Social tools and the social person

Over the years I have embarked on many efforts to ensure I had the right skills and right capabilities within the teams I have lead. Often times I had been moved into an organization or inherited a team through mergers and acquisitions that went through a period of time of discovery. Time was spent trying to gauge who knew what they were doing, and who was really good at baffling the crowds with their BS. I have called it different names and or designed the process to work differently depending on the situation, but it always had some basic repeatable tenants. Assessment, Statement, Evaluation, Feedback, and Roadmap. Failing back to my Marine Corps ways, lets call it the enterprise 5 Paragraph Order of Organizational Alignment, and assign then the acronym, ASEFR. So before I begin explaining each segment, why am I even bringing this up, might be a great place to start. Periodically there are transformations that we must undertake in our IT organizations to ensure we are ready to meet the changing needs of the business. We get enamored all the time by technology, but its only when technology is applied that we have any hope of beating the expectations of our end users, and meeting the scale needs of the business. We did this when we left mainframes to open systems, and again to virtualized and now cloud systems. We have done this through different software languages and architectures. Today we are again on the edge of what needs to be pervasive across all of our applications, and that is the integration of social media constructs. Companies are facing competitive pressure to engage with their customers in whatever means requested, and not confine them to just the phone or email. I can remember a time, when we had the 'Unix team' or 'Web team' in IT, but then over time, eventually everyone was expected to have these tools in their bag in order to be effective. I would contend we are at that point today for social media, but the question is where do you start, and hence my ASEFR plan. (that acronym is coming in handy now, huh?) I am also a big fan of not waiting until the business asks you if you are ready, but rather plan ahead, and be sure when you are called upon, you are able to execute against their needs. Assessment - In this phase I am usually assessing the architectures of the applications and topologies of the underlying infrastructure required to support my enterprise, both legacy and in the foreseeable future. Changes underway today are certainly around what cloud platforms might you be adopting, what external and internal gates or measures do you have for social media, and more importantly what are your operations on the business side ready to absorb, and take advantage of. Its not sufficient to think of the social media engagement team as your target user, rather they should be the evangelists for how to drive this behavior across every function, from sales, to marketing to customer care. So what new skills do you need in IT to ensure you are ready. Statement - Be CLEAR to your team. I hate 'wishy washy', and that is why this is one of my favorite parts. By job title, I lay out what is expected as it relates to these skills. Do you simply need to be familiar with these technologies, or are you expected to be able to teach a course on the subject matter if required. In any case, I don't worry about where people are at this point. This is a chance to set the bar, and be clear about what it takes to succeed. I always talk about it like a roadmap. You might know where you want to go, and if you can read a map, there are usually many ways to get where you are going, and those routes, might be as distinct and individual as the people you are leading. Let them decide which they want to accomplish first, but have confidence in their ability to rise to the occasion and plan what is best for themselves. In my experience, people will surprise you in this business, as they love to learn. Evaluation - This is where is starts to get a little more difficult. Here you have to be ready to put a stake in the ground and claim who is going to be the judge, of where a persons skills lie. Hopefully, you are able to leverage your management for this. As Managers and leaders it is what they should be doing all the time. A former boss of mine, once said, your job is no longer to be the expert, but rather to pick and choose who the experts are. Feedback - As Managers and leaders we are bound to evaluate job performance all the time, so I like this to be lead by my managers, but they have to be consistent, and getting that alignment is part of the magic of good camaraderie and leadership. This also sets the benchmark for the individual so they are as aware as they can be about what it takes to succeed, and how much ground they may need to cover to be ready for that next role, or in some cases to get caught up with their current role. Roadmap - The evaluation and feedback loop can't be a one time thing. For this to be successful, it should be revisited at least twice a year, and people need validation that they are making progress, and that what you said was important last time is still important today. This is also the point I like to ensure the team member tells their manager about what they want to accomplish by the next period of evaluation. This is the personalization part, and we all know that the plans or commitments we personalize are the ones we are most likely to accomplish.

#1 ISV for virtualization....It is nice to be validated publicly

Since we have been at this job of building great software since 2006, it is nice to see honest evaluations done that show us leading the pack. Many smaller vendors are out there claiming to be number one in some pretty micro-niche areas, and others are claiming to be number one, and have some grand roadmaps, but false claims and pretty slides wont get your Virtualization efforts off the ground, and some of these smaller players have little more than that to offer. Todays Virtual Machine environments need serious people who can handle serious problems, and they need serious products, which is why customers continue to make us the #1 ISV in this space. Our approach has always been different than others in this space. We knew early on that this wasn't a change to just how data would be protected, or how things were monitored, but rather there was a who sea change coming to the world of infrastructure management, and it will stretch from the end users, to the darkest corners of your data center that some people fear to tread. And this time around people wouldn't just need automation but they would demand it, and for that we need new ways to approach our infrastructure. We also never though of this change as being a all or nothing proposition. People will have computing needs that span physical, virtual and cloud enabled machines, and the Quest portfolio is there wherever you decide to put your computing payload. I know as people surf the internet you are bound to find lots of web sites of companies that claim they are #1. I almost wonder if this isn't a result of school today who don't want to hand out grades, lest you let someone suffer being ranked where their achievements put them. You know the types right, lets give everyone a trophy because they participated. Lets make everyone feel good about themselves. In business though it really doesn't work that way though does it. If you claim you are #1, you should have something to back it up with, something other than your own press. As the LEADING platform independent vendor, it would be nice if the competition that fraudulently claims a #1 spot, would gain some honesty, but wishing rarely solves anything. So instead here at Quest Software we are focused on continued product leadership. We know that in many ways we are defining this market rather than just chasing like other vendors. Great company's like Quest Software don't just happen. Great employees and great customers are what make Quest Software great, and lead us to being the #1 ISV in virtualization, and today I would like to thank both for your loyalty. Accolades like this don't satisfy us at Quest, instead they motivate us to do even more tomorrow. I am constantly humbled by the role we play in helping solve really complex problems for our customers, and how integral they have weaved us into their success. Our best was good enough for today, but we must be better tomorrow. We will continue to deliver the best products in the industry, we will continue to set the pace for others to benchmark against, and we will be ready for to help solve the toughest challenges our customers are facing, not with roadmaps, but with proven solutions that are ready to be put to the test every day of the week. If your system is critical than you need someone who is serious, you need Quest Software.

Its not a two horse race.

Who is served when topics are covered incompletely? Is it the writer or consuming public? I tout that neither are well served when this happens, and would submit that it is more often out of insufficient time in a persons schedule that drives this type of behavior. In fact talking about VDI as a stand alone aspect in itself is a challenge to what really occurs in the buying space today. VDI is only one of the many blended ways that Desktop Organizations want to deliver a workspace to an employee. In fact looking at the current onslaught of tablets, smartphones and ever increasing arrays of devices that have compute built in, we can only lay the groundwork for what the Workspace of tomorrow will look like and stand ready for a world of change with pervasive computing.



What does this have to do with two horses? For some time people have been talking about VDI like it was a two horse race to win the hearts and minds of the VDI adopting public. Those two horses of course being VMWare and Citrix. I can understand that any good analysis today might start with these two players, but moving past day one of your analysis I would suspect you would quickly start adding to the horses in the race. Somewhat selfishly I would contend its a least a three horse race, that includes Quest Software. Most desktop teams will tell you that VDI is good for some use cases, but not all. Depending on the problem you are trying to solve, you may keep physical machines for some people, terminal services and even blades for others. For simplicity sake what they really need is all of this, in one simple to use, easy to manage solution. That is why Quests vWorkspace is the only real horse in this race.


While VMWare is doing a great job of seeding licenses into their ELA deals, I am still waiting to hear some noise about any reasonably large deployments of their suite. Let me be clear on the definition of reasonably large as say over 10K seats? Anyone? In fact the word on the street, if the analysts were listening, is that their sales teams wont even spend their own time on it anymore, and instead try to engage specialist partners. Instead attaching View onto their deals they have created an illusion that they are gaining traction, without really getting many seats into production. Do analysts ask what kind of revenues are being obtained, or rather how many production deployed seats are there? Its an important distinction, because it presents a narrow window for View to become critical to an business operations. When that ELA is up for renewal, savvy purchasers will start trimming their renewal license costs by removing this software that is sitting on the shelf. There is no doubt that they have painted a very interesting roadmap, but I have never been able to find an installer that will run and implement roadmaps, they usually need well written code behind them.



Meanwhile Citrix, continues to abuse and mistreat its long time loyal customers with a long practiced licensing scheme, that gives this perception that they are leading the way for VDI. However, dig under those revenue numbers and see what reality looks like. Are customers really phoning up, researching and buying the Citrix VDI solution fresh, or rather being backed into a terminal services license swap instead, and loosing flexibility in the process? Look, I wont argue that for the last 15 years Citrix has enjoyed a virtual monopoly in this field, but as many upgrading customers have found, Citrix is racing to try to re-establish a lead they once had and having to move to a whole new architecture for the product in the process. This is precisely why its a great time for customers to re-evaluate the exorbitant costs they have been spending on Citrix, and explore the possibility of an easier life. And furthering the point on abusive practice, in a point of haste, Citrix has rolled out their v5 product that offers no upgrade path for customers on v4. I of course love moves like this, because its a great time to evaluate alternatives, since the labor and professional services involved to essentially, re-implement and deploy v5 are significant for their customer base.

The disservice done by suggesting this two horse approach, also seems to not look at the normal RFP process. Most companies embarking on an effort like VDI, will usually have at least three bidders minimum when going after a effort of this size and magnitude. So it seems to me like it would only make sense that any critical analysis of this space would also encompass more than two vendors.

The power of choice is found in the Quest vWorkspace solution. Here customers are able to choose their hypervisor, they aren't swayed to use XEN or ESX only. The choices for customers extend way beyond this aspect though as well, in fact choice moves all the way to the client. Quest is the only VDI player today that allows customers to offer a true BYOC program for their employees. If you dig into View or XenDesktop, ask them how their offline VDI works on an Apple and if they support it. When they are done trying to read back the script their Product Marketing team supplied them about ways to talk around the question, just smile at the hard working sales person and give Quest a call.



Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and yes there are more than two horses in this race. In fact there is only one horse that really offers independence, choice and a clean path to true BYOC programs that will change the nature of desktop support that will be provided in the future. It may also be why its growing a 100% year on year, but I wont go there, as thats just bragging.

Tarnished Gold

I will bet that many people have some kind of polish in their house. It could be polish for their silverware, it could be polish for their shoes, or maybe even for their car. We like shiny things. Things that are shiny capture our attention, help make us proud, and are a sign that we know how to care for those things we find important. The Marines of 8th and I in Washington DC, have a ritual of shining the brass every morning. In fact it is among many great traditions and with the summer upon us, I would urge you to check out their Friday Evening parade, if you are interested in a spine tingling pageant of pride.

I don't think it is coincidence then, that we, often times, call our master images the 'Gold Image'. Record labels called them gold masters for decades before we computer geeks got into this game of storing information on a disc. The Gold Image is important because it takes us back to a time when our environment was pristine, a time where we knew every parameter by name, and while we might not have been in control, it sure felt like we were at a good state of equilibrium. In a small town, this is easy to achieve right? However, you move to a big city, or build out a bigger environment, and suddenly there are other actors in my play called 'life'. With new people in my environment, it suddenly becomes more difficult to manage everything they are doing. The next thing you know, they are inviting over their own friends, and all of a sudden I don't know the names of all of my parameters any more. Values are changed, files like chairs at the table, are moved, and the guy I thought was named Steve is now a girl named Sue(there is a garbled up song in there somewhere).

People by their very nature cause change. The challenge is how to track that change, know when it occurred and understand if their actions made things better or worse. In science they call them controlled experiments, and every variable is meticulously tracked. What if we changed the name of change control, or change management to 'controlled experiments', would that change our behavior to ensure we documented everything? Probably not. The funny difference between Scientists and Engineers (IT) is that we in IT think we know all of the answers. I am not being flippant, just a realist. If we looked at our end users, shrugged our shoulders, and said, let me conduct some controlled experiments to see if I can find the root cause of the problem, they would probably laugh behind our back, lose confidence in our ability, and ultimately look to replace us. We are almost forced to lie to them, and tell the user what they want to hear. 'Don't worry, I know exactly what the problem is', even when we have no clue. The worst thing is we then lie to each other as well, right? Have you ever looked at your DBA or your Application Admin, and said "I know this will fix the problem, trust me"? Meanwhile your fingers are crossed, your hope is diminished, and inside you feel like you just lobbed a 'Hail Mary' pass 70 yards down the field.

If we go back to my small town analogy, and consider how it grows, we know that one person cant manage all aspects of the town. We get someone who specializes in roads, another person who specializes in buildings, and so on. These specialists then make changes on what works best for them. What they are not good at, is understanding the coordinated impacts of their changes. This is very similar to what we do in IT, when a network person, or storage person or whomever makes a change thinking it should have no impact to an application running atop it, only to find out later they were wrong. We try to capture these with coordinated changes events, but because there are so many moving parts our ability to test these things ahead of time is very hampered. I would propose the better route is to make the change, know how to validate and test its coordinated impacts and stand ready to back-out if you need too. It introduces more risk, but the return for that risk I believe is material to a teams productivity. The trick of course is having eyes and ears on that change so that you can pinpoint it immediately. We claim to test changes in our lower environments all the time, that have no REAL reflection of what happens in production because the environments, regardless of what we claim, are not the same.

No one is doing this to be malicious or because they don't care about their work. Rather they care too much sometimes. We skip work outs, we skip meals, we skip family holidays sometimes, for the love of our environments and happy users. It is only human nature then to find ways to cut corners. "Oops I forgot to document this", "Ouch, I didn't get approval for that", or "Who was I suppose to coordinate with" You got to be kidding me, I have to remember all of that when I just pulled a 40 hour shift, troubleshooting a hung process, and my vision is blurry, but you want me to stop and do paperwork? I am the gosh dang hero of the moment. I'm not doing no stinking paperwork. I may be tarnished at this point, but I am still the golden boy of the hour. Crisis has been averted for another day!

We have, though, at our disposal the ability to apply polish to our Gold Image. That polish allows us to get our image shiny again, and it also lets us take a look back at how we got where we are. In the case of environments like Oracle Applications or PeopleSoft, the beauty is we have some frames of reference in terms of the pre-built environments. For custom applications, while a little more work, the fact is the principles and applied discipline are exactly the same. So if tracking change is the beauty of the proposition, then I think the sexy stuff is when we correlate performance to that change. If you modified your carburetor (I know I am dating myself for those who have only known fuel injection) and got slower RPM's, you would want to back out that change right? The two go hand in hand, but all too often in the field of IT, they aren't looked at or managed that way. I feel like at this point I should offer to start a petition and get a new ballot measure put on the California voting scheme. Short of political voting, we here at Quest are looking at exactly how to make this type of thing easier every day. It should be simple and should solve some of our biggest problems of the day.

In summary, make sure you are polishing all that is important to you. If it's the end of work week, feel free to polish off a few beers. But while the cold, crisp taste of grains are disappearing from your palate, ask yourself if you have polished your Gold Image, and is it as pristine as you once knew it to be.

Carl