Perhaps most exciting, if you’re a ControlCenter customer, is the chance to get an up-close look at our next major release, what we’re calling “SRM 7″ internally.  There’s going to be a dedicated system on the show floor manned by some overworked and underpaid colleagues of mine, who will walk you through some simple use cases using our latest build of our in-development product. Please take the opportunity to grill them and provide some feedback. We’re all marching full speed ahead on this product and some real customer feedback at this stage is going to be incredibly useful to us.

There’s also some lecture/demo sessions set up, including “Next Generation Ionix ControlCenter v7 is Here…What’s Next?” and “Achieving Time to Value with Next Generation SRM: An Architectural Perspective.“  Both of these will take you behind the scenes with where ControlCenter is headed.  I wish I could see them, and more than that, I wish I could hear what you the customer are saying at them.  Feel free to reply to this post or hit up the ControlCenter customer community with feedback; I promise it’ll get seen, and not just by me.

And if you’re more interested in adding value to your current ControlCenter install, don’t forget the always-popular hands-on sessions and a special demo/lecture on “Ionix ControlCenter v6 – Under the Covers.”  I imagine that one’s going to be pretty informative.

There’s a ton of other Ionix presence scheduled, including some hands-on work with Storage Configuration Advisor (the “next-gen” compliance product that got some sneak-peaks last year) and a slew of vBlock/Unified Management presentations.  It looks like quite a full menu for the Ionix fan.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Ionix at EMC World

Fortunately, I didn’t toss it too far aside.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in almost 15 years at EMC it’s that change isn’t disruptive to the status quo, it is the status quo.

Everything I said I was doing before, I’m still doing.  I’m wearing a lot of hats right now.  My small development team has grown as it takes on more responsibility, and I find myself playing the roles of Scrum Master, Technical Lead, and Development Manager.  Somewhere in all that I’m trying to individually contribute technically as well, but that is at the bottom of the list.

The other thing that keeps falling off the list is contributing to “the conversation” (both internally at EMC and externally on twitter and in people’s blogs).  I’m afraid that is going to be an uncomfortable reality while I try to wrap my arms around all these roles and make sure my own commitments aren’t being missed. Try not to do too much without me .

It’s a great place to be, in the thick of the action, surrounded by good people.  I’m never bored, I’ll say that much!

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Personal update: putting new hats on

The concept: write a project where multiple EMC developer technologies can be used in a single program.  Bonus points for incorporating other online technologies.  Win money and fame and the adoration of the world.

I’m waiting for the detailed T&C, but you can read up more on it here.  Innovation through contest is something EMC has tinkered with quite a bit, as you may have read on Steve Todd’s blog last year.

Definitely check out the link for more info. I’m hoping I can find some time in between all my “real work” to put a couple of these tools through their paces.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

EDN puts its money where its mouth is

So here, as requested by Natalie, is my version of the web at 20…

How has the web changed my life?

It’s a bit of a cheat for me to answer this question, because what truly changed my life were the networks that predated what we think of as the Web.  The web made them easier to use and broadened their scope by orders of magnitude, but the damage was already done.

I would not be where I am in life without the Internet.  As a teenager, I hungrily sought out information from any source I could.  On a TRS-80 Color Computer hooked up to a tiny black&white TV, at 300 baud, I connected to (and eventually ran) bulletin boards, snuck into unprotected university dialins to play MUDs and read Usenet, and connected to individuals and information from a much bigger world.  I am still in contact with some of those people, still use the behaviors I learned back then every day.

But it wasn’t until college, in 1993, that I saw those things melded together into The Web.  It may have been technically 3 years old by then, but it was just getting its momentum.  It became my immediate and constant companion, and has been since.  Everything I cherished about the Internet was boiled down into one magical term: Home Page.  We didn’t have net connections in our dorms, so all that gweeping was done in the semi-dark basements of the CS building, in labs shared with giant line printers and dozens of black and white monitors.

I can still taste the Mountain Dew … and the freedom.

I created my first web page in those years, when the best web search engine was called WebCrawler and people still coded for users of Lynx.  The Internet Archive has a version of that page, from right before I graduated.  Most of the links are incredibly broken, but you can still see a snapshot of my personality in the text, personal branding way before the Millennials “discovered” it.

This was the brave new world.  And we thought we’d keep it to ourselves forever: nerds arguing over Star Trek and D&D, posting pictures of our cats, and researching new technologies.

And then some damn fool figured out how to make money off it all.

How has the web changed business and society?

I like to say the changes to society and business associated with the web have come (and are coming) in waves.  For a long time, businesses saw the web as nothing but a giant Yellow Pages, and society saw the web as a place to argue over Star Trek.  I remember a magical period in the Web’s history when business hadn’t caught on yet, but there were enough people for actual connections to be made.  You could find people who had been to far away places and talk to them about their experiences.  You could bump into groups who were dedicated to obscure programming languages and figure out how to solve bizarre software problems.

And then the marketers took over, clumsily but powerfully. When you tried to find real people, you found storefronts instead.  Search engines were new, and SEO technology outpaced the search algorithms.  You couldn’t trust the web any more.  Communities were buried, hard to find.  It was difficult to meet new people and form new interactions.

Eventually the old sense of community emerged from its hibernation.  Strong web forums with passionate moderators helped people with similar interests hook up, and some of them lasted long enough to become trusted sources of information.  Social media sites formed and helped us track trusted crowds.  Web page technology got decent, bandwidth got cheap, blogs became mainstream, and suddenly (if you knew where to look) the web was social again.  Now there were two webs, the social web and the static clumsy business web.

Then, most recently, businesses figured out how to leverage the new (old) online world.  Instead of trying to take over, they tried to engage.  And the business web became social.

And so we’re back where we started, but better.  We’re free to argue over Star Trek and post pictures of our cats … and route around government censorship … and collaborate on new technologies … and tallk directly to our government … and order pizza online … and monitor millions of conversations until you find an unhappy customer in Paraguay … and finally engage with that person following the same unwritten rules we geeks help put into place 20 years ago.

It’s a beautiful time to be an information professional.

(What I think is an important followup point here is that there are areas where the web hasn’t changed society.  Vast stretches of people are not connected, and the disconnect isn’t shrinking.  Let’s not forget this.)

What do I think the web will look like in twenty years?

To answer this I tried to think back on the past twenty years.  Many of the technologies existed when the “web” was born, but we found innovative ways of tying them together, made bandwidth cheaper, and exponentially extended its reach.  So what do we have the technology to do now, but aren’t doing yet?  What will change when (and if) the digital divide narrows?

The easiest answer is that dumb search will disappear.  All search will be contextual by default, whether that context is geographical, social, historical, or something else we haven’t thought of yet.  Our tools will serve us, help us filter the world automatically in contexts that make sense to us.  Based on aggregating data about ourselves, our histories, and our friends, the tools will be highly predictive and accurate.  They’ll work on objects other than text (we’re improving image search, but let’s imagine all of youtube indexed not by metadata but by the data itself!).

This will come at the cost of privacy, of course, and the mad scientists of the 2030s will be those who refuse to make that trade.  Like a person in today’s world who refuses to have a credit card or a bank account, most of us won’t be able to understand how they can reject all that convenience.

Another easy one is that we’ll take the cloud for granted.  If you have data somewhere, you’ll have that data everywhere.  The concept of remembering a URL or bookmarking it and losing that bookmark will seem archaic.  There’s some fascinating security and usability problems to be solved there, of course.  It’ll be fun to see that fall into place.

Fads will come and go faster than they do today.  With the ability to spin up a virtual data center and tear it down with no delay, a startup can flare up and disappear within hours.  Low-budget clones of such companies will appear worldwide, and the battles over who had an idea first will be epic.

Another trend I think will continue is the shrinking of content.  Real writers will be harder to find, as the majority of content providers end up doing nothing but sharing links and snippets.  Our attention spans will shrink further.  If we can’t read it or watch it in 30 seconds, we won’t care.  And the few of us who insist that things used to be better will be laughed at by our juniors.

One thing I can predict is that twenty years from now, my daughter will 21 years old, and she will laugh uproariously at how wrong we all are about where things are headed.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’ll ask Jamie Pappas, a colleague at EMC, to continue the discussion next.  Jamie?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The web at #20years old

I won’t give a play-by-play of the event, but I will say it was energizing to see so many people so excited about bringing new ideas to EMC. It’s always humbling and inspiring to sit among intensely intelligent people who speak with confidence, poise, and command about complex ideas.  We spend so much time specializing in our day jobs — getting really good at doing the jobs assigned to us — that it’s easy to forget the rich backdrop of brainpower this is all built atop.

I had a chance to catch up a bit with some old colleagues, put faces to some names, and connect with some people I hadn’t met before.  The conference took place around the world, with one hour shared at all sites through videoconferencing, when the new class of Distinguished Engineers and Fellows was announced along with the awarding of prizes for top innovation ideas.  I was sitting next to one of the submitters of the top prize-winning idea, and it was great to see him receiving accolades and congratulations through the rest of the day.

The conference had a few speakers from outside EMC, including Dave Ritter from Innocentive.  They provide a framework for crowd-sourcing problem-solving, and Ritter had some fascinating insights into innovative thinking.  The notes I scribbled related to boundary objects and problem statements.  He echoed a lot of what I feel about diversity and effectiveness, and I look forward to reading more about what he and Innocentive are doing.

We also heard from a handful of executives during the conference, and it was refreshing to hear some of their no-spin commentary on where EMC is, what the company needs from us, and where it’s headed.  As something of a cynic, I expect to be suppressing a bit of eye-rolling during executive presentations, but they avoided the temptation to drown us in Kool-Aid and instead gave us some real insight into the business.

The event was a success on multiple levels, and I’m glad I could make time to attend.  The real question is how to make sure the spirit of innovation and engagement I saw everyone displaying gets spread throughout the company the remainder of the year.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Hanging out with the braintrust

If only the truth were that simple.

Another co-worker asked me when I usually did my blogging.  I told him the truth — I usually get Monday’s blog entry written on Sunday night, unless I’m lucky enough to have had a great idea during the previous week in which case Sunday night is for putting the finishing touches on a post which I started earlier. A productive week is one where another topic pops up during the week and I’m able to get some words down “on paper” on a weeknight.

I very rarely work on this blog during the business day; I just don’t have time.

I know the same holds true for another Ionix blogger I’d like to introduce you to this week: Hiren Doshi, who writes Practice Agile, a brand new blog about agile development seen through the lens of someone working at EMC Ionix.  I’ve worked with Hiren for a few years now in various capacities and he “gets it.”  I’m glad he’s dipping his toe in the blogging pool and I look forward to reading more from him.  He and I are working on projects that interact, so if you pay enough attention to what we both talk about you can get a pretty good idea of what working in this little neighborhood of EMC Ionix is probably like.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Say hello to Hiren

I don’t presume to speak for those who knew him.  But when I came back from vacation this past weekend and saw the news of his death, it was those people I thought of, the people who helped build EMC into the place it is today, who bridged the gap between the EMC before 2001 and the EMC of 2009, who were there to see Egan’s vision and adapted it into a vision for the next century. I thought of Polly Pearson’s post about the rise of EMC’s stock during the 90s, and about Egan’s response to the Working Mother’s Experience book.  I thought of the many long-tenured employees who would have memories of the early days, and wondered what they would say.  I expect the coming week will bring out a lot of personal stories from those people and others.

My heart goes out to all of Egan’s Many Children, and to the large and literal family he also leaves behind.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Saying goodbye to a legend

I didn’t have much to say about the acquisition during the “battle” for the company, because I don’t know much about the business side of the products involved.  What I find fascinating is the people side of this. When Data General was acquired a decade back, we in the CLARiiON division had mixed emotions.  We were frustrated at being acquired by someone we viewed as a competitor, but were excited knowing our products would have a new channel into the market.  We figured EMC’s acquisition of us meant we were right about how important the market was we had been targeting for years.

Data Domain isn’t in that same kind of position.  I assume their fears revolve around what EMC will mean to their culture, their history of innovation, the things that got them where they are.  Their hopes are probably the same, though — entry into new markets, the EMC brand standing behind your product.  Good stuff.  Hopefully their fears will be somewhat allayed by the announcement that their CEO Frank Slootman will be heading up an entirely new division which more products will eventually join.  I would like to think this means EMC not only values how Data Domain got to where they are, we want to see that “special sauce” applied to other products in the future.

I’m looking forward to seeing an influx of new faces and ideas inside our corporation.  What’s exciting about EMC these days is that even though Data Domain will be a separate division, the cultural mingling can begin immediately, as soon as employees “meet up” on our internal web sites.  People talk all the time about the social web as a force multiplier — this is a textbook case.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Welcome Data Domain

Well, that’s not entirely true.  The group’s here still, but it’s got a spankin’ new name: Ionix.

And what comes with that name (besides business cards and new splashscreens)? I’m glad you asked.

Ionix is a full family of applications that are designed around the Big Idea for EMC’s IT Management – helping people get from the physical world into the virtual, and beyond into the cloud.  Perhaps you’ve heard of some of what makes up Ionix?  We’re talking about products and technologies used in Smarts, nLayers, Voyence, Infra, ControlCenter, and ConfigureSoft.  What you might not have known is that we haven’t been content to just leave these products alone on little islands in the EMC sea.  They’re all part of the same strategic solution which addresses the four major pains your IT management might suffer:

1. What do I have?
2. Where are my problems?
3. What’s changing, and am I still in compliance with internal/external rules?
4. Am I meeting my service levels?

I won’t sit here and paraphrase the whole press release. You can read it here.  You can also check up on the EMC IT Management Blog for their take on the story, and see what our twitter folks are saying.

In addition, we’re taking the integration that’s already present between these products and building on it.  There are changes afoot within my immediate organization, as we try and arrange our teams to give us the best possible chance to keep ControlCenter successful while building out the future applications that take Ionix integration to the next level.

I’ll be writing about some of these changes as they come up, but if you want a more unfiltered view at the impact this has on our ControlCenter product family, make sure you join our private user community.

In a recent behind-the-firewall blog post, EMC blogger extraordinaire Chuck Hollis said that the Ionix product family was coming around at exactly the right time.  I can’t wait to see where we go with it.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

RIP RMSG, long live Ionix!

For example, next week’s webcast will be given by Mark O’Gara (VP at Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield) and Daryl Molitor (senior architect at JCPenney).  Both have impressive backgrounds in storage and IT. They’re going to talk about their challenges and experiences in designing and implementing data centers.  This is meaty stuff – storage, migration, energy efficiency, interoperability, and more.  There are sessions in July and August as well, which will look forward into the future, how these challenges will change over time and what technologies and processes will be necessary to solve them.

You can read more (and sign up) here if you’re interested.  The first session is called Technology Convergence: Transforming Data Center Infrastructure.  Future sessions will cover new technologies and their business impact.  These sessions are being sponsored by EMC’s ON magazine.

I thought this was interesting enough to pass along for two reasons.  Obviously this is cool real-world application of the big-idea stuff going on at EMC.  But my interest lies in our handing control of our webcast over to current customers to talk to other customers about their problems and solutions. We are hosting the conversation, but not necessarily driving it.  It’s an important distinction and I like to do what I can to help recognize this kind of forward momentum when I see it.

I hope these webcasts turn out well. I’d love to see us doing more in this space going forward.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

New webcasts: hosting, not talking