That’s about to change.

The same way the next generation user doesn’t give a rat’s behind about your “you can only use laptop ABC with software XYZ’ on it” mandate, the next generation of IT people are not going to care one bit about “we’re an (IBM,Oracle, EMC, Pick Your Poison) shop.”

The next generation is fearless.

They don’t care about “folders” and “structure.”  They don’t care about “inboxes” or “outboxes” – which were designed to AUTOMATE some function that used to be manual and physical – back in 1975.  We used to TYPE a DOCUMENT then make a MIMEOGRAPH of it and put it in the FOLDER which was stored inside the FILE CABINET.  Now we do the electronic version of the same things.  How very “Mad Men” (stolen analogy from John McKnight, super genius).  What’s next, slapping the admin’s butt (electronically, of course)? Scotch and cigarettes at 9:30AM?

When’s the last time your 17 year old did any of that?

Guess who your next CIO is?  The kid who was born in the cloud.  The kid who gets his information from a Twitter stream, blog roll, or web page.  Not a newspaper or a TV.  The kid who pushes and pulls value socially.  Not mono-directionally. Old school IT vendors still try to control the “message” and selectively hear the responses.  Old school IT still tries to control what you get, when, how, and where. How very Mayberryesque.

I’ll talk more about the Social Enterprise later – as it is a massively disruptive, completely fascinating movement (and you all know how I enjoy those!).

We WILL NOT consume IT apps/services/value the way that we have for the last 50 years any longer.  So why do we continue to attempt to deliver them the same way?

IT isn’t going to need a meteor to make us extinct.  We’re doing just fine on our own.  We’re going to implode at this rate.  And it won’t take decades.  It will take a few years.

Things change.  Adapt or perish.  Peyton Manning will not play forever.  People might actually vote for Newt Gingrich. Newt might actually be the antichrist.  The Soviet Union might fall. Greece has the financial controls of my 8 year old daughter.

Stuff happens.  Whether you like it or not, stuff happens.

The bigger truth: it’s time for our CIOs to realize that they can lead the new wave, or get run over by it.

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

Duplessie noted that Tucci has nothing to prove before retiring, given EMC’s strong performance. “The easiest thing for him to do is to leave now,’’ he said. “He’d never have to look back.’’

The transition of EMC leadership will be slowed, but not halted, by the delay. Tucci said he has begun to give more responsibility to senior team members.

“They never would have made this move if it had not already been squared away with senior staff,’’ Duplessie said.

via EMC’s chief says he’ll delay retiring – Business – The Boston Globe.

Why? Because it really is social networking 1.0. People are there because they want to be. They weren’t bribed, cajoled, or threatened. The NE VMUG is the only VMUG (I think) that has NOTHING to do with the mothership – VMware or the national VMUG (which is controlled by the mothership). It’s truly independent. It’s a family affair (the Maine Harney family, to be specific). Built by users, for users. Not built by a corporation with designs first and foremost on controlling everything you see or hear, with the intent of lining their own pockets.

I loved it.

I love it so much that I intend on doing everything I can to make sure it continues to improve (better and better user content, less and and less vendor bullshit), and most importantly, continues to remain independent. I love VMware, but they should leave this alone. This works. This is by the people, for the people. I hope others will take up the cause as well, and offer suggestions on content they would like to see, or even better, to deliver and teach their peers how to progress to higher levels. When that happens, everyone wins. Users win. Vendors win. VMware wins.

I met users from London.

I met users from other parts of the US – and when I asked (two different people) why they came here, they both said “because our VMUGs suck.” People know the difference between value and bullshit–it insults their intelligence when it’s all contrived bullshit.

VMworld is awesome, by the way. It’s the regional VMUGs that seem to suck. They have become “commercialized,” it appears.

1,200 people had registered when they closed it down. On Wednesday, the day before the show – Dawn Harney had over 300 additional requests to join. When does that ever happen?

By 9am, there were over 1,000 people already there.

The venue leaves a bit to be desired, as cool as it is. It’s chopped up and hard to really support the right number of larger rooms for all the breakouts – and you had to go outside to the other side of the stadium (it was freaking cold!), but otherwise, it was a superb event.

Sponsors love it because A: they are charged effectively nothing to be there, and B: because there are 1,000+ legitimate, valid, not made up/fictitious actual IT end-users who buy things. If this was a normal industry event, we would have already been told that over 400,000 IT buyers were in attendance, with the buying power of China. Lying liars.

So bravo to the Harneys for keeping it real.

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

via More Perspectives on Big Data… | Business Intelligence.

“…the belief that a company in IT/Tech over the last 20 years can be truly run from Israel. They can’t. I am an unabashed fan of all things Israel – but I’m a realist as well. You can make great things in Israel. You can sell to your army buddies in Israel. You can raise money in Israel. You can hire loyalists who will work like dogs and build stellar products in Israel.  But you can’t grow a big IT/Tech company of relevance in Israel (with very few notable exceptions, of course).”

via Israel’s high tech future – Investing Strategy – Mindful Money.

“It was a great product. They automated the data migration process for Windows machines,” Duplessie said. “But the IT guy had to justify to his boss that the benefit is he would have more free time. There was no direct benefit to the company.

“AutoVirt never armed their customers with enough ammunition to fight the internal battle. It was an execution failure on the business side, and it didn’t look like it was going to hit critical mass so the venture capitalists gave up.”

AutoVirt may have had a better chance if its software also supported Linux and Unix because that would have brought it into the enterprise, Duplessie said. The average data migration time for a small organization with a Windows environment is about a day, while a larger company could require eight to nine months from planning to execution.

“They didn’t support a Unix environment, where the problem is more expensive and a bigger light is shined on that problem,” Duplessie said.

via AutoVirt’s demise another blow to file virtualizaion.

They failed because they built a value proposition aimed at a person in an organization that the organization itself sees limited value in.

Read that again.

The specifics of Autovirt are that they automated a shitty, never-ending, manual labor intensive, error prone task called Data Migration – or moving stuff from one system to another. Data Migration is the no glory, all problem tactical task of IT. The best case you can hope for is that nothing goes wrong. No one in management gives out bonuses for nothing going wrong.

Data migration projects in big enterprise shops can take 6-9 months to plan and execute (and something always goes wrong). That is painful. Show me a way to reduce that risk and cycle time (say down to 24 hours) and people will PAY for that. Customers will pay for that – and Vendors will pay for it (Vendors can’t recognize revenue of the new stuff you bought until they get the old stuff out and the new stuff functioning many times). That’s a problem worth going after.

AutoVirt instead elected to attack the Windows market – small pieces of the enterprise and bigger pieces of the SMB. The value prop is the same – they will take a shitty task that some poor slob has to do from 24 hours down to 3.

What’s the problem here? The problem is that no one up in management that spends money gives a shit if their Windows admin saves themselves 8 hours. Where is the benefit to the company? Sure, there is a benefit to the Windows Admin – but isn’t that why we pay him to begin with? (I’m not making a value statement here, just telling you the way it is.)

Thus, AutoVirt was doomed from the start. The only way they could succeed is if their customer, the Windows Admin, was willing to pay for their stuff out of their own pocket – because lord knows the company itself couldn’t care less.

Hence, AutoVirt misdirected their value proposition to the wrong target(s). They should have focused on markets that care (Enterprises with BIG stuff to move that takes 9 months), or built a value proposition that drove value to the COMPANY, not to the Windows Admin. Those are the pieces they could never put together.

What’s tragic is that I believe there is legitimate value to the ultimate company that implements such stuff. But the buyer (Admin) was never armed with a story to sell to the business – and that is AutoVirt’s failing. The stuff worked great, it absolutely saved time, it created consistencies and eliminated risk – but the only thing the Windows guy was able to articulate to finance was “cool, I can get 8 hours back to do other stuff no one cares about either.” Tough sell.

The messaging was all wrong. They never took the time to figure out how to do it right. Thus, $25M clams have gone bad.

So the bigger truth, kids, is that you can’t stop at solving a problem – even a legitimate one. You have to KNOW who really matters in the decision-making process – and make sure that you aren’t stopping at the first guy who sees a benefit – you have to direct your value prop as high up the food chain as you can – because that’s where the money is.

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

In 2009, people were 3X more likely to cancel an IT project, or cut headcount to contain costs then they were to use cloud services.

By 2011, folks were just as likely to consider implementing a cloud solution to contain costs as they were to kill a project or fire people.

2012 data tells us that we’ve crossed the chasm – people are now MORE likely to use cloud techniques as a cost containment/reduction strategy then they are to shoot a project or get rid of people.

This, my friends, is a tipping point. (How many more book themes will I steal in this blog, I wonder?)

Cost reduction/containment is by far the most important catalyst to a long term, thriving market opportunity. Always. Strategic value (i.e., making money on your decision versus saving money by your decision) is always secondary. Always.

Thus, we can now assume that cloud has moved mainstream – and will only accelerate. As soon as a market accepts you as a valid cost containment/reduction strategy, you are invited backstage, where the deals happen.

So, what’s that mean? Markets become interesting when the status quo is upset. The status quo likes things, well, to stay the same. The same being “you give me money, I spend it. You bitch about it, then you give me more money.” Something that derails that flow tends to upset those on the receiving end.

So as more and more people adopt cloud-based strategies (initially) to cut costs, who among the status quo will be negatively affected? Want to know how to figure it out in your own shop? See which sales guys start coming around way more often than normal. See how many times they call you “Buddy!” lately. Those are the ones at risk. Those are the ones who will react in violent opposition (overt or covert) to your move to the cloud.

Those are the ones who will adapt (quickly) or perish (slowly and painfully).

Game on!

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

Simply put, big data applies to any data set that breaks the boundaries and conventional capabilities of IT. That’s it. What kinds of things break the boundaries of IT? Big capacity does. Big transaction counts do. Big analytical requirements do. Big response time requirements do. Big bandwidth needs do.

Big Data is NOT just analytics. It’s NOT just about storage. It’s NOT just about anything – it’s about everything. It’s about tossing out the old way of doing things because those ways simply won’t work in the world of BIG.

Think of it this way, take whatever it is that you are concerned with as a metric and ask yourself, “How will I be able to perform this function if I had to do it at a scale of 100X what it is today?” Whatever you come up with that breaks is Big Data, baby.

Why is Big Data way cooler than its buzz alter ego, Cloud? Because Cloud is a new marginally disruptive consumption model. Big Data is a massively disruptive force that will change every single thing in your current IT methods. Everything. It will literally disrupt the way you store, process, find, analyze, protect, secure,support, and deliver services and value to the organization you serve.

Big Data is not “transformational” (my 2011 IT word of the year) – it’s CONFRONTATIONAL.

Other than that, it’s no big deal.

You can read Steve’s other blog entries at The Bigger Truth.

Another reason, said Steve Duplessie, founder of the IT industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, is Windows IT admins were pushing back against using the AutoVirt software, because they couldn’t justify the importance of their own jobs if AutoVirt’s software was being used.

via AutoVirt Shuts Down Months After Launching Channel Program | The VAR Guy.