Mark's Blog

Episode 6: Dialog

Greetings,

As I am lazy by nature, one of my goals with this blog is to work less! Now before everybody reacts (or my performance review goes down if Joe is reading) let me define “lazy.” By “lazy,” I really mean “efficient” but lazy sounds more provocative and less technical.

I am one of those people that likes to know the quickest way to drive to a location for any condition or variable. I constantly try to maximize my effectiveness. When I travel, I try to meet with customers, or partners, or media folks starting with breakfast all the way through dinner – use every available slot to get the message out.

One thing that I want to achieve by writing this blog (btw - I do write 100% of it) is to interact directly with more customers, partners, media, analysts, and even EMC employees. If I can interact with more of you directly and my penalty is fewer red-eyes on United then so be it - I will tough it out even if it means that I have to give up those stale mini-pretzels. Results are my goal - effort is great but results count.

I have added an EMAIL Mark@emc.com link to the Blog. I would like to hear from you; especially from our customers. I would like to get your feedback, understand you pain points (those are “IT” pain points please – you will need to find other sites for your other pain points), and even topic ideas that you would like me to discuss. If you don’t understand something about EMC, ask me. I do hope it would be about technology or ideas or strategy though as I am not likely the best authority on replacing memory boards or disk drives on your array. My desire with this Blog is to be able to interact (with impact) with as many of you as possible. While nothing is better than first-hand interaction – I hope we can use technology to interact more effectively.

I do have a couple of asks:

Please identify yourself. I will not read anonymous or unknown EMAILs. You know who I am; it is only fair I know who you are. I will try to cover as much as I can but I am not sure what to expect.

To insure your openness, I will not publish any comments or questions if you mark it “private” in the subject line. Otherwise – I may use it in the Blog.

Onward,

Mark…

Episode 5: Network Intelligence

OK, so many folks have been asking me about our security strategy. I have discussed RSA in detail but some folks are still puzzled with the Network Intelligence acquisition. There are lots of good reasons but let me explain my rationale of why I consider this very strategic for EMC.

Network Intelligence for us is about 2 words: Metadata, and Compliance.

We all are familiar with data right? It’s that stuff in the file or the database – the stuff we actually use. Metadata is everything else. It is all of the data that is captured in logs and around files to help us manage, and protect the data itself. We use Metadata in Content Management to help provide services like versioning, workflow, and indexing. We use it to protect and secure data. Metadata is everywhere. In fact, I believe that there will ultimately be more Metadata then data itself!

Network Intelligence is the leader in its ability to capture log metadata in a coherent way so that we can do some really cool things. As you would expect, computers, systems, and applications log lots of things. Problem is that these logs are everywhere and there is simply no way to leverage this data (into information) uless you capture it into a repository.

The most important use case is Compliance. By capturing the metadata in an effective way we can actually go back and look at events that occurred in a system or application to understand if there are/were any problems. Data is not like money. When someone steals from a bank, it is usually easy to tell – the money is gone – duh. Data is different, what you need to be able to do here is to track the actions (especially of privileged logs) to insure that nothing is amiss.

Since this data is gathered and “organized” it can be used not only for Compliance (prove that nothing bad happened) but also for Forensics (something did happen – let’s look and see “how”). In general – this is the SIM market, and it ties directly in with both our information management and security strategies.

With all of this data coming in, there is an additional customer benefit we can provide; that is “Security Event Management” or SEM. Once a customer finds an issue, they can easily build a policy to check for the “event” and trigger a notification or other action.

Together this is now called the SEIM market. It is a key goal for EMC to help our customers manage their Metadata as well as their data and we believe that this is the best technology in the market to do just that.

If you want to read more – here is a link http://www.network-intelligence.com/solutions/loginaccess/whitepapers.asp

Mark…..

Episode 4: The 2006 METAL Awards

So it’s been a long week for me. It felt like one of those jam-packed “5 cities in 4 days” business trips, but I was home – sort of. Lots of customer briefings, dinners, and kids activities; the fall season is in full swing. So when my wife asked me what I thought we should do this weekend – the answer was simple, sleep!

So, as I was building my thoughts for this Blog, one thing I decided was that it wouldn’t be just about “storage and IT” topics but that it would discuss all technology and innovation in general.  It is in that spirit that I give you the first installment of Mark’s Essential Technology Accessories List or METAL. We engineers love acronyms and I can even create some wordplays like “does it cut the METAL”…. As you will see, these picks will not always be high-tech gadgets. In fact, innovation is most often the marrying of simple technologies or that of putting together a more complete and easy to use solution.

My favorite example is what I consider to be one of the best innovations of the 90’s – pay at the pump gas pumps.  This is a very simple piece of technology that may save me on average maybe 5 minutes a week. But run the number out -- 5 min X 52 Weeks = 260 mins/year - let’s call it 4 hours. I looked, but have no exact idea how many cars fill up each week, but let’s just call it at 100 million. This one idea gives back 400 million hours of efficiency per year! That is innovation.

So onto the list – here is a list of my current 10 favorite gadgets. Not all are about the latest technology. They are just things that, to me, excel at providing a function. In no particular order they are:

Tivo

iPOD

Miele (coffee maker)

Sonos (Music System)

Blackberry

ESPN Phone

One-touch Backup

Harmony Universal Remote

In-Car GPS

Vaio Laptop

…and honorable mention

My Fire Pit

Tivo: I don’t watch much TV but I also don’t watch any live TV anymore. This one is pretty obvious these days.

iPOD: Good music player but the trick here was the “ecosystem” the apple built with the player, iTunes, and the music providers. It’s all about the solution.

Miele (Coffee Maker): A great gadget that grinds a single serving of beans and makes me a single cup of great (European style) coffee in about 15 seconds. A must for my morning routine.

Sonos: A great new gadget for me. Basically it provide wireless music anywhere in the house with remotes that let me control music selection. It has a good interface and uses all of the music I have on my PC and can use any other source. It is a bit expensive right now but it is definitely the right concept.

Blackberry: Obvious – yes. Just a must for me but it has its downsides. Like when my wife catches me reading emails at the diner table – ouch!

ESPN Phone: I got this from a friend of mine at ESPN and gave it to my son to try out. He is hooked. For sports scores and highlights, it beats everything out there. I don’t think I am getting the phone back.

One Touch Backup: OK, I will say up front that this product uses EMC software (which is great). This product is all about simplicity – a hard drive with a built-in backup program from our Retrospect team. Integration and ease of use is great. Everyone with a PC needs backup – most, unfortunately, start using it after they loose all of their data.

Harmony Universal Remote: This was an area that was a wasteland of junk for 10 years. I have maybe 40 universal remotes and it was unbelievable to me that no one took on this problem. Harmony fixed it – done.

In-Car GPS: While there are definitely good ones and bad ones here, moving to Massachusetts 4 years ago would have left me trapped to a 3 mile radius from my house without these gadgets. The roads here seem to be basically paved-over cow trails – and sometimes they are only about wide enough for the cow. I discovered great things like the fact that towns and (maybe even individuals) get to name their sections of these roads. This means that the street may change names 2, 3, or 4 times in just a few miles. Street signs just confuse the matter – they also have roads that will be labeled “North” while you are actually traveling South – still haven’t figured that one out. There are clearly no rules requiring the posting of street numbers on businesses either. I guess when you don’t even know what street you are on, numbers would just complicate things. Since I would rather suffer for 2 hours than ask directions (my wife can attest to that one) I just gave up and got the GPS.

Vaio Laptop: Sony proved to me that Laptops are not yet a commodity with the Vaio. After noticing that, with all of my business trips, my left leg seemed to be getting shorter than my right, I switched to the small Vaio. It is a real PC just half the weight, more features, and twice the battery life – go figure.

And an Honorable Mention goes to my Fire Pit. Yes, maybe an odd choice but it probably has as much utility for me as anything in the list. It is not that complicated; just a special burner I had custom made. When it is the middle of winter in Massachusetts, the temperature is a balmy 10 degrees F, I have spent 23.9 hours a day inside, and I haven’t seen the sun for a fortnight - there is nothing better than sitting outside with a nice cigar and a warm fire.

M ark….

Episode 3: Pretexting

“Hi my name is Mark and I am from EMC. I am here to help protect you from HP?” – Sounds kind of strange doesn’t it? While I am not trying to pick on HP (I really mean that), the recent series of events clearly highlights the ability of individuals to secure confidential information in ways we might not have thought possible.

While everyone is steeped in the boardroom drama – there is a great technology question just not being asked – “Why don’t companies put the right technology in place so this doesn’t happen in the first place?”

For IT to thrive and its general commercial use to continue to grow it is critical that we address the need for security regarding our information. Most information of value to us and our business is private, not public. While there is great value in having access to information, there are also risks. The ultimate success of the Web relies on moving from simply a tool for access to public information to a tool that can also be used for ALL information.

Simply put, we need to build systems that can effectively protect private data while also making appropriate access as painless as possible. To date, I believe we have many technologies that will ultimately not withstand the test. Having a company ask my mother’s maiden name or my birthday does not give me that warm and fuzzy feeling that my data (or my money) is protected since this information itself is just not private.

We are experimenting with things like biometrics but these are also problematic for many applications. I just can’t imagine a retina scanner on my Blackberry. Personally, I believe that 2 factor authentication will play a key role in bridging the gap. The simplicity of two factor authentication is that it incorporates a simple electronic key that cannot be duplicated. It relies on the combination of something you know (a password) with something you have (a key fob) and can be used across almost any medium. Since they “key” is constantly changing, it also cannot be copied or written down. Any key number can only be used once so no key logger can be effective. If you loose the “key,” it can simply be deactivated and is useless.

I expect that recent events, while unfortunate, will provide the impetus for change that will ultimately help us provide greater access to information while, at the same time, putting in place the needed levels of information security.

And, if there were any doubts as to why we acquired RSA, this helped to show us all why Identity and Access Management (IAM) is going to be a critical technology for any company’s information management and protection strategy.

As for pretexting, I even find even the word itself interesting. I said I was going to talk about the technology side and I am clearly no lawyer but - in terms of right or wrong – I am going to say wrong. Pretexting. It sounds so innocuous; we need to call it what it is – identity fraud.  If my kids “pretext” me they get punished just the same as they would for lying.

Mark…

Episode 2: EMC Strategy

Greetings,

I gave a keynote Tuesday on EMC Strategy at Storage World in Boston. There were lots of requests for the presentation so here is the link.

Download lewis_swc_blog.pdf 

Folks also asked if I could give the presentation again or how they could hear the actual presentation so here is a link to a mp3 I created from the talk for the podcast crowd.

Download emc_pr_lewis_swc_9.19.06_2006_09_18.mp3

I am not going to be able to sync the speech to the slides but I am sure folks can track it through pretty easily (caution - the audio is 23MB! sorry, didn't have the time to compress this).

My thanks to Daniel Delshad and the Storage World team. They did a very nice job.

-----

I am a big believer in having a strategic framework for everything you do – a guiding vision if you will. EMC’s vision is to build an “Information Infrastructure” for our customers. This infrastructure will allow you to store, manage, protect, virtualize (move), archive, and secure your information, as well as manage your IT resources in ways that reduce cost, while giving you the ability to derive more value (knowledge) from the information itself. Whew – that was a mouthful. Take a look at presentation – I think it ties things together pretty well.

Sometimes as we rush to build on vision we forget that we need to tell everyone why we think what were doing is important and, as I believe in this case, transformational. This and other blogs from me will work to help articulate not only what we are doing but why we are doing it!

Chris Preimesberger (eWeek) also did a nice write-up summary of my strategy talk. I think he even said it better in some places! Here is that link as well.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2017702,00.asp

We have clearly been busy here doing lots of great things both internally and through acquisitions to deliver on our vision. I think we have assembled some of the most innovative technologies that exist today to bring this vision to reality. I hope you will agree.

Mark…

Episode 1

Greetings.

This is new for me - Blogging that is. The Marketing folks wanted me to do it but, like many companies these days, I just figured this would fall into the legal abyss and never come out. Too much risk they would say. I thought I was off the hook but I was wrong; they actually pulled it off - oops.

Its not that I didn't want to Blog; I think the power of individual "commerce"  is the largest single untapped resource (more on that some other time) in the world. This should be fun and I have no idea what to expect.

So some housekeeping to start. Is this a corporate Blog? NO. As the Chief Development Officer (which really means "Head Strategy Guy") will my views reflect things we are doing at EMC - YES. At least I hope so or they will start looking for a new strategy guy:-) As my one disclaimer, I guess EMC does pay the monthly fee for the site (I hope I don’t get taxed).

They had this corporate photo of me in the requisite black suit with the yellow power tie but I took that one down. The short story on the personal side is besides my family, I like to ski, fly fish, collect classic cars, and enjoy a good cigar. Oh, and yes, as you would expect, I am a gadget nut. The Lab in the picture is "Doc;" one of three labs we have right now. That is about all of the personal side I intend to get into but the plastic suit thing just didn't work for me.

OK down to business. As you would expect, I would like to comment on technologies and trends, offer some perspectives and provide a deeper thought process that went into many of the strategies and acquisitions that evolved for EMC. People will often label me a "technologist" but I don't consider myself one at all.  I like to think of myself as simply a matchmaker but just not with people. There are so many problems to be solved and so many things we can do better. On ther other side there are so many great new things being invented every day. I view my job is simply matching ideas with the needs - aren't we all just in sales.

I once heard some one comment that, in all likelihood, we already have created the cure for Cancer but the problem is, we just don’t know it yet.

More Later