Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect and Event Content Manager for [
Christopher Vollmar is a Storage Architect supporting customers in Canada and the Caribbean. He is a Certified Consulting IT Specialist and a Design Thinking practitioner. He has also been a contributing author to the the 
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Virtual Worlds Conference Spring 2007
Several of my IBM colleagues will be attending the "Virtual Worlds 2007" conference today and tomorrow. This conference sold out so quickly that they have already scheduled a second one for October. The focus is on 3-D internet technologies likeSecond Life. Attendance is expected at over 600 people.
IBM is investing heavily in this new concept of v-business. Last year, I was one of only 325 IBMers on Second Life. Now, according to this Better than Life blog entry from Grady Booch, IBM Fellow, the number is over 4000! Of course, the challenge for IBM, and others, is learning to market in virtual worlds. Already, my team is in-world, and we meet several times a week. Using Second Life is quickly becoming an essential business skill, like participating in conference calls, or responding to instant messages. What does meeting in-world entail?
I suspect the need for having places in Second Life to hold meetings will become more and more in demand.At a time when real-estate sales in the US is slowing down, Coldwell Banker's Second Life efforts are ramping up. I am not making this up. Coldwell Banker is one of the nation's largest real estate brokerage firms. They are trying to bring the same "adult supervision" to virtual real-estate transactions, offering to help people buy and rent properties in Second Life. We live in interesting times!
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2007 State of the Site for IBM Tucson
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Today was our annual "State of the Site" meeting for the IBM Tucson site. This facility was completed in 1978, and I started my career here in 1986.
Various employees and teams were recognized for the contributions and dedication. For example:
Our site manager, Terri Mitchell, did a recap of all our recent awards and accomplishments.Of the nine Design Innovation awards won by IBM this year at the CeBIT conference, eight were for IBM System Storage products!
A representative from Tucson's Brewster Center presented Terri an award, thanking IBM for its strong support for the community through various charity initiatives. The final speaker was a new IBM client, Tony Casella, the IT Director of the town of Marana. Recently, the town of Marana selected IBM products made big news. Arizona is the fastest growing state in the USA, and the town of Marana, just north of Tucson, is one of the fastest growing communities in Arizona. The town is growing so large that it will soon spill over from Pima into Pinal county, and will be the first town in Arizona authorized to span county boundaries. Marana is most famous for its Gallery Golf Club on Dove Mountain that is the new home of the World Golf Cham His decision was based on conversations he had with other IT directors of other towns and cities, and this November 2006 article in Network World. He held up the copy of his magazine. Tony was very delighted with IBM's solution-oriented approach, rather than just selling more boxes of hardware. He found IBM easy to do business with, and committed to his success. |
Productivity Center in Leader Quadrant
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It's good to see IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center evolve and expand. I was the lead architect for this product a few years ago, and my has it come a long way from its early beginnings.
Today, Gartner, Inc. has IBM Positioned in Leader Quadrant for Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software. The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted concept by Gartner, representing a two-by-two grid that ranks various offerings from different vendors. Ideally, vendors want their products in the upper right "Leaders" quadrant. Yahoo Finance reports: According to Gartner, Inc., "Leaders have the highest combined measures of an ability to execute and a completeness of vision. They have the most comprehensive and scalable products. They have a proven track record of financial performance and an established market presence. In terms of vision, they are perceived as thought leaders, having well-articulated plans for ease of use, how to address scalability and product breadth. For vendors to have long-term success, they must plan to address the expanded market requirements for change management and root-cause and performance analysis. Leaders must not only deliver to the current market requirements, which continue to change, but they also need to anticipate and deliver on future requirements. A cornerstone for leaders is the ability to articulate how these requirements will be addressed as part of their vision for resource management. As a group, leaders can be considered a part of most new purchase proposals, and they have high success rates in winning new business."IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is a strategic part of IBM Service Management, and a foundational component of the IBM Systems Director family. IBM is making a concerted effort across servers, networks, software and storage to help manage the IT infrastructure in a coordinated way. I have seen other quadrants used to help explain different market segments, such as the one used in this 40-minute video Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start speech at TiECon 2006. To the current architects and developers of Productivity Center, well done!
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ASU turns to Google
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As an alumni of the University of Arizona, it is always good to see any of the Arizona schools try something new and innovative. This time, it was our arch-rivals atArizona State University (in Tempe, AZ, near Phoenix).
An article in InformationWeek reports that40,000 ASU Students Leap to Google Apps; University Pays Zero. The ASU president, Michael Crow, wants to make IT the primary driver in his ambitious "New American University" project.Last October, ASU became the first large institution to deploy Google Apps, a comprehensive suite of productivity applications that includes e-mail, search, calendars, instant messaging, and even word processing and spreadsheets.I've tried them out, they work, nothing fancy but certainly good enough for college homework assignments. Already 40,000 students and faculty have switched their e-mail to Google, while keeping their asu.edu designation. (out of 65,000 student population, which Mr. Crow is trying to raise to 90,000 students!) E-mail is a thorn in the side of storage administrators. Being "semi-structured" repositories, they cannot just delete or move files around, as there is context between notes and their attachments, that shouldn't be broken. E-mail systems are often the fastest growing consumer of storage for many organizations. Switching from maintaining their own mail servers to Google is saving ASU $500,000 US dollars alone, not including the administrator labor savings. Again, some corporations might feel their e-mail is too "secret" to be outsourced like this, but for college students who spend all their creative talent posting things on MySpace and YouTube, and faculty who spend their careers TRYING to get published, they have nothing to hide from the rest of the world. It makes perfect sense. Best of all, Google isn't charging ASU anything for this service. Google is able to cover the costs from advertising revenue instead. I can think of a lot of companies that might want to advertise to a demographic of "40,000 students who are mostly 18-25 years old and all live in or near Tempe, AZ". In the list ofTop 10 Best Presentations Ever is Seth Godin talking about Marketing at Google. The video is worth watching.
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Held Hostage by Information Overload
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The amount of information stored and available today is astounding. Consider the following:
...a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England. Shawn Callahan mentions this in his great presentation on how work really gets done. Mark Nelson covers this in more detail inWe Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload. To help address this challenge of organizing finding the right information at the right time, Web 2.0 technologies have emerged. You can read the 16-page paper What Is Web 2.0? -- Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation by O'Reilly. Or better yet, watch the quick 4-minute video Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/Ing Us.
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