One of the most chilling IT-related comments I can recall came out
in a conversation yesterday with NetApp CEO Tom Georgens as he was
relating some of the challenges his CIO customers are facing.
And the knee-knocker Georgens related should serve as a
2x4-across-the-face reminder to all CIOs and to all IT vendors that
most of yesterday's tech strategies and approaches and products are
woefully inadequate for today's high-velocity online global economy
and will consign change-resistant companies to mediocrity and then
irrelevance and then ruin.
Here's what Georgens said: "One CIO—and he's with one of this
country's best-known and best-run companies—said that at his
company, IT is regarded as the single biggest threat to the future
of his firm.
"And he has one—and only one—chance to change
that."
The change he's looking for is most certainly not more of the same:
more complexity, more integration, more tinkering and tuning, more
isolated silos of infrastructure supporting more isolated islands
of applications requiring truckloads of new storage systems
interconnected with to tens of thousands of fiercely independent
(translation: a mess) end-user computing devices.
So Georgens is spurring NetApp into the breach with the audacious
promise to CIOs that his company can meet their storage needs with
50 percent less physical storage infrastructure than competitors
will require. The secret is NetApp's unshakable belief that the
future of storage will be based on the central role of
virtualization in the ongoing transformations of IT systems in
general and data centers in particular.
Storage strategists might want to split hairs over that
philosophical position, but lots and lots of CIOs seem convinced:
NetApp just announced its third straight quarter with revenue
increases of more than 30 percent and is now on an annual run rate
of almost USD 5 billion.
Asked if he feels like the leader of a band of revolutionaries,
Georgens laughs and says no, it's just a matter of applying the
right tools for a brutally complex job.
"If you go into some of these big installations that competitors
have, and we tell them that we can match or beat that performance
with only half the physical number of boxes—well, in today's
environment, people have to listen," Georgens said in a phone
interview Monday.
"At first we lay off some of the tech talk but in general make sure
they get a sense that we've got all sorts of technology
capabilities that yield very compelling cost of ownership for
them.
"We struggle constantly with the issue of awareness, and in spite
of our success and our growth, a lot of people still don't know who
we are. And as we grow, more and more of the deals we're competing
for involve companies that are much better-known than we are," he
said.
"So when we go in and explain what we can do and how we can do it,
a lot of time the customers say, 'Well, that's interesting, but I
don't hear that from the other guys—if you can really do what
you say you can do, why aren't the other guys doing similar things
and talking about similar approaches?' "
But nine out of 10 of Wall Street's biggest firms have dropped such
skepticism and bought into the NetApp approach, Georgens said. And
as for the 10th:
"It's not like they've rejected us or anything," Georgens says,
"but they're still making up their minds."