Okay, it has been about 30 days and I am now out of IBM. It was a great run and I learned a lot. From Storage Efficiency Evangelist to Business Line Executive for Data Protection, I got to do and see a lot inside of IBM.
That said, I am a startup company guy for sure. I have started my own LLC (Storage Alchemy LLC – of course) and am now working on a few consulting gigs in the Copy Data Services/Management space, Security space, QoS space as well as some analyst work for Wikibon.
If you follow me at all, you’ll start to see some postings and thoughts in these areas. It has been great to be back in the mix of it all again. I really enjoy meeting with vendors discussing strategy and the direction of the industry. As an example, when I went into IBM, “tape was dead”, now, tape is and can really make a comeback. Not just because I was at IBM but there are a number of vendors as well as statistics as to investment in tape vs. disk these days as well as complementary solutions such as Flash that help to make a whole new architecture “Flape”. It will be interesting to see how this solution, as an example, takes off.
Additionally, since I have last been with a startup there has been a lot of social media movement and tools to use as well as track success that company’s can have leveraging social media tools such as CrowdChat. At IBM we had worked with Wikibon to host a few “Tweet Chats” which were pretty successful and it looks like CrowdChat is a platform to do just that.
Stay tuned, as there will be more to come hopefully in all of these areas. I hope to be doing more blogging, and feel free to post a comment and tell me what you see as interesting areas in storage, data protection, QoS or anything.