Hilarious and informative. The stories he must be queueing up to tell...
Great article from one of my favorite websites.
Great news as one of our key partners has moved over from Yahoo! to VMware.
Scalar originally partnered with Zimbra back in 2007 - we were looking for open source email infrastructure that could handle the large scale some of our university and telco/ISP customers were looking for. Most of these customers had built their previous systems on variants of the original internet email applications (sendmail and the like) but it was time for an upgrade. After much review we selected Zimbra - mature, reliable, highly-scalable, open source, fully featured with plenty of installations at large scale Universities and Telco's. It is capable of handling millions of mailboxes due to a design that enables it to be efficiently distributed across many servers.
At Scalar we have been running Zimbra on VMware virtual machines for years to leverage the redundancy and highly-efficient hardware utilization the platform provides. This enables us to help our customers and clients manage thousands of web, smartphone and Outlook accessible email addresses, documents, and calendars.
Paul Maritz (VMware CEO) ran the office and exchange business inside Microsoft and the cloud business inside EMC for a bunch of years. I expect some big moves as VMware moves to wrap up scalable email within the cloud.
Read about it on http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/zimbra.html
The world is shifting to the 5th major cycle of computing - the mobile cycle - and at the same time the captains (Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Oracle+Sun) of the first 3 cycles (mainframe, mini and pc computing) are lining up for a donnybrook. Each are spending billions on acquisitions, likely similar amounts on marketing, slideware, branding, partnerships, press and twitter posts. Each are promising massive savings, higher utilization, lower footprint, less cooling and greener infrastructures. And they all want your business. I think we will have 3 winners, possibly an epic fail and lots of new technology startups over the next few years as all this gets figured out. This is gonna be fun!
Mary Meeker is back and according to clusterstock "Mobile's gonna be huge!"
The Mobile Internet Report
The final team pic - thankfully nobody opted to keep the 'stache beyond the campaign to raise funds! Our team raised $11,846.10!
Tooting the horn of the Scalar NetApp team - last night they won the 2009 Outstanding Partner Contribution Award!!! Way to go!
A few of the crew at Scalar decided to support a very worthy men's cause - Prostate Cancer Research and Education by growing a mustache for the entire month of November.Here is the team pic - I will update will the results at the end of the month!
Well its been 5 1/2 months since my original post and will soon be a year if you read the SEC filing since the whole business of Sun selling itself began and today they announced the slashing of another 3000 jobs today as a direct result of the delay in closing the deal.
A quick review of my May 7 comments.Oracle / Sun impact on the IT industry: May 7th prediction - VERY GOOD. True today. Oracle is introducing products and solutions that are forcing their competition to step up their game and deliver more to customers. Hard to argue the benefit.
Oracle / Sun impact on Sun customers: May 7th prediction - VERY GOOD. So Larry has announced he will spend more investing in SPARC, Solaris, and a whole host of other Sun products and will increase the number of sales and technical people in front of customers. While he has yet been given the opportunity to delivery his comments are trending in the right direction.
Oracle / Sun impact on the business of Sun: May 7th prediction - TBD to BAD to GOOD.Well if you were one of the 3000 at Sun today it was bad news. But if you spend anytime with Sun its easy to recognize they have turned a corner and faced the reality of becoming Oracle. Their optimism and energy are increasing, they know not everyone of their co-workers will be around after (if) the acquisition completes but they are ok with that and moving forward. I move my position to GOOD.
Funny article I was pointed to by one of our architects http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/dirty-vendor-tricks-909 and the corresponding reasons why I believe Scalar can help our customers build great IT infrastructures! For those that do not want to read the article - the 'Dirty Vendor Trick' list is from the infoworld article - the reason why to leverage Scalar are my comments below that.
Dirty vendor trick No. 1: The magic demo
We built a customer lab that integrates all the technology we promote and sell to our customers. Its was purpose built to allow our customers to prove out performance, functionality, ability to integrate to your environment ONCE you've seen the demos.
Dirty vendor trick No. 2: Underbid, then overcharge
Since our inception the number one source of opportunity within our marketplace was to help our customers procure less technology - do MORE with LESS. There is no lock-in to Scalar and our customers are one decision away from selecting our competition so our solution recommendations must match your objectives (often to the dismay of the incumbents) or we are simply out of your selection process.
Dirty vendor trick No. 3: The customer headlockOur only 'headlock' is to deliver the best work possible and to remain committed to the project. If we deliver it makes if hard (not sure that counts as a headlock) for our customers to move onto our competitors. Our product is a service and the switch costs are low - we actually like it that way.
Dirty vendor trick No. 4: The billing "mistake"I was wowed by this one. I do not believe we have an opportunity (should we be so inclined) to bill our customer 'incorrectly'. Their barrier to switch is to low and so our requirement to be correct is quite high. I can tell you that positioning us against the organizations that do have a headlock and could make a billing 'mistake' generally helps you keep them honest.
Dirty vendor trick No. 5: The forced upgrade marchOur job is to take our customers off the forced upgrade march. The best tool we can give you is choice, as soon as we deliver that we value the lever behind the force disappears.
Dirty vendor trick No. 6: The clueless customerOne of the things I often say to prospective customers is 'all I want is a chance to compete - if we deliver a valuable solution, select us, if not hopefully we left you respecting our offerings and we get an invite back for a future opportunity'. Our job is to present choice, another option, a different way to look at the problem, ... - the best way for you to avoid No. 6 is to look at as many options as makes logical sense (I believe this should always be some number > 1). We believe we are the best option when looking at tough IT problems inside your data centre.
