NetApp - Exposed

NetApp 3.0

Innovation is easy.  Particularly when you have limited scope and no installed base to carry forward.  On the other hand continuous innovation, delivering compounding value to a growing market at every turn, is not only hard - it is highly risky.  So much so that there are startlingly few companies who have survived such ambitions of repeated innovation – along with the difficult transitions involved.

Last week’s historic announcement prompted me to examine several key attributes which set “innovation survivors” apart from the litany of failures.

NewsFLASH: Spring SNW Orlando Preview

If you’re an “IT storage person”, next week is gonna be a fun storage geekfest at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando.  Whether you’re into Dedupe, FCoE, Multi-Vendor Storage Array Interoperability, Flash or Storage Standards in general, NetApp will be omnipresent at this year’s Spring Storage Networking World show organized by SNIA & ComputerWorld.

Cloud & Virtualization will be two of the dominant themes at the show, but the theme I’m most excited about is of course Solid State Storage.

FAS2050 Wins Award – What Else Is New?

Quite a bit actually. In fact that award was for a bakeoff among a dozen iSCSI storage arrays back in the summer of 2008. Since then NetApp has won many more mainstream awards while receiving continued analyst and customer recognition. NetworkWorld recapped their Best of 2008 today, which included the FAS2050. While there have been numerous hardware (disk, HBA, NIC) and software (Data ONTAP) updates since then, there was also one loose end exposed which we are about to close.

UPDATE March 6th: To quote Mark Twain, the Rumors of FilerView's demise are greatly exaggerated!

Building an Admirable Billion Dollar Company - The Recipe Book

"It's easy - All we have to do is sell products we haven't developed yet, to customers we haven't met yet, with people we haven't hired yet" -- Tom Mendoza in 1994 upon receiving a billion-dollar quota after booking $40M the year before.

I've known Dave Hitz for almost 11 years now, and I still marvel at his story-telling abilities. It's not just that he can repeat a story well, or that he can craft a compelling original one with the same ease. Dave has this rare talent for distilling complex scenarios of all kinds (technology, business, life, etc...) into simple analogies which even my immigrant grandparents could understand. The final subtle yet critical distinction is that he does it without insulting their intelligence. Add a disarming wry sense of humor and you've got the formula for what makes Dave truly exceptional.

Venture Capitalists are highly paid professionals who focus full-time on identifying the next "great idea" and then molding it into an enterprise which will hopefully reward their efforts handsomely. They've each developed their own proprietary formulas for success which understandably remain closely guarded secrets in their community.

This is the book for the rest of us.

In it, Dave applies his highly approachable story-telling skills at exposing critical lessons learned along the way towards building the very special company that NetApp has become. Executives and business leaders will naturally absorb many key elements from this book, but the real magic of it lies in the long-term observations that every employee of a young, ambitious, successful company can take away.

Is NetApp Perfect?

Short answer no.  We will never get there but we'll also never stop trying.  Many respected industry observers like our efforts so far.  Here's a recent one in particular (click image for full story)

NetApp's Secret Competitive Advantage

Over a year and a half ago when I still ran our competitive team, I was asked a relatively straightforward question by our CEO (Dan Warmenhoven) during the taping of a company-wide radio (podcast) interview.

What is NetApp's Competitive Advantage?

Both of us were probably thinking I would build my answer starting with our cool technology, or maybe some exciting upcoming product announcement. Perhaps I would regale in a sales anecdote about how we displaced a direct competitor in a major account.

But as I was formulating the response in my head, I quickly navigated to the source of it all.

Miracle on the Hudson

Nothing like a Metropolis superhero-style story to help people forget about negative headlines for a while and put the gift of life into proper perspective.  I love this picture of today's aftermath because after the miracle of 100% survival from a plane crash, it also looks like these survivors are literally performing the miracle of walking on water!

For frequent travelers like me though, Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie may now come to mind in a whole new context :)

There are so many near-disasters averted in this story that it makes you wonder if this is some kind of post-9/11, post-flight 587, post-Wall St. collapse type Karma.  Regardless of the motivation behind today's fate - Kudos to Scully and the crew of US1549!

Vicious or Virtuous in 2009? Choose Your Cycle!

The headlines of early 2009 are hardly encouraging.  After almost two decades of avid purchasing, consumers have lost confidence in the economy, thereby slowing their spending.  As a result, business revenue is down, driving pressure to lay employees off in an effort to maintain profitability or minimize losses.  Layoff notices further erode consumer confidence and the vicious cycle continues.

The downturn in the information technology sector is a microcosm of this broader economic phenomenon.  But in our world of enterprise storage there is a clear way to break out of this Vicious Cycle and turn it around 180 degrees…

The Significance of Obama's Victory to the Storage Industry

Having just finished watching his inspirational yet humble victory speech, it's clear to me Nov 4th, 2008 will go down in history as a transformational date not only for the United States, but for the world as a whole.

While this seemingly endless US presidential campaign stretched the patience and passion of most Americans, I had the luxury of observing it as a neutral 3rd party from both a personal as well as professional perspective.

The Recession of 2008 - Summarized in 8 Short Minutes

Like a slow motion train wreck, I can't stop watching CNBC lately in order to witness what I hope is (only this once) in-a-lifetime worldwide stock market crash.  The implications for the storage economy are vast, but before I pontificate on the topic in more detail later this week, I encourage a quick read of Dave's and Marc's respective takes.

Candor is a NetApp hallmark and I am proud of how our executives are resisting the shallow and superficial tendency of some competitors to feign indifference to the burning of Rome around them.