Under a beautiful day in Silicon Valley while Jonathan Schwartz (ex Sun CEO) blogs away as a mere moral just weeks after Sun has been consumed by Oracle, SAP introduced the new five-week old partnership of co-chief executives Jim Snabe and Bill McDermott. Jim Snabe and Bill McDermott are sharing the role of CEO at the global powerhouse software company SAP - whose current value is at $54 billion dollar (market capitalization). Jim and Bill were visibility tired, but they didn’t show it.  After hours of jet lag and late nights honing and finalizing SAPs business and technology strategy, the two CEOs showed excitement and punch to their new business strategy. Bill and Jim Show Jim Snabe talked about the agile and entrepreneurial sp

Wow—HP is finally getting its act together in storage. For years HP has talked about leveraging the systems and storage business but that vision has never materialized as a serious differentiator. Guess what? It’s finally happening. And there’s an added bonus, HP’s move to compete with Cisco makes it the only company on the planet that owns a robust server, storage and networking stack.     How did that happen? Here’s the simple formula: Hire someone (Donatelli) that understands the business and can execute Keep the best executives, restructure the talent pool and bring in people you trust Create a vision with big time goals Set some specific, measurable objectives and put a strategy in place to meet these

Last October I wrote: "By late 2012, federated storage will be the architecture of choice for large new storage deployments. These capabilities will dramatically improve IT's ability to respond to business needs with minimal disruptions. IT organizations should plan to aggressively adopt federated storage as it becomes commercially available." Around that same timeframe, Nick Allen wrote a piece about Chad Sakac’s Long Distance Live vMotion demo at VMworld 2009 and asked : "So, has EMC solved the long-distance cache coherency and distributed lock management problem that has plagued the industry forever?" Today (3/11/2010), EMC’s President of Information Infrastructure, Pat Gelsinger unveiled a vision for federated storage

{Editors Note:  I am pleased to have @Stu post some of his opinoins and observations here on SiliconAngle. Although Stu works for EMC these thoughts are his own cross posted from his personal blog. -- Please give Stu a big welcome to SiliconAngle. - Cheers John @Furrier} I had the pleasure of attending the Ethernet Technology Summit last week in San Jose.  In addition to presenting as part of the FCoE track, I was able to spend a day getting updated on 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet from the people and vendors involved in creating the standards which are both expected to be ratified in June 2010.  While most enterprise customers are only now starting to deploy 10Gb Ethernet, the completion of the higher speeds are very important developments

It is estimated that poor customer service has cost the Cable/Satellite Industry over $12 billion in lost revenues over the past year, ahead of the financial services industry with more than $10 billion in losses; which is startling considering Cable/Satellite companies project themselves as the future of home and business subscription services of all things information and entertainment. How can these companies survive with such a poor record of customer care?  Take the up and coming consumers, ages 27 – 43, who terminated services most frequently at 1 ½ times per year compared to older consumers. These consumers are the target audience that Cable/Telecom companies want the most due to their powerful (Triple Play) buying power. T

Sometimes the 'golden handcuffs' tarnish the other hands in the company... Thirteen years ago I worked at a small technology consulting firm, headquartered out of Columbia South Carolina, named The Computer Group.  TCG was acquired by IKON Office Solutions, the copier company. IKON then went on a spending spree over the next year acquiring many technology companies, largely small to mid-size systems integrators in a fairly classic channel roll-up strategy to build footprint.  This was quite smart given the complexity of digital copier and printing systems coming to market in the mid 1990's as well as the upside and opportunity to move into adjacent markets aside from their core paper distribution and copier sales and service divisi

It's fun to bash Microsoft. It's easy, too, with Apple solidly conquering the high end of the PC and mobile markets and Google's command of the Internet. But how fair are these articles skewering Microsoft, such as "Microsoft's chronic lack of innovation" published this week at Techworld? I suggest that Microsoft innovates as well as, if not better than, any other massive company. But no one innovates like an outsider. Note: I am a Microsoft MVP in the area of File System Storage and will be on the Redmond campus all week as part of their Global Summit for MVPs. I am not a Microsoft apologist or sycophant and have been both harshly critical when the company deserved it and full of praise at other times. Mostly I just focus on

Brian Solis spoke recently on what the future of social networks will be. Ideas, it turns out. As I wrote on another blog post: Solis, leading thinker in the integration of social media and PR, recently spoke on an intriguing concept: ideas connect us more than relationships. The premise of his argument is that ideas are what elicit passion in people. They animate us, and if we find someone with a similar interest in a given idea, we connect. Then there was this observation by Intel’s Enterprise 2.0 lead Laurie Buczek on the only quantifiable value they found in their Enterprise 2.0 efforts: Where we did quickly find quantifiable business value during an ideation proof of concept.  Ideas that are discovered and turned into

I just finished watching the press conference debuting to the public the new social network “Google Buzz.” Aside from a confusing name (there are already a handful of products from all the major companies, including Google itself, entitled Buzz), it looks like a stellar product and something to actually get excited about. Perhaps it’s a result of the fact that a new entrant to the social networking race has actually entered a horse, or the fact that the social network hot wars have cooled down from 2006, when Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were unveiling a new social network every ten minutes, but I’m actually interested in this. I tend to think my excitement comes from a much less cynical reason: it seems like a social network actua

SAP, the world's largest business software company, said Léo Apotheker has been replaced as CEO. The SAP Executive Board, in agreement with the SAP Supervisory Board, has appointed two Co-CEOs: Bill McDermott, head of field organization and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development, both already members of the SAP Executive Board. Dennis Howlett, on ZDNet, writes that Mr Apotheker's departure wasn't unexpected. But it was surprising that the company acted so soon. The choice of new leaders should not be surprising but hardly imaginative. In effect, SAP has chosen ‘last men standing’ rather than taking what some of us thought might be a bold move by appointing an outsider. SAP is headquartered in Germany