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6 things every CIO should know (or at least think about)

Barb Darrow — Thu, 23 May 2013 03:04:54 +0000

CIOs have a tough gig. They’re besieged by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) boom; have to keep up with the latest cloud services; to assess the value of the latest big data innovations; and deal with CEOs and subordinates who often think they could do the job better.

“Being the CIO of a tech company is easy, you support 60,000 users and 59,999 think they have your job,” EMC executive vice president and COO (and former CIO) Sanjay Mirchandani told attendees of the MIT CIO Symposium on Wednesday.

Here are the key takeaways from the conference.

1: Learn to work well with others

Erik Brynjolfsson, director for Digital Business at MIT Sloan School of Management .

It’s a lesson we were all supposed to learn in grade school but too often IT staff and the business units beyond are not fully in concert. That’s got to stop.

CIOs are tired of being “the department of naysayers” and the best ones embed themselves in the business cases of the company. And they have to be active participants in business talks, not order takers for technology.

In the traditional model with CIOs, it was “‘come in and tell me what your requirements are’ — we need to get out of that we need to have the courage to participate in the process,” said Michael Loo, SVP of Global IT for Avaya.

2: Embrace big data but don’t be bedazzled.

Everyone is besotted by data. The more the better. But a common mistake is to confuse correlation with causation. Without the right background knowledge and statistical analysis tools you can still leap to the wrong conclusions about your data.

“There’s a shocking correlation between lung cancer and people who have ashtrays at home,” said Andrew Lo, professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloane School of Management, to illustrate that point.

Alex “Sandy” Pentland, professor at the MIT Media Lab concurred. “Big data is good for interpolation, when you know the field you’re working in but can be bad for extrapolation where you’re entering new areas,” Pentland said.

3: Stop managing by gut

Having said that, there is still no substitute for data and metrics, properly applied and analyzed. Early in the war on cancer, medical research was too often hobbled by researchers’ tendency to let intuition drive their trials, said Dmitri Bertsimas, professor of operations research and statistics at MIT’s Sloan School. “We didn’t make a lot of progress,” he said.

“We need to change from opinions and hunches and go with facts and data,” agreed Erik Rynjolfsson, director of the MIT for Digital Business at the Sloan School.

4: Beware the HIPPO

Too often key business and tech strategic decisions are made by the HIPPO, aka the ”Highest-paid Person with an Opinion.” That person may big-foot a process where discussion and pushback are a better way to go.

This is a term I first heard a few weeks ago at another industry event where Phil Swisher, chief innovation officer at Brown Brothers Harriman bemoaned this tendency of HIPPOs to dominate discussion. As The Boston Globe’s Scott Hirsner wrote:

Running experiments is much better than simply taking direction from a HIPPO, as politically difficult as that may be. “Hypothesis testing is better than hunches,” Swisher said.

5: Balance innovation with stability.

Remember, bleeding edge is bleeding for a reason. Sometimes you do have to simply make sure the trains run on time, while hopefully also making those trains better, faster, cheaper over time.

Kazuhiro Gomi, president and CEO of NTT America, knows from experience. “Many of our customers rely on us to run their systems for them and running things smoothly is sometimes more important than being innovative,” he said.

6: Beware the CMO

There’s been a lot of talk that chief marketing officers will control more of the IT spend than CIOs going forward. Michael Relich, EVP and CIO of Guess Inc., said he was well aware of the study which also said “CMOs and CIOs should be best friends.” That makes sense, he added, because CMOs need data and to get data they need things like point-of-sale systems and e-commerce sites which are, by the way, all about IT.

So, will CMOs get more IT spend then CIOs? According to Relich: “Over my dead body.”

Note: This story was updated at 6:04 a.m. PDT May 24, 2013 to correct an attribution about CMOs getting more IT spend. Michael Relich of Guess Inc,. made the statement, not Avaya’s Michael Loo. I apologize for the error.

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PernixData nets $20M to virtualize your server-side flash

Barb Darrow — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:30:47 +0000

PernixData, the startup founded by former VMware and Oracle technologists, now has $20 million in Series B funding to pursue its goal of virtualizing all that flash memory that’s getting shipped with new servers.

The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from original investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and individual investors including Mark Leslie, co-founder of Veritas; John Thompson, former CEO of Symantec and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks. It brings total funding to about $27 million.

The company plans to use the cash to build out its enterprise support, sales and marketing staff and to add capabilities as the software heads for general availability. That should happen in about two months, company CEO Poojan Kumar said in an interview. There are about 30 employees now, with the goal to add 70 to 80 more in the next 9 to 12 months, he said.

“Enterprise software requires staffing and expertise,” he said. He should know — Kumar led Exadata development for Oracle and then headed up data products for VMware. His co-founder Satyam Vaghani was principal engineer at VMware, where he worked on the vSphere kernel and the clustered file system.

PernixData says its software-only approach makes a disruptive technology a non-disruptive install that will run with a company’s existing server and storage hardware, take all the server flash available and virtualize it into a shareable pool. The company’s goal is to become “the VMware of server-side flash.”

As more servers ship with on-board flash, there’s a desire to make the most of that resource — especially for tier 1 applications like database and ERP applications that have proven difficult to virtualize.

San Jose-based PernixData is early to this battle but it won’t be alone for long. It’s safe to say that legacy storage and server players — ranging from EMC and NetApp to Hewlett-Packard and Dell, as well as flash storage players like Fusion-io and Violin Systems — are scrambling for traction here.

PernixData is betting that its product — now in beta at 50 companies — will beat them to market by a good two years and build from there.

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How data warehousing is now a cost-effective solution for businesses

nraden — Mon, 13 May 2013 06:55:34 +0000

The new economics of data warehousing provide attractive alternatives in both costs and benefits. While big data gets most of the attention, evolved data warehousing will play an important role for the foreseeable future. In order to be relevant, data-warehouse design and operation need to be simplified, taking advantage of greatly improved hardware, software, and methods.

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How EMC’s CTO is trying to keep EMC, VMware and Pivotal orbiting the same sun

Derrick Harris — Wed, 08 May 2013 01:17:09 +0000

If you’re confused about all the action with EMC, VMware and Pivotal over the past several months, you’re not alone. CEOs have traded places, joint ventures have been struck, product lines have been sold and GE even came on board. And that’s before you even start talking about all the new technology.

I sat down with EMC SVP and CTO John Roese on Tuesday at the company’s annual EMC World conference to find out what’s up. Here’s what he had to say.

On three companies under one roof

While they’re technically three separate companies, EMC is really in control. It’s the majority shareholder in VMware and owns more than 60 percent of Pivotal, its new joint venture with VMware that includes the Greenplum, Pivotal Labs, SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Cetas business lines. When it comes to everyone working toward a common goal, Roese said, “The good news is that while there is independence, Joe Tucci is the chairman of all these companies.”

Roese calls himself the “gravitational center” of the three companies when it comes to technology. This is a reinvention of the CTO role at EMC, which used to be more of a research position. Now, he puts the stake in the ground and generally directs everyone toward it, even if they’re not all taking the same path to get there.

On why Pivotal happened and why it matters

My takeaway from Roese’s comments on formation of Pivotal is that Greenplum is really the linchpin of the whole company. At its core, Pivotal is about building big data infrastructure that can handle next-generation workloads, but it’s aware that broad adoption is only possible if that high technology becomes easier to consume. That means new higher-level applications, which is where SpringSource, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs come into play.

All of this technically could have been accomplished by just selling Greenplum and Pivotal Labs (the only assets of the new company that was under the EMC umbrella) to VMware, but Roese said VMware wasn’t the right home because VMware is not so important in the places where next-generation workloads are popping up. There’s not a lot of VMware inside carriers’ data centers, he acknowledged, but there is a lot of OpenStack popping up. And there’s a lot of Amazon Web Services everywhere you look.

“We would like the big data infrastructure to not care about that,” Roese explained. From EMC’s perspective, it doesn’t need to own the middle — the cloud operating system, if you will — if it can still engage customers at the storage and application-platform layers.

On keeping independent while working an ‘unfair advantage’

Roese doesn’t think a vertically integrated approach is the best way to do business in today’s technology world, which is why EMC, VMware and Pivotal all operate independently and no one relies on another in order to work within customers’ data centers. That’s why VMware has its own cloud computing efforts but Pivotal is cloud-agnostic, why EMC storage can operate with any higher-level software and why VMware doesn’t care about what’s running underneath or, usually, above it.

However, he added, it’s only natural the three companies seek an “unfair advantage” from the incestuous bonds they share. What he means, of course, is that they should keep a close eye on what the others are doing and work together to ensure they’re all optimized for the same types of workloads. For example, Roese said, if EMC didn’t reconsider how storage had to perform given that virtualization is the norm or that technology like Hadoop exists, it would “become suboptimal or generic.”

The same holds true for Pivotal and VMware. Pivotal needs to think about how big data applications run on virtualized resources differently than on big bare metal systems, as well as on flash-based arrays like what EMC is about to roll out based on its XtremIO acquisition. VMware and EMC need to think about how their software-defined data center and software-defined storage approaches can build off each other.

From EMC’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this all matters. It is at its core an information infrastructure company, but “the challenging thing with that is that it’s a moving target,” Roese said. A company like EMC can’t get by on storage arrays alone anymore, but it also can’t be dumb enough to think it can be everything to everyone and still be good at anything.

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EMC plots software-defined data center journey from ViPR storage virtualization base

Barb Darrow — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:07:03 +0000

Unless you’ve not been paying attention over the last year, you’ve heard a lot about software-defined data centers. Nearly every legacy and new-look IT vendor has its own take on making the entire data center more programmable via software and less dependent on specialized, proprietary and pricey hardware.

VMware is charting its course using its virtualization prowess and Nicira’s software-defined networking, which it bought last year. It’s no surprise that VMware parent and storage leader EMC is pinning its strategy on software-defined storage technology that it’s calling ViPR.

The first software deliverables — and it’s all software built by a team led by Amitabh Srivastava, the former Microsoft cloud exec who joined EMC in 2011 – will be outlined Monday at EMC World in Las Vegas. But, here’s how Jeremy Burton, EMC’s CMO and executive vice president, outlined the plan for me on Friday.

First: A new control plane will let admins manage physical assets, including storage arrays, to create virtual arrays and storage pools and then provision them and make them available in a service catalog for users, Burton said. EMC likens the software to a universal remote control that can operate multiple devices. For most storage, ViPR will discover what storage assets are available and allow provisioning. And if there is “smart” storage available, it will offload processing to that array to handle the data path.

Second: A new data plane will initially focus on data objects — at first those stored in Amazon’s S3 by the third quarter and then HDFS by year’s end, Burton said. ViPR data services will also support OpenStack Swift-compatible REST APIs as well as existing EMC Atmos and VNX storage and even storage from rival NetApp, Burton said.

From the press release: “For traditional workloads that utilize file and block [storage], EMC ViPR steps out of the way and lets the underlying array fulfill the role of Data Plane.” But for new web-scale, big data applications, it provides Object Data Services, which is where the support Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift REST APIs and HDFS access methods comes in. Of course it will support existing NFS and iSCSI protocols that drive much of enterprise storage now. That heterogeneous support means that customers can, depending on the workload type, configure their services as they see fit without necessarily having to worry about what storage is under the covers.

IDC analyst Vernon Turner said EMC ViPR is about much more than “storage virt.” Instead, it “takes many of the elements needed to create the software-defined data center [including] wide-spread orchestration — so it can properly deliver cloud services.’

EMC, which made its fortune selling big, expensive storage hardware, has shown a willingness to cannibalize its own business before others can eat it for them. Burton said the design point was cloud, and the first targeted companies will be service providers, he said. “The design goal is no single point of failure … and ability to scale out,” he said. Service providers, including telcos and big hosting companies, are looking for ways to stave off incursions into their businesses by insurgents, especially Amazon Web Services.

Asked if EMC/VMware spinout Pivotal will use the new software as a foundational technology, Burton said the “Let me just say that Paul Maritz is one of Amitabh’s best friends right now.”

Maritz, who is Pivotal’s CEO, “wants a cheap massively scalable store for what he’s building,” Burton said. “I think Paul’s mission is to be cloud-agnostic but he also believes HDFS will be foundational layer and we intend to be primary provider of that layer.”

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How to manage big data without breaking the bank

George Gilbert — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:55:18 +0000

In the tsunami of experimentation, investment, and deployment of systems that analyze big data, vendors have seemingly been trying approaches at two extremes—either embracing the Hadoop ecosystem or building increasingly sophisticated query capabilities into database management system (DBMS) engines.For some use cases, there appears to be room for a third approach that lies between the extremes and borrows from the best of each.

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Can Pivotal really offer cloud nirvana?

Barb Darrow — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:43:30 +0000

Pivotal boss Paul Maritz knows how to paint a pretty picture that enterprise customers want to hear — Pivotal will launch an infrastructure-independent “operating system” for the cloud. It will enable new applications to help companies make sense of the data explosion expected to come with the internet of things.

He pledged Wednesday that PivotalOne technology will run on Amazon Web Services, and on OpenStack and other infrastructures. And that this effort will be independent of its owners EMC and VMware (and now General Electric as well).

That is a very, very tall order, which I’ll get back to. But first, the actual news from the official Pivotal launch event:

Maritz now has a title: he is Pivotal’s CEO. Up until now he was just sort of the “head” of Pivotal.
The first deliverables of PivotalOne will be generally available in “less than 6 months,” according to Pivotal SVP Scott Yara. It was, however, unclear which parts he was referring to.
We can now definitively drop the “Initiative” from the Pivotal Initiative name.

To be fair, Pivotal was just spun off four months ago, after six months of leaks. And in February it made its first move, launching Pivotal HD, a re-architected Hadoop implementation that is key to this whole effort.

How independent is independent?

Now, back to positioning. Maritz, who spent 14 years at Microsoft, where he helped lead the Windows 95 and then Windows NT server charge, has huge credibility with developers and customers alike. If anyone knows from OSes — and what customers want from them — it’s him.

But the notion that Pivotal will be given free reign to cozy up to Amazon, or Microsoft, or other infrastructure providers as needed when it is still part-and-parcel of EMC and VMware — both of which have their own cloud agenda — strains belief. VMware is launching its own public cloud May 21.

Much of Pivotal’s promise — it will provide an abstraction layer atop third-party infrastructure so that applications will run anywhere — is what VMware promised with Cloud Foundry, the open-source PaaS that is now part of Pivotal. But there’s also the new Pivotal Data Fabric which builds on EMC’s GreenPlum technology and VMware’s Gemfire fast transaction processing capabilities. And then there will be Pivotal Expert Services, including Pivotal Labs’ rapid application deployment capabilities, which can be offered in conjunction with or atop the whole stack.

I don’t doubt the quality of the technologies here or even Pivotal’s ability to integrate them. But customers will wonder just how independent an entity that is 90 percent owned by two technology giants can really be to work with competitors in a scenario that will reassure corporate customers who don’t want lock-in.

The fact that GE is investing $105 million in this effort remains the headline. That news has got to have both Amazon and Microsoft sweating. Amazon is the world’s biggest public cloud provider and is adding more enterprise-class services by the day atop that cloud. Microsoft is pitching Azure now as an AWS infrastructure rival but has also tried to be the PaaS of choice for the millions of Windows businesses out there.

Both of those companies would have given a lot for an endorsement that GE gave Pivotal early today.

Check out Om Malik’s interview with Maritz earlier this year at our Structure:Data conference below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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GE to pour $105M into EMC and VMware’s Pivotal Initiative

Barb Darrow — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:53:05 +0000

The Pivotal Initiative, the big cloud and big data startup backed by parents EMC and VMware, now has another big, scary backer: General Electric is ponying up $105 million for a 10 percent stake in the company.

Bill Ruh, GE’s VP, will talk about the investment and the Pivotal One Enterprise PaaS later today on Pivotal’s coming out party at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, joining Paul Maritz, the former VMware CEO (pictured above) who’s heading up Pivotal.

GE, the huge conglomerate that makes everything from household appliances to medical devices to jet engines, has been talking up the industrial internet of late. And now GE’s Global Software Center in San Ramon, Calif., will to use the Pivotal technologies as a standard way to deliver data management across GE units, according to the joint announcement.

According to statement released Wednesday morningt:

“The companies also announced their intent to enter into a broad research and development and commercial agreement aimed at accelerating GE’s ability to create new analytic services and solutions for its customers. The investment and business agreement are each expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2013 and are subject to standard regulatory approval and other closing conditions.”

Update: With GE aboard, EMC will own 62 percent; VMware 28 percent and GE 10 percent, according to a Pivotal spokesperson. Previously EMC owned 69 percent, VMware 31 percent. When the project – which took on assets from both companies — launched, it had 1,250 employees and represented about $300 million in revenue, EMC Chairman Joe Tucci said last month.

This report was updated at 9:22 a.m. PST with the new ownership stakes

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Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 06:55:36 +0000

Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the first quarter of 2013.

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EMC’s Paul Maritz: it takes leadership to move companies toward a data-driven future

Eliza Kern — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:56:25 +0000

It would be easy to think that moving companies toward a future in data would be a technological challenge, but Paul Maritz, EMC’s chief strategist and a key member of its Pivotal Initiative spin-off, took a different approach: it’s about human leadership.

Speaking with Om Malik on Wednesday in New York for GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference, Maritz talked about the two potential courses a company might take in heading toward a data-driven future:

“I think there’s two ways. One way is, unfortunately, Darwinian evolutions,” he said. “But others will change and change always comes through leadership, where someone in the organization has to really step up and drive change.”

Maritz said when he was at VMWare, he was fascinated that in looking at different companies in the same businesses, he could see that some would be fifty percent virtualized, and others only ten percent virtualized, simply because of the mindset at the organization that had inspired the change.

“Change really requires leadership. It requires people to understand the organization and get behind it,” he said.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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