John McArthur’s New Venture Blog

One of the sessions I attended at the New England Area VMware User Group meeting in Newport, Rhode Island last week included a discussion on how to take the internal storage of a VMware ESX host and turn it into a virtualized iSCSI storage appliance.  I happen to believe that the approach has great merit for many smaller IT shops and for remote office environments.  The internal storage of an ESX server, if totally useable and accessible to the ESX host and other ESX servers on the network, is probably the cheapest storage you will ever buy.  What I found particularly interesting about this session, however, was the fact that the presenter downplayed the approach as good enough to experiment with the storage virtualization software, but not good enough to run production applications.  In order to encourage companies to try the software, the developer offers a free 30-day trial, the expiration of which then renders the server unuseable, unless you purchase a permanent license.  While I believe the company has good software, I don’t understand the approach to the market. (more…)

I attended the New England Area VMware User Group meeting in Newport, Rhode Island last week.  It was a great opportunity to see what challenges IT managers are facing, what solutions they are adopting, and what problems remain to be solved.  It was also a good opportunity for me to revisit what I learned many years ago in studying the research of  Clayton Christensen and his concept of Disruptive Innovation.  Two of my clients have what I consider disruptive technologies.  I’ll write about Tek-Tools in this post, and then cover  StorMagic in a subsequent post. 

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.)  

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One of the things we used to discuss, when I was running the storage research practice at IDC, was “When will a market disappear and just become a feature of some larger market?”  Examples are numerous.  Remember when there was a market for browser software? And, while NetApp is going strong, both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are trying to make NAS a feature of the operating system.

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.  (more…)

My recent blog post on Skype and Logitech inspired one of Skype’s bloggers, Villu Arak, to locate this history of picture phones.   If you look through the history, you’ll notice several different jobs that were being proposed for the picture phones: business communication, grandparents staying connected with grandchildren, soldiers calling home.  While AT&T’s initial implementations failed, the jobs still needed to be done.

This post by Villu confirms that fact, as he writes about some of the ways that Skype is being used today:

Distant lovers enjoying dinner — and each other’s company — over a free video call.

Local-government officials replacing meetings with multichats.

Homesick soldiers keeping a line open with their families. (more…)

Paul Gillin was kind enough to meet me for coffee on Friday morning.   Paul and I go back a long way.  He played a key role in the success of TechTarget, and I spoke at one of his first conferences, the highly influential Storage Decisions conference.  When we met for coffee this week, Paul  brought with him an autographed copy of his latest book,  The New Influencers , which I am reading, while on a 3-day holiday in Syracuse, New York.   Who wouldn’t want to be in Syracuse, the land of lake-effect snow, in the middle of winter?  But it’s a great place to go to catch up on reading.

 As part of my New Year’s resolution, I’m determined to become more engaged in the “new social media.”  There are a couple of reasons.  The first is that, while I have an enormous network of contacts, I need a more effective way to maintain communication.  The second is that, I have several clients that need a more effective way to reach potential customers and influencers than traditional marketing approaches provide.  (more…)

Last month, at the request of a friend at Genesis Partners, I facilitated a roundtable discussion with Chief Security Officers (CSOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from a few major global companies.  The assembled group was part of a technology advisory council that the firm leverages to help guide them in investment decisions.  There’s nothing like a few generals in the trenches to tell you what the “real world” is like.

Prior to the roundtable discussion there was a brief introduction by Dr. Henry Kressel, who has just written a book entitled “Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World.”  He closed his remarks with a cautionary comment that those of us who live in the United States need to prepare emotionally for a world in which our children are substantially worse off than we.   The premise is founded in part, at least, on his accumulated evidence that digital innovation is moving rapidly away from its previous center of concentration in the United States.  I’m not sure if it’s some sort of accelerated innovation entropy, but there’s little doubt that very innovative technologies are now coming out of countries and regions that had previously contributed very little to the digital revolution.

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For those of you who are watching closely, you will notice that I added a new entry to my blog roll.  I recently got reconnected with Denise Shiffman, former marketing executive at Sun Microsystems, through another former client who has found her way to Mimosa Systems.  Denise has a new book coming out in the fall, which I hear is on Enterprise 2.0.

I met with an investor last week at a hotel in Boston.  He was in town to attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference.  The basic goal of his attendance was to get a better handle on when, or if, money was going to start changing hands for his Enterprise 2.0 company.  Let’s face it.  It takes time for some things to develop.  As one storage-industry watcher reported, a lot more money has been invested in storage companies than will be returned in profit.  I suspect the same may be true for Enterprise 2.0, though I haven’t done the math. (more…)

We are fast approaching the 10th anniversary of the publication of  “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” by Harvard Business School professor,  Clayton Christensen.  Like many of you, I’ve read and re-read the book.  But, if you are one of the few who haven’t read this book, which carried an Amazon sales ranking of #1,285 on April 5, 2007, it seems like the 10th anniversary would be a good time to do it. 

I’ve also read “The Innovator’s Solution,” with an Amazon sales ranking of #1,617, which attempts to answer the “So what should I do about it?” question that logically follows from “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”   The respective rankings only reinforce the notion that there are more people willing to point out problems than there are people willing to solve them.  I recommend this book for anyone who wants to stop complaining about how customers are being duped by the manufacturers of low-quality products and figure out how to participate in the next opportunity wave.

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