SNLDD #7: When is it Time to Jump Ship?

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Gabriel

why-summer-is-the-best-time-for-financial-advisors-to-jump-shipUpdated: This session will be happening on 7/19. Stay tuned.

Keeping with the tradition of sporadic epsidoal content, this week on #SNLDD Episode 7 the team will discuss the concept of “Jumping Ship” or changing jobs. So just a few of the items up for discussion:

  • How many bridges are safe to burn
  • When opportunity knocks do you have to answer
  • The counter offer
  • The grass isn’t always greener
  • Professional impact

Hoping that this is a good one. I find the topic fairly interesting, and it kind of dovetails to the last epside about getting canned. I should have a link ready soon. Obviously Google Hangouts continue to be the bane of my existence, but you should be able to watch the episode live here.

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The Journey To Leadership Starts With Having Vision

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Gabriel

AWS09In 2009, Gartner released the Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services. At that time,  Amazon Web Services, AWS for short, appeared as one of the Visionaries in the space. I have to wonder, if at that time, the team at Amazon realized that it would only take them 3 short years to become the de-facto leader in the space, and that in just 6 years they would account for more service capacity than everyone else in the Magic Quadrant combined?AWS11

An additional point I find interesting about the AWS journey is when I look at the competative organizations and companies whose pedigree and execution capabilities would put them in the category of “Titans of Industry” in 2009, many were not even listed in the Magic Quadrant only 3 short years later when AWS took ownership of the space. It’s also interesting to look at the niche players who came aboard, and then also disappeared, either going under due to competition, or being purchased and integrated into one of the larger groups. An immediate takeaway, is that this is a dynamic and highly competitive space.

conanSo Visionary to Leader in 3 years is a massive accomplishment for any company, but this journey also needs additional context. At the time AWS entered the Magic Quadrant, AWS had been a product with over 180,000 developers working with the system for several years. They had the financial might of Amazon itself to devote resources and infrastructure to. Still, they went full Conan and crushed their enemies, saw them driven before them, and, well you know the rest. 

All this said, why am I prattling on regarding Gartner and Magic Quadrants? Well as I write this the company I work for, SimpliVity has been announced as part of the Gartner Maexpectationsgic Quadrant for Integrated Systems. Now I won’t go into great depth on what an Integrated System is, my buddy Ron Singler already has and Matt Vogt has gone one step further to lay out the inclusion criteria as well, but what I do want to delve into is why I believe this is a very important first for a young company like SimpliVity, and to provide a little more context to what the 4 squares mean.

For those new to the world of Gartners Magic Quadrant, the image to the right, while a little tongue-in-cheek, is for the most part accurate. When the Magic Quadrant is released you are either on it, or you are not. There is one small exception here, and that’s the “Cool Vendor” space, which is outside looking in, but relevant enough to have an “honorable mention. In our case, it would have been a good thing for a company that had only been shipping product for 6 months to be mentioned in the “Cool Vendor” spot, it would denote that there was potential enough to capture the eye of the analysts, and then wait a year to see whether the company made it onto the chart.

As it turns out SimpliVity made the Visionaries category (Click for full report) for Integrated Systems. The one aspect of this that is truly remarkable, is that I cannot recall any company that had only been an active participant in the marketplace for 6 months being included in the Magic Quadrant. When I came on board in April of 2013, only 5 months before the Gartner quadrant was analyzed, there were roughly 70 employees at the company. At the time of analysis that number was closer to 100, today that number is over 300, and that kind of growth is a strong stepping off point for the journey to leadership.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Enterprise Tech, Gartner MQ, HyperConvergence | Leave a comment

vExpert Weekly Digest – MARVIN Mania & Docker-o-Rama

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Gabriel

6-12-2014 12-41-12 PMIn this weeks edition, lots of discussion around VMware’s foray into the hardware world with MARVIN. Docker appears to be popping up everywhere, I hear more buzz around it than Big Data at the moment, and the concept of containerization, while not new, seems to be all the rage. More thoughts on all of that at another time.

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SNLDD#6 Getting Fired for prosperity and profit

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Gabriel

Droid_FiredLike all things I do, this is sporadic, and spontaneous. Remember Conan knew what was best in life, I’m guessing that fluctuated as well. All that said, this week lets talk about getting shit-canned, how it happened, why it happened, and what the result was good or bad. 

For the record, I’ve been fired a few times. Sometimes it’s been warranted, others no so much. That said, I believe there is a lot to learn from the process, and that failure promotes learning. So lets have a chat about that.

Also, I continue to suck at Google Hangouts, therefor I will continue to use them. Though apparently they have made a few changes that make scheduling a hangout suck less. Seriously, I’m skeptical. Follow the link that will somehow magically transport you to the show when it starts here.

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vExpert Weekly Digest: Let the Hiatus End

Posted on May 24, 2014 by Gabriel

5-24-2014 10-20-53 PMArise from ye slumber, like a bear who hibernates in winter., a new Episode of vExpert Weekly Digest is here.  I must apologize to all 5 people who read this blog for the lack of updates. Not only has life inside the Matrix been uber hectic, but the travel and work schedule has simply kept the man down. For the record there are like 400 blog posts stuck in my brain right now. Mentally I’ve written them all, physically only a few. All this said, I’ve pushed through and put together a vExpert Weekly Digest. This week is a collection of things from around the web over a much broader period of time. I promise to resume our regularly scheduled programming. Thanks for your patience.

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VMUG-ED in April, or In This Post I Drop Names

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Gabriel

April is a busy month.

Preface: You may ask “What’s with all the name drops”  in this post? Well, these are all people I would suggest you follow on twitter. Think of this is an elongated #FF. I have linked to their twitter feeds, I’d recommend following everyone above for great technical insights and information.

2014-04-01 15.38.25For starters this year, April 1st marked my first year anniversary at SimpliVity. It also marked the start of the second quarter and the end of the first full year of GA release for us. Much has been learned by yours truly in seeing what it takes to bring a product to market, recruit partners and customers, create collateral, cover a massive territory, and evangelize around a product that disrupts pretty much the entire data center stack. Good times.

April this year was also a 3-fer when it came to VMUG End User Conferences. April 1st marked Seattle VMUG, where I was joined by many tech friends. Chris Wahl, Jason Langer, Damian Karlson, Peter Chang, GS Khalsa, Brian Graf, and Justin King. It also marked a VMUG event where I had a break out session to speak at. To be fully honest, if I could do break out session presentations every day of the year I would. They are possibly my favorite thing to do in the evangelical space. This is odd for me because up until a year ago, I’d never presented to a group of more than say 5 people in a room. Now I’m fully jazzed to present, and it doesn’t matter if it’s one or one thousand people. Seattle’s session was fun, first it was a good sized crowd, people were engaged, good Q&A and I felt  that the presentation had the right mix of this is what we do, this is why we do it, and this is who might be interested, along with some good humor. I like to make sessions interactive, light, and fun, but serious enough to get the big 3 covered. Interesting that last year I also presented at Seattle, and if I had to grade myself, last year was a C, this year was an A. After having done roughly 400+ meetings in the last year you tend to hone your message basics. I for one am constantly tweaking and changing the content, but the message still stays true. I also don’t really practice or rehearse any of my presentations either. I know to some this is a major no-no, I just find that If I speak organically that it comes across better, and I think that’s why this session felt pitch perfect for me.

The back-to-back: San Diego and Silicon Valley

Each year I get a back to back VMUG event, the last two years its been San Diego and Silicon Valley. Frankly its fairly tough to get up, drive an hour down to San Diego at 5AM, then work the show all day and then race back up north to catch a flight to go up to SJC. It makes for two very long days (I know quit your bitching) Bl9JRq9CYAA7Lnz I pretty much count San Diego as home turf. It’s the first place I lived in SoCal when I moved here in 1991. It was one of the first VMUG chapters I got involved with on a regular basis. The local team puts on a great quarterly event, and the annual EUC event is always a big affair. I’ve been going to it since around 2010. Interestingly enough I’ve seen many of the same people at the event year after year as well which makes it a great time to catch up and see how everyone is doing. This year, Rick Scherer from EMC asked me to be on the Meet the Experts Panel with himself, Vaughn Stewart from Pure Storage, and Dwayne Sinclair from the VMware NSX team. This was my first time as an “expert” panel speaker and I found the format to be a good experience. It’s always interesting to see the divergent viewpoints of different people and the vendors that they represent. VMUG Q&A sessions can be hit or miss sometimes. I still think there is some hesitation on the part of participants to stand up and ask a question in a room full of people. I know that Mike Laverick is working on a project to help with that called Feed Forward.  I’ve thrown my hat in the ring to assist if I can. I think its a great idea to help grow the community, and bring forth more customer voices to be heard.

Silicon Valley VMUG

Silicon Valley VMUG started off just right. First, I went to the Santa Clara Convention Center (where it was the year previous), only to find that it was at the San Jose Convention Center. I was not the only person to do this, as  I saw several others who would make there way over to the proper location eventually. Fun Fact: you can make it from Santa Clara to San Jose in about 8 minutes in a Hyundai rental. photo The #SVVMUG is a great event, primarily because there are simply so many community people at the event. There is something about being in the heart of the technology world, the long history of amazing invention, and the sheer amount of start-up-mojo that you will run into that gets a little intoxicating. I always enjoy spending time in the area, and the VMUG event is always a great one as the turn out is good sized. With VMware HQ just a few miles away, you will get a a good number of the core people who work on the VMware products on a daily basis showing up on the floor. Getting to bump into William Lam and John Troyer  is always a treat, especially to hear what they are currently working on in person after having read about it over the year.

This year the VMUG also coincided with Stephen Fosketts SDDC14, and Storage Field Day 5. So that meant that it was going to be chock full of community peeps. Post VMUG, I joined Aaron Delp, Sean Thulin, and Kyle Murley for a quick jaunt over to Menlo Park to hang with the Tech Field Day crew at Auto Vino. For the record, Stephen Foskett always picks the best places to host a Soiree. Auto Vino isphoto 1 essentially a winery that holds super cars. It’s like a play ground for rich super nerds.  It’s not every day you get to walk through a garage with a half dozen super cars current and past. Silicon-Valley-Cast-LogoAlso since this was the end of the first day of SFD5, lots of high level team members from the presenting companies were on hand to chat with. Poojan Kumar and Satyam Vaghani  from Pernix Data. Jason Collier from Scale Computing, Dave Wright, from freshly GA’d Solid Fire. All on hand to chat with and talk shop. And lets not forget the delegates on hand, Lauren Malhoit, Ray Lucchesi, Howard Marks, Arjan Timmerman, Justin Warren, Bob Plankers, Phoummala Schmit, and Robert Novak. Just a great group of people who are all very passionate about technology and the tech space in general. Finally, a very special thanks to Caroline McCrory of GigaOM who was kind enough to drive me back to the VMUG late at night.

So now you know why there has been a lack of blog activity this last month. With all the new vExperts blogs now part of the official blog roll, I’ll be resuming the vExpert Weekly Digests, on a still to be determined weekly, bi-weekly, or whenever I have time to post it schedule. Also, #SNLDD will resume again shortly as soon as I have a free Saturday Night. Oh and one last thing, I’ve got actual content you may want to read stuck in my head. Just looking to craft some messaging. Tips to upcoming blog posts: I don’t like the term SDDC,  Major Tech Companies as Tribal Waring States, and Why try as we may want to, its going to be tough to destroy tech silos.

P.S. I’ll be at Openstack Summit Mid-May which will be my first official OS event. I’ll be attempting to live blog that. So  watch this space. 

4-26-2014 5-01-19 PM

 

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vExpert Weekly Digest – vExperts 2014 Edition

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Gabriel

4-5-2014 4-55-13 PMAlas, April Fools and  Troyers cat and Troyers dog be damned, the 2014 vExpert list was announced after a near solid day of teasing by the a fore mentioned pseudo animals. And what a list it was, 745 vExperts in total, up nearly 200 over the previous year, and 400 since I was awarded vExpert status in 2012. As for me, this is my 3rd year in a row as a vExpert and I continue to enjoy being part of the community. Once again, I am very thankful to John and Corey for the mountains of hard work that they put into this community all year long.

So to commemorate this grand event, this weeks vExpert Weekly Digest is 100% dedicated to vExperts announcing they are vExperts.

As always I would ask that the new members of the club heed the warnings posted on this blog and yodawg-vexpertmany others on previous years, simply so they understand what the lay of the land is. I’ll be posting a link to this and other items in the official vExpert forums for the new members to get their blog links over my way so I can add them to the vExperts RSS feed that I use to culminate these posts.

Also, for those of you who are new to the vExpert community, please come over and join the vExperts Google+ Community Page.

Oh and for the record, The #vDB achieved a perfect 100% vExpert status. Outside of VMware and EMC the vDB crew has the most vExperts in the world.

Mad props to: @vnoob  @jaslanger @sixfootdad @vsential @millardjk @mwpreston @josh_atwell @joshcoen@vmcutlip@virtualbacon @timantz and yours truly @Bacon_Is_King

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Startup Life: A Years Worth Of Activity

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Gabriel

HOW STARTUPS ROLLSo this marks my one year anniversary with the Hyperconverged Infrastructure company SimpliVity. Since the dotcom-bust, this is the first real “start-up” I’ve worked at, though I use the term start-up only in the sense that the company was bringing their product to the marketplace. When I joined, there were roughly 70 people on board, the vast majority of which were engineers. For a company that was founded in 2009, we spent a good amount of time in what is considered “stealth mode” but also a long period of engineering and development. Turns out doing things the right way (aka the hard way) takes a lot more time. (Image courtesy of Fake Grimlock, I highly recommend his The Book of Awesome)

I was part of the original go to market sales team in the US. My primary responsibility is the Western territoryUnited States and Canada. That’s roughly 10 states and 4 Canadian Provinces, or the geographical equivalent of modern Europe. Suffice to say, I was going to be doing a little bit of travel. I think for those of you who follow me on Twitter, you will see a lot of airport check-ins. To date, I’ve only done 92 flights, which doesn’t sound like a lot looking back on the amount of activity. For comparison,  my first year as a Sales Engineer with Emulex, it’s a 12X increase. Now all I need is Southwest to open up flights to Hawaii (please please please) so I can make good use of those Rapid Rewards points.

Being part of a team that’s bringing a disruptive product to market is not something that everyone will have a chance to do during their career. It’s a mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion. There is very little in the day to day Systems Administration world that will prepare you for this type of work. I can say with 100% certainty, that I’ve never worked harder or longer in my entire life, except for combat operations when I was in the military, but even those were shorter in duration than what I’ve done for the last year. It can feel like trying to sprint through a marathon.

To really get a good understanding of what the past year was like, I went back through my calendar (where I log most everything) and found that there were 980 individual entries. I’ve broken some of that activity out here in this handy chart.You can click on the various legend items to either add/remove items. This tracking of activity is helpful for me because it can identify trends and correlations based on activity levels. It can also help to determine if your approach or strategy is working, especially when it comes to making decisions around allocation of time and effort.

Of course when you come on board with a new company there is a time frame where you drink from the uncannyFire-hose. I’ve talked about it in the past, and from the aspect of pure accelerated knowledge intake, the first 3 months with SimpliVity was no different. What was different was building a channel where none existed, at the same time you are building customer awareness,. Both are full time jobs, and as it so happened I was doing both at the same time. Highlight on Customer Facing and Partner Facing only in the graph and you can see where my focus was during the first quarter, recruiting partners (aka planting seeds). Fun fact, I’m related to Johnny Appleseed (see the uncanny resemblance) the legendary folk hero who planted apple trees around the eastern United States. In that respect my early months at SimpliVity were focused on planting the seeds that would grow over the course of the year. Partner recruitment is something that many companies simply do not have to engage in, but in the early stages its crucial to building a pipeline of business for a channel focused organization.

Picture1The second part of that planting is building customer awareness, and when your product is an atomic building block for the virtualized datacenter (Shameless plug!) then what better event is there than VMworld to get your message out? Pick out only Aug/Sep in the chart for Tradeshow/VMUG and Customer Facing, and you can get an idea of what an event of that magnitude can do for building awareness. It can also point to the timing of when you decide to launch with your larger go to market strategy. If I had not planted all the partner seeds earlier in the year, I wouldn’t have the bandwidth to address the large ramp in customer interest that followed VMworld.

Timing is everything, and in my case it means that with a territory so large and with only 24 hours in a day, my bandwidth is being exhausted. Now comes the time when the territory changes, and we get to call in the cavalry. When I first came on board, there were I think 6 teams in the US, we are now hiring karl_kopinski_empire_knights30 additional teams. My territory will shrink from the size of Europe, to just Southern California (and Hawaii too). The difference for this coming year will be that instead of the larger broader area of influence, I should be able to focus much more time on taking all that previous years  work of planting seeds, and start the much more difficult work of harvesting. It also means that the teams that will be coming into the newly formed territories will benefit from that work as well. They will not have to repeat the introductory effort, now it will be a time of building, expanding, and focusing on growth of the company and the further expansion of the product and its awareness.

Oddly enough, I don’t expect my activity stream to get any smaller in year two. If anything its focus will shift, in which direction, I’m not yet certain. I do know that in the next months I will be responsible for the same large territory, but more from the standpoint of ramping up the new team members and making sure they are empowered and enabled. Other plans I have for this year are to switch my focus from VMware to KVM and automation technologies like puppet. For me that’s where I see the larger datacenter trend moving. I’m sure I’ll have several posts that expand on that in the future.

And saying that, this posts is getting a little long. Thanks for reading.

Posted in Sales Engineering, SimpliVity, Tech Marketing | Leave a comment

vExpert Weekly Digest – March 23rd 2014 – Stop the VSANITY!

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Gabriel

3-23-2014 11-19-30 AMBumping up against the end of the quarter and I’ve been crazy busy, alas I had some downtime this morning and pulled together another edition of the vExpert Weekly. This week, you guessed it, MOAR VSAN! Lots of VSAN, in fact way too much VSAN. Funny, you hardly hear about NSX anymore.

There’s other things in there too, Scott Lowe has a nice post on Docker that I’m digging into. The Brownbag crew will be doing Sack Lunches at Openstack Forum too.

 

 

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#SNLDD Episode 5: Becoming a Corporate Sellout

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Gabriel

whoselloutOnce again, free time permits a new episode of Saturday Night Live Deep Dive. This week the topic will be “Becoming a Corporate Sellout” As usual, obligatory alarming headline is being used to generate traffic.

Unless you have lived under a rock for the last month, it’s been impossible not to be inundated with the onslaught of buzz around VMware’s long awaited VSAN launch. By my count alone in my current RSS feed there were over 60 different blog posts or articles related to VSAN. Chris Evans took it a bit further and calculated all the posts by only Duncan Epping, Cormac Hogan, and William Lam on the subject which totaled out to 77 between the three of them.

garthNow, let me be clear here, I’m not picking on anyone in particular, this is just an example that is currently being used because of its current relevance. For the record, I’m just as guilty as the next guy when it comes to writing about the technology I work with and the company I work for. Still, the underlying question to discuss tonight will be, when you have built up your online following under independent auspices, do you lose credibility if you switch to a nearly full time Evangelist on behalf of your employer and are there further ramifications involved in “Selling Out”? Is there a happy medium that can be reached, and does it matter or should you even care?

As usual, Google+ Hangout Challenges will prevail. Here is the main G+ Event page which will be updated with the Hangout once it goes live.

 

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