, but over time this simple symbol has built up powerful associations.

The Arc de Triomphe inspired our “blue gateway” logo. The triumphal arch is a symbol of victory and progress going back thousands of years. I understand that there’s nothing inherent in the shape that means “innovative enterprise storage that helps you go further and faster toward your goals,” but if we continue helping our customers to succeed, then it will absorb those positive associations over time, just like the old logo did. I don’t know if the new logo is artistically better than the old one, but I think it’s a better symbol for NetApp.

As I said, I loved the old logo, but after 16 years, it no longer met NetApp’s logo requirements. It’s no surprise that I like the new one, since I helped chose it. More importantly, the new logo meets the design requirements much better than the old. And I love the flexible way we are using it as the foundation for our visual identity.

NetApp is a Well-Kept Secret. Time For That To Change.

Today, NetApp is launching a new “brand identity”. This includes a new logo, a new tagline, new messaging framework, a completely reworked corporate website -- the whole shebang. We are even changing our legal name from Network Appliance to NetApp. (For more details, see our new web site, this press release, and this podcast on the research behind our new brand.)

To understand our motives, you have to understand the relationship between brand and awareness. Awareness is about how many people are familiar with your company, and brand is about the stuff that you tell them in order to increase awareness. The new brand is the first stage of a new awareness campaign. Over the next few years, NetApp will spend tens of millions of dollars on awareness. Before we spend all that money, it only makes sense to get very clear about what -- exactly -- to tell people in all of those advertisements and customer programs!

At its heart, branding is about making promises. If you explain to people how your company can help them, the “brand promise”, then they can figure out for themselves whether to buy from you. (I wrote this blog entry about the idea of a brand as a promise.)

Based on past experience, I expect many readers -- especially technical ones -- to view this as so much marketing bullshit. Ironically, NetApp has never spent much on branding and awareness because our engineering-centric executive staff largely shared this view. We were skeptics! Other skeptics might like to hear why I’ve changed my view.

Since the goal of developing a new brand is to increase awareness, the most obvious question is why we think awareness is important. NetApp’s unaided awareness is less than 10%. Unaided awareness is when you ask potential customers to name all of the vendors that they would consider to solve a particular problem –- storage and data management in our case. Less than 10% of potential customers list NetApp. That means our unaided awareness is very close to our market share, which is also about 10%. Pretty much everyone who knows about NetApp is buying from us. Think about it: Everybody knows about EMC, but only a third of them choose to buy from EMC. Ten percent of people know about NetApp, and almost all of them choose to buy from us. Apparently, pretty much everyone who knows us likes us. Just imagine how well we could do if the other 90% knew what the 10% know!

One barrier to increasing awareness is that people call us so many different things: Network Appliance, NetApp, NetApps, Network Applications, Network Associates. What’s worse, our own material said both NetApp and Network Appliance. How can people remember you if they don’t even know your name? More people call us NetApp, and it’s shorter and easier to remember, so we decided to reduce confusion by legally changing the company name. Now we are NetApp. (FedEx did a similar rebranding in 1994.)

“Okay”, I hear the skeptic saying, “that makes sense, but did it really take expensive consultants to figure out that you need a single name and that you should start advertising?”

That’s fair, but other aspects of branding are trickier to get right. I said earlier that if you tell people what you do, then they can figure out for themselves whether to be customers, but it’s tricky to get the details right. Your explanation must be honest, clear, and relevant. If you aren’t honest about what you can do, customers will figure that out, and you’ll have a nasty backlash. If you aren’t clear, then people won’t understand what you are trying to say. Also, you must take a variety of audiences into account. Historically, we focused on the technical folks who use our products, but the higher-level business people who write the checks and make final decisions on vendor selection are equally important. Finally, you must be relevant. There are many true things that we could say about NetApp, but we want to share the true things that customers care about, that will make them want to buy from us. (Just to be clear, there is a profit motive here.) For our top level messaging, we also want to say true things that are of interest to both technical and business people.

Getting all this right takes careful research. We interviewed customers to hear why they buy from NetApp. We worked with industry analysts to validate customer input and to express the messages as clearly as possible. We did test marketing -– complete with one-way mirrors -– to see whether potential customers understood our messages, and whether they cared. (As an engineer, this whole process surprised me. It felt more like an engineering development project than I expected, complete with requirements, development, testing, debugging, milestones and everything.)

As part of the launch we are changing many things –- the logo, the tagline, the messages –- but we are not changing NetApp itself. Since we began, NetApp has changed from a small startup to a major IT vendor in enterprise data centers. The brand launch is not about driving more change; it is about introducing people to what NetApp has matured into, after fifteen years of successful growth.

NetApp has been a well-kept secret for too long, and we intend to change that.

Management Tip: To Defend a Decision, Highlight Its Flaws

Sometimes the best way to defend a decision is to point out its flaws.

Let’s say you have decided to pursue “Plan A”. As a manager, it is part of your job to defend and explain that decision to folks who work for you. So when someone marches into your office to explain that Plan A sucks, and that Plan Z would be much better, what do you do?

My old instinct was to listen to Plan Z, say what I don’t like about it, and to describe as best as I can why Plan A is better. Of course, the person has already seen these same arguments in the e-mail I sent announcing the decision, but since they don’t agree, they must not have heard me clearly, so I’d better repeat them again, right? I can report that this seldom works very well.

It works much better if I start out by agreeing: “Yep. Plan Z is a reasonable plan. Not only for the reasons you mentioned, but here are two more advantages. And Plan A – the plan that we choose – not only has the flaws that you mentioned, but here are three more flaws.” The effect of this technique is amazing. It seems completely counter-intuitive, but even if you don’t convince people that Plan A is better, hearing you explain its flaws, and the benefits of alternate plans, makes people much more comfortable.

Here’s what I think is going on. When a decision comes down from on high, it can be scary, because people wonder whether management understands the consequences of their choice. If you understand the pitfalls of your plan, it reassures them that you didn’t make the decision blindly. If you knew all that stuff, and still chose Plan A, perhaps it’s not as they thought. Ideally, being open about pros and cons leads to a conversation in which you can convince them that Plan A really is better. But whether that happens or not, they’ll definitely leave feeling better than if you simply pretended that your plan was perfect and that the alternative was completely stupid. (Of course, if the person raises flaws or alternatives that you hadn’t considered, then you may need to reopen the decision. When to reopen decisions is a whole nother topic.)

This is part of a larger philosophy. I want an environment where it’s okay to openly discuss the pros and cons of ideas and plans. Every idea has advantages and disadvantages. I shouldn’t take it as a personal attack when someone points out a flaw. When you choose a plan, you choose it flaws and all. The best way to succeed is to be open about the flaws, and work to avoid them.

It helps to avoid a strong link between ideas and people. If I think of an idea as mine, then when you insult it, you are insulting me. If I think of an idea as a hypothesis that we can investigate together, and maybe modify together, then we can discuss flaws and alternatives without making it personal. When ideas are a joint project with multiple people contributing, you end up with something better than anyone would thought up on their own.

Fortune Magazine says NetApp Is A Great Place To Work

For the sixth year in a row, NetApp has been in Fortune’s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. This year we are #14.

To generate the list, Fortune works with Robert Levering, who is the founder of The Great Place to Work Institute, and last year I had a chance to hear him describe his research. He believes that the most important factors for measuring a good working environment are that employees:

• Trust in the people they work for
• Have pride in what they do
• Enjoy the people they work with

Dan once told me that getting into the Best Companies list gave him more satisfaction than any other award or accomplishment at NetApp. When Dan first joined NetApp, creating a healthy corporate culture was one of his highest priorities. (I’ve described some of the things he did here and here.) I think he believes that a healthy company culture is the foundation for everything else a company does.

Sometimes people talk about “building a corporate culture”, but I think that’s the wrong metaphor. To me, the word building implies something mechanical that you can design exactly the way you want it. I don’t see culture that way. Culture is more like a plant. You can water it, pick weeds from it, maybe fertilize it, but you can’t really control it. Culture is something that you nurture, care for and worry about, not something that you design or build.

People who like NetApp’s culture often worry about how to keep it from changing. I think that culture should change! Culture is like a baby: it’s cute when it drools and spits food out of its mouth, but imagine if it were the same at age 21. The best culture for a startup with a handful of employees is probably completely wrong for a large company with tens of thousands of employees. On the other hand, I want the core values at the heart of our culture – like teamwork, trust and integrity – to remain constant even as the culture grows and evolves.

It’s interesting that Robert Levering does not focus on the kinds of employee benefits that you often see in articles about good places to work, like volleyball courts, yoga classes or nap rooms. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with cool perks! (Google with its free gourmet lunches is #1 on the Best Companies list.) The point is that these things aren’t what create long-term employee satisfaction. I think that Levering is right on target. It’s much more important that you trust the people you work for, take pride in your work, and enjoy the people you work with.

This blog entry is very NetApp-centric, but I think there is a benefit for customers in working with employees who take pride in what they do and trust the people they work with. Tom Georgens, who runs all product operations at NetApp, put it like this:

Great milk comes from happy cows.

As one of the cows, I have some discomfort with Tom's analogy, but I do agree with his basic point. :-)

NetApp Buys Onaro: A Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-Compatible Acquisition

There are lots of things to check when you buy a company. Is there good product synergy? Strategic fit? Cultural fit? Are there happy joint customers? In the case of our recent Onaro acquisition, we also used this test: Are the Gartner Magic Quadrant rankings compatible? In fact, Gartner lists NetApp and Onaro as the two most visionary companies in Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software. (Third and fourth place vendors are EMC and then IBM.)

To see how familiar people are with Gartner Magic Quadrants, I did a quick poll of some random engineers: 28.6 percent hadn’t heard of magic quadrants, and another 42.9 percent had only a vague idea, so it seems worth explaining.

Gartner ranks companies by two criteria: Completeness of Vision, and Ability to Execute. Vision measures things like how well you understand the customers’ needs, and how well you innovate to meet them. Execution measures things like customer experience, track record and operational capabilities. Combining the measures into two dimensions gives you the magic quadrant:

You are a leader if you have good vision as well as a proven ability to execute. A challenger has good execution, but not much vision. I think of Dell as a challenger. They may not have any vision at all, besides “copy the leader”, but they have great execution.

Execution is based largely on track record, so when you enter a new market, you usually start out as a niche player, or – if you are lucky – a visionary. NetApp just showed up for the first time last year in Gartner’s Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software quadrant. It would be impolite to paste Gartner’s copyrighted material into my blog, so here’s the link. As a first time entrant, we were pleased to be ranked in the visionary quadrant, with more vision than any other storage system vendor. Onaro was the only company above us, so the solution was obvious. :-)

For more information, you can see our own press release, but I also thought that Deni Connor did a good job of capturing both what Onaro does, and also our rationale for the purchase:

I've always been a fan of Onaro and its SANScreen product, which provides real-time analysis and monitoring of how storage, servers and network devices interact when faced with changes to the infrastructure…. Onaro just announced NAS Insight, which provides visibility into multiple NAS systems.

…

The acquisition has been rumored to be worth $120 million. If true, that is a small price to pay for the value Network Appliance receives from Onaro’s technology.

What I like about Onaro’s products is that they help you understand your data center at a higher level of abstraction. You can focus on storage service levels, and whether you are meeting them, instead of worrying so much about the low-level details of storage systems, servers and networks.

To NetApp Employees and Customers on Sun’s Lawsuit

[Note: This is an e-mail that I sent internally to our employees, with the expectation that they might also share it with customers. Some of it repeats previous posts, but other parts are different. In the spirit of openness, I decided to post here as well.]

To: everyone-at-netapp
Subject: Sun's Lawsuit Against NetApp

This morning, Sun filed suit seeking a “permanent injunction against NetApp” to remove almost all of our products from the market place. That’s some pretty scary language! It seems designed to make NetApp employees wonder, Do I still have a job? And customers to wonder, Is it safe to buy NetApp products?

I’d like to reassure you. Your job is safe. Our products are all still for sale.

Can you ever remember a Fortune 1000 company being shut down by patents? It just doesn’t happen! Even for the RIM/Blackberry case, which is the closest I can think of to a big company being shut down, it took years and years to get to that point, and was still averted in the end. I think it’s safe to say the odds of Sun fulfilling their threat are near zero.

If you are a customer, you can be confident buying NetApp products.

If you are an employee, just keep doing your job! Even if your job is to partner with Sun, keep doing your job. Here’s a ironic story. When James and I received the IEEE Storage Systems Award for our work in WAFL and appliances “which has revolutionized storage”, it was a Sun employee who organized the session where the award was presented. He was friendly, we were friendly, and we didn’t talk about the lawsuit. You can do it too. The first minute or two might feel odd, but then you’ll get over it. We have many joint customers to take care of.

If you are a salesman with concerned customers, feel free to show them this note, and maybe also point them at a couple of my blog posts (here and here). But don’t waste too much time before getting back to how we can work with them to solve their storage and data management problems.

I am frustrated with Sun and with Jonathan, as I describe in this blog entry. We have tried to be very open, detailed and specific about how Sun is infringing our intellectual property. We’ve tried to set a higher standard in how companies conduct patent litigation. It’s frustrating that Sun would just do a two-barreled blast, threatening to shut down our company. Frustrating and silly, to be honest, because it’s just so unlikely for a patent case to shut down a major corporation.

The other thing that’s frustrating is the way Jonathan wraps himself in the open source flag. We aren’t against open source, and we aren’t even against non-commercial use of ZFS. The number one rule of open source is that you should only give away stuff that belongs to you. That is what this suit is about, and everything else is just fluff.

Sun Sues NetApp: Says “You Cannot Unfree What Is Free”

Sun is seeking a “permanent injunction against NetApp” to remove almost all of our products from the market place. This is exactly the sort of broad but vague threat that gets people so frustrated with patent litigation. (The timing is no surprise: their deadline for responding to our complaint was this Friday.)

I have tried very hard in my blog to be unusually open – very detailed and specific – about how Sun is infringing our intellectual property. I’ve been trying to set a higher standard in how companies conduct patent litigation, and I’m disappointed in Jonathan for not doing better than this. This sounds like Sun’s broad threats when they sued Azul, but in the end, Sun didn’t put Azul out of business or even stop them from shipping products. I’m quite confident that two years from now – or however long it takes this suit to reach court – NetApp will be doing just fine. (For details on how this whole mess started, see my blog post, Jonathan’s response, and my response to him. I won’t revisit those arguments, so if you have comments about who is evil or not, please put them in those posts.)

But from a philosophical perspective, I found one part of Jonathan’s post especially interesting:

NetApp’s objectives were clear - they'd like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Which reflects a common misconception among proprietary companies - that you can unfree, free. You cannot.

Jonathan seems to be arguing that once something has been put into open source, it is beyond the law. I disagree completely! To get us away from the details of Sun and NetApp’s particular case, let me make an analogy.

Suppose that I steal and then open-source Jonathan’s patented recipe for chocolate chip cookies. The recipe will probably live forever in the web. There is no getting those bytes back, and if it’s a good recipe, there is no stopping individuals from baking those cookies.

On the other hand, if I start a company to sell Jonathan’s Patented Cookies™, then it’s perfectly reasonable for him to ask me to stop. (Let’s just assume, for the sake of the analogy, that he’s got a valid patent.) Or if Nabisco starts selling Jonathan’s Patented Cookies™, it’s perfectly reasonable for Jonathan to ask them to stop. It isn’t a question of trying to unfree what’s free, or retracting the recipe from the free recipe community. It’s a question of whether corporations must obey the law.

Jonathan’s claim that “you cannot unfree what is free” sets a very dangerous precedent. It says that you can steal anything, as long as you open source it afterwards. That can’t be right! I do understand that many open source proponents argue there should be no legal protection at all for information. “Information wants to be free.” But even if Jonathan believes that, he ought to wait until the law changes before taking Sun down that path.

One of the most important rules of open source is that you must only give away things that belong to you. If protected information does leak into open source, it will probably live forever in the web, but that isn't the issue. To me, the issue is that large corporations should stop making a profit on protected information that doesn't belong to them. That's what we're asking here.

Defining Consensus: What Does It Mean To “Own” a Decision?

Cooperation, collaboration and consensus are part of NetApp’s culture. Partly we feel that it makes for a better work environment, but also that it leads to better decisions and better alignment. However, consensus can lead to paralysis if carried too far. Simply giving one person ownership for a decision – they can do whatever they want – would certainly be much faster. How do you balance between these two extremes? What does it mean to be the “owner” of a decision? 

Dan, our CEO, has very strong views on culture, so a few years ago, when I was struggling with these issues as a manager, I asked his advice on what it means to delegate the ownership of a decision to someone. He said:

When I delegate a decision, I want the owner to identify the key stakeholders, and bring them to a consensus on the right plan, if possible. If they fail, then bring the decision back to me, probably at my staff meeting. (I am sometimes a key stakeholder, so don’t forget about me when driving to consensus!)

The trickiest issue here defining consensus. Even when people have rough agreement, they may differ slightly on details. Does consensus mean 100% agreement? If not, who determines whether consensus has been reached? What does it mean to “own” a decision if you still have to reach consensus?

I asked Dan all of these questions, and he said:

If the owner and key stakeholders cannot reach agreement, then I’d like them to bring the decision back to me, generally at my staff meeting, and preferably in the form of different recommendations to choose from.

But everyone should be aware that I have a strong bias to accept the owner’s recommendation. This bias helps to define consensus.

Consensus doesn’t mean that you agree 100% with the owner. It means that you believe the owners plan is fundamentally broken, and you want to try to convince me of that, despite my bias to accept the owner’s recommendation. I am not interested in arguments that “the owner’s plan is good, but mine is better.” Go convince the owner.

On the other hand, decision owners better be careful about ignoring input from key stakeholders, because if a stakeholder thinks a plan is really busted, then I do want to hear about that!

I love this definition, because it describes consensus operationally, instead of getting bogged down in theoretical philosophy. If you are a stakeholder trying to decide whether to withhold consensus, consider whether your case is so strong that you want to argue it in front of Dan’s staff. (And remember, Dan’s bias is with the owner!) But if you are an owner, and a key stakeholder is objecting, consider whether your case is so strong that you want to argue it in front of Dan. Maybe you should work harder to accommodate the stakeholder’s concern and reach consensus. I bet your plan will be stronger for it.

As near as I can tell, this is Dan's ownership model for pretty much everything. I can't think of many decisions where Dan has told the owner, “You can do whatever you want, and I’ll just support it.” On the other hand, for many areas it is very clear who the owner is, and unless people think there is a serious, serious issue with the owner’s plan, they unlikely to withhold consent.

I’m using Dan and his staff as an example, but obviously, managers who own a decision can apply this model recursively to their own staff, as they delegate further down.