Believer

Jeff Darcy says I'm a shill.

The truth is far worse than that my friends, I'm a believer.

I believe in the people I work with. I believe in the ideas we come up with and I believe in the products and offerings we provide.

But no one should be under any delusion that:

-The smartest people always work somewhere else.

-There's always a better idea out there.

-There's always more work to be done on products and offerings.

If you don't believe in the people you work with find new people to work with.

If you don't believe in the ideas you're working with now, if they don't challenge and excite you, come up with new ones.

If customers aren't happy with your products and offerings work as hard as you can to change that so they will be.

I've done all of the above while working at EMC and I've been fortunate to have had the opportunity and created the level of access required to help make change happen by just getting involved.

It's a better feeling than sitting in your cube moaning about this that and the other and not doing anything about it.

Now I certainly haven't won the day all of the time, but I've won enough times to make it clear to me that even I, a low ranking employee without a fancy title, can affect the direction and destiny of a company with tens of thousands of employees world wide and make things better for the customers we serve.

And that's why I'm a believer.

Comments

[John]

I second that statement whole heartedly. Even the smallest person at the table gets a say if they want one.

Day one at 176 they said EMC has lots of opportunities but you need to step up and take them.

Two years in with the company and I am a Six Sigma Black Belt working on projects for VPs. Most things are possible if you don't give into the "culture of suck" that is so pervasive these days.

Maybe if folks don't think they are doing exciting things they should go visit the EMC HR page and see if they can join a team that is getting things done?

[David F., Evanston IN]

You should change one thing... "If customers aren't happy with your products and offerings... lock them into product suites they can't get out of" (cough, centera)

[Storagezilla]

-cough cough-

XAM.

http://stevetodd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/a-word-about-xa.html

Where's the lock in now?

[Val Bercovici]

But without API lock-in, where will all the Centera add-on revenue come from?

Fool them once, shame on them. But based on my discussions with EMC Centera victims (er, I mean customers), I couldn't imagine someone choosing to be fooled again (queue Roger Daltrey) and make a Centera mistake twice :-)

[Storagezilla]

Oh now Val, when you have as many Centera customers as EMC does and have shipped as many units as EMC has I'm sure you'll find places where things might not have went as everyone planned. And that's unfortunate and you work to fix it.

But since NetApp's approach to the CAS market is a half assed attempt like SnapLock I'm not surprised they've gone back to school (In this case the University of California Santa Cruz), to try and figure out how something like Centera works.

So, that whole "You don't need self healing, self managing object based storage" excuse the NetApp sales force have been using must be pretty threadbare by now huh? :-)

[Jeff Darcy]

No, Mark, I didn't say you're a shill, and I find the misrepresentation offensive. I said that *if one applies the standard that you are applying to NetApp employees* then that would have to be the conclusion. It's the "people in glass houses" aspect that motivated me to respond. Perhaps you don't post at the explicit direction of EMC management, but you sure as hell would be getting some "negative attention" if what you write weren't so one-sidedly suitable to their purposes. I worked at EMC, I blogged while at EMC, I know a little bit about how that goes. We have some mutual acquaintances blogging from EMC that you could ask if you don't want to believe it from me.

Being a believer is great. I'm a believer in what my company does, and in the people who do it, too. Being a believer doesn't have to mean losing one's objectivity, though. Every good idea might not come from somewhere else, but a few do. You've been directly involved in capitalizing on a market that EMC overlooked and ignored until others who had the idea first forced them to change their minds. (Hint: you linked to my account of what happened at that company.) It wouldn't kill you to consider the possibility that someone outside of EMC might have another good idea some day, or that someone at EMC might occasionally have a bad one. It might even increase your credibility.

[Val Bercovici]

Nice try Zilla, but that lame excuse reeks of defensiveness. There is a hint of truth though, because "working with it" is standard issue for that so-called "self-managing" device EMC sells with mountains of professional services and chapters of system maintenance advice in the manual.

Also, when did "self healing" storage become so revolutionary? RAID for disks and automatic controller fail-over pretty much covers commodity functionality of all external storage systems on the market today. Perhaps you're referring to attempts of bringing corrupted data back from the dead?

Claiming NetApp is in the CAS market only exposes the ignorance EMC has about our product strategy. The very reason XAM exists is because we would never subject our customers to yet another separate storage silo featuring the type of inflexible lock-in of failed CAS 1.0 solutions in the marketplace today. But don't believe me, the inventors of CAS (Paul Carpentier and Van Riel) have already atoned for their sins quite publicly. The truth is out there courtesy of Google :-)

[Storagezilla]

Jeff I found your first comment offensive and having just replied to your blog post (It's now 11:53PM on a Friday night) I'm not feeling very generous anymore.

Your comment was a mealy mouthed sneering attempt to introduce the idea that I was somehow marketing run. Something you have re-iterated in your blog post on the same topic.

Lets get something clear I don't urinate on my employer in public.

I don't think employees should. I think it's disloyal. I think if you can't get it changed internally you're not being effective. I think the most ineffective employees cry and whinge and whine about things which happened at work long after they actually happened.

I feel nothing but contempt for such people. They're weak.

As for all the good ideas out there if you were paying attention I've spent significant time on, and shown pride in, blogging about products from *acquisitions*. Ideas other people had and EMC paid for.

-RecoverPoint

-Avamar

-HomeBase

-NetWorker

-Rainfinity

All those products people and ideas came from outside the company and that's why I spend so much time blogging about them.

I actively encourage EMC to acquire startups and other companies because that's where some of the most innovate stuff comes from and EMC is a better company afterwards.

Am I proud that I've helped sell more than my fair share of RecoverPoint? Yeah I am. Why shouldn't I be? I worked hard on numerous Proof of Concepts to help make that happen. I helped build a growing part of the business one RecoverPoint Appliance, Fabric Splitter, Host splitter, CX Splitter at a time and spent a chunk of my life doing it.

Revivio failed. It happens. But it really pisses you off now doesn't it? It comes off your writing in waves. You all did this thing at Revivio it went horribly wrong and it's left you all damaged. Like you feel it was somehow your market and EMC stole it. But it never was your market since customers rejected what you created and EMC bought what they embraced.

That's not my fault, it wasn't my failure. It was yours. I won't apologize for enjoying my win. I worked for that.

It's nearly midnight and I have an early morning flight to Vegas.

After notifying you of this comment we're done for the night.

[Storagezilla]

Val: Oh please with the amount of EMC derived code in XAM you mean to tell me you were just sitting around watching a multi billion dollar opportunity pass you by while you waited for EMC to have a conversion on the road to Damascus and release that code?

In what paralell universe do I buy that story?

You didn't get into the CAS market because you didn't have the development resources and welding GX and Classic together is a level of effort for you that you might as well be going to the moon.

As for Carpenter and Van Riel it's not like they have any self interest behind what they're saying since they see themselves as a competitor but while EMC remains in the CAS market they appear to be trying to move into the nearline storage business.

It should be noted EMC bought their first failed startup and turned it into a massive business. Since they're latest venture is already looking wobbly as half their customer base aren't using the product for CAS I wouldn't expect EMC to swoop in and buy any remains again.

But hey, they'd be in NetApp's price range right?