The first city on my Eastern European trip was Moscow. I think the traffic here is worse than the 101 in Silicon Valley during the dot com era. That said, it was a great visit. I spoke at the Information Infrastructure Conference at the Swissotel convention center in Moscow. It was the first time I spoke to a group of people with an interpreter. It was like being at the UN. The two main topics were Storage Efficiency and Real-time Compression.
I spoke with a few customers and the press and in dealing with the data growth challenges they wanted to know, “When it comes to big data, what is next, is it ‘huge data’”? Data growth clearly a concern. Interesting enough though most of the questions, came around my title of “Evangelist”. One report told me, “if an Evangelist is ‘preaching the word of storage’ then why not just call yourself an Apostle”? How do you think that would look on an IBM business card: Global Storage Efficiency Apostle?
The next day I did a day of “sales enablement” in the Moscow office. We discussed mostly how to sell and position Real-time Compression and what is next for the technology. I was very impressed with the team. They were very technical and knew quite a bit about Real-time Compression and really wanted to know in more detail how the technology was invented. This means they are really talking about the technology and the customers are drilling down into the next level of detail. There are a lot of good opportunities for the technology in Moscow and I look forward to hearing more about the success of Real-time Compression there.
I didn’t have a lot of time to sight see but I did make it to Red Square. You can actually buy a beer outside in Red Square and walk around. So I did. I took a few photos and then as the US was getting going, I had some work calls to attend to. That evening I spent on the 34th floor of my hotel having dinner. It was a great view of Moscow. I hope to come back.
Next stop, Warsaw Poland. Stay tuned.