Wrapping up my week teaching Top Gun class in Sydney, Australia, I could not resist taking a photo of the cityscape.

Sydney is a beautiful city, and the view from the 13th floor of the IBM Centre at St. Leonards in North Sydney is always worth a picture!

Vic, Scott and I all have engineering backgrounds, so it is easy for us to drop down into the technical weeds in discussing each product and solution. However, the student feedback from both Auckland and Sydney was that some of our material was just too technical.

"Shoe salesman should know how to tie a pair of shoe laces, but do not need to know [how the little aglets at the tip of each lace are made] just to sell a pair of shoes!"

Rather than presenting my standard 137-slide "Death-by-Powerpoint" deck on selling midrange solutions, I came up with this simple 5-point approach.

1. Are they digitizing their information? In my blog post, [IBM Watson - Helping Doctors Reduce Costs, Manage Risk and Improve Healthcare Outcomes], I mentioned that 70 percent of doctors do not use Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. They are still doing everything on paper! On a Dollar-per-GB basis, paper is more expensive than magnetic tape media.
    
2. Do they plan to store and process their data in house? IBM's [focus on Cloud is paying off], and IBM SmartCloud offerings might make a lot of sense for many clients.
    
3. Do they plan to centralize their IT? Some companies centralize all of their IT, and others distribute the decision-making to departments, remote office and branch office locations. For the latter, use the ROBO approach to selling.
    
4. Do they prefer one-stop shopping? In my now infamous post [Supermarkets and Specialty Shops], I mentioned research that found our clients fall into two camps. Those that favor one-stop shopping from IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell or Oracle, versus those that prefer to buy from the many IT equivalent of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers like EMC, HDS, or NetApp. For those clients that fall in the latter camp, focus on IBM's best-of-breed products.
    
5. IT Supermarket competition? The final group are clients that prefer one-stop shopping, but have not yet made up their mind between IBM versus the [IBM wannabees]. Focus on IBM's synergy between storage, servers, software, switches and services.

Last week, we celebrated Joe's birthday in Auckland. This week, it was Vic's turn, so we went to the Garfish restaurant at Manly beach. Here we are with bacon-enhanced oysters.

The four-day class finished Thursday afternoon, and I went out with some of the students to celebrate their graduation. I started with beers at the Cabana, then wine at [the Ivy Room], and finally dinner at Uccello on the rooftop [Pool Club]. Dinner was awesome: pork sausage-stuffed olives to start, roasted chicken with polenta, and finally a capuccino to finish the meal.

I would have never found these places on my own, and the students provided me some interesting feedback about the class and how to improve it.

technorati tags: IBM, Supermarkets, Specialty Shops, ROBO, SmartCloud, Garfish, Ivy Room, PoolClub, Uccello

This week, I was in Sydney, Australia teaching IBM Storage Portfolio Top Gun class.

Our hotel is near [Circular Quay], and our class is at the IBM Centre at St. Leonards, just six metro stops away. There are also ferry boats from Circular Quay to other parts of the city.

Here are other members of the teach team. Scott McPeek covers the IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center, SAN Volume Controller and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Vic Peltz covers high-end disk, disk replication, and competitive issues. Here we are in front of the [Sydney Opera House].

Sunday, we took a ferry boat to [Watsons Bay], to have dinner at the famous [Doyles on the Beach] fish restaurant.

We arrived at 4:15pm to discover they weren't open for dinner until 5:30pm. We managed to find some beverages at the bar next door. Corona beer?!?! I just travelled thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean to be offered Mexican beer I can get locally in Tucson? I don't think so! Instead, we got some local Tasmanian brew.

Once seated, our table at Doyles was outdoors on the patio, with stunning views of the sunset. The weather was just right, cool and crisp sea air, but not windy.

I tried their Sydney Sangria which combines red wine, fruit juices and ginger beer. This had an interesting kick. If you have never tried Ginger beer, I highly recommend it! For dinner, I had the Flathead fish and chips. All of the fish at Doyles is locally sourced.

We got done with dinner just in time to catch the last ferry boat at 6:55pm! We literally were the last three to get on the boat before they pulled up the gangplank!

On Monday night, after the first day of class, our friends at [Brocade] invited us to a Pizza-and-Beer reception at the [Cabana Bar and Lounge], similar to the Brocade reception at Sale Street Bar last week in Auckland. Here I am with Katie, one of the Brocade employees hosting the event.

While at the reception, we had a terrible rain storm. I am so glad we were not on the street at that time. Some of our colleagues were not so lucky, and arrived soaking wet!

Special thanks to Tim Lees, the Brocade partner manager to IBM in ANZ, for hosting these receptions in both Auckland and Sydney!

On Tuesday, I once again presented the [Storwize family, DS3500 and DCS3700 disk systems]. Based on student feedback from last week's Auckland class, we took out some of the more technical details of each product, and added more information on the business value of each feature.

For my presentation on "IBM's Big Four Initiatives - Understanding Social, Media, Analytics and Cloud", I added more explanation on Hadoop for the big data analytics section. I even installed [IBM InfoSphere BigInsights] on my laptop to run a sample MapReduce job. The [Basic Edition 2.0 version can be downloaded from developerWorks] for free!

technorati tags: IBM, Brocade, Tim Lees, Storwize, V3700, V7000, DS3500, DCS3700, Social, mobile, Analytics, big data, cloud

Continuing my week in Auckland, New Zealand, I presented my last three topics for the week.

• Selling IBM System Storage against competition - Part 1. You would think that since IBM's storage products are, in general, easier to use, faster, at a lower cost of ownership than the offerings from our competitors, there would not need to be a presentation like this. Since there are so many reasons why IBM is better, I split the session into two parts.
   
• Selling IBM System Storage against competition - Part 2. With so much material, I needed to provide some structure. In the past, some Top Gun instructors organized by category, Enterprise Class, Midrange, and Entry level. I chose, instead, to organize by the different competitors themselves.
   
• Selling IBM PureSystems. IBM PureSystems feature the Storwize V7000 and Flex System V7000 disk systems inside, and support all of IBM's disk and tape offerings outside the frame. I covered Flex Systems, PureFlex, PureApplication and PureData, including the newly announced PureData System for Hadoop.

We often joke that I.B.M. stands for "Information Between Meals"! Here we are at a restaurant in the [Britomart] area. I am on [the Paleo diet], which is low-carb, high-protein, dairy-free and gluten-free, and am trying to stick with it even when on the road traveling. Sometimes it can be challenging. Tonight, I opted for a light dinner, just roasted vegetables and grape-flavored beverage.

The folks in New Zealand love sheep. There are nine sheep for every person in this country. Here are some metal sculpture lawn ornaments.

Hyein and I needed new "desktop wallpaper" photos for our laptops. For those who want to dress up their laptops, here's one for each of us. (Click on each photo to see full size). Hyein kept getting her hair in the way. I didn't have that problem, but was worried my cap would fly off my head. This cap was a gift from my clients at [James Cook University in Brisbane, Australia].

In Top Gun classes, the top students are given "Top Gun" caps and their picture is published on the official website for all to see their success. Overall, the entire class did very well, and these three outstanding students had the top scores.

I am now in Sydney, Australia -- to teach Top Gun class again!

technorati tags: IBM, PureSystems, Desktop, Wallpaper

I returned safely from my trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(A special shout-out to Shannon at [In The Raw] sushi restaurant, and my new friends I met at the rooftop of [the Mayo]!)

Last week I was in Auckland, New Zealand teaching Top Gun class. Top Gun teaches IBM Business Partners and sales reps how to sell our products, services, and solutions. I have been teaching Top Gun classes around the world since 1998.

(Why didn't I post sooner? Because IBM's developerWorks was getting an exciting upgrade to IBM Connections 4.0, and bloggers like me have to wait for the conversion to complete!)

While many of my trips in the USA involve traveling alone, that is not the case for Top Gun classes. Our class manager, Joe Ebidia, brought his wife Karen. Our class administrator is Hyein (Hyein is a Korean name that rhymes with rain). In addition to some local instructors, I am joined by my IBM USA colleagues Scott McPeek (Tivoli Storage) and Vic Peltz (Disk/Replication/Competitive Sales).

The rest of the teach team arrived a day or two early to adjust to jet lag. I, on the other hand, got off the plane Monday at 6am, and had a business meeting that same morning with GTS architects from Wellington.

Clockwise from left: Karen is vegetarian, and had some pasta with tomato sauce. Hyein had a lamb burger. Joe had flounder. I had salmon risotto. Yum!

(To those asking why I have only the bellies of Karen and Joe in the picture, I was focused on taking picture of the food.)

After setting up the classroom, we took a ferry over to [Devonport], a charming seaside village just minutes across the bay from Auckland. The ferry boats were close the the Central Business District our [Stamford Plaza hotel] was in, and they run every 30 minutes.

The four of us walked up to the top of Mt. Victoria to see the views of the city. I highly recommend this! Once you get to Devonport, you can walk along the streets to see all the cute shops, or enjoy the parks and natural beauty. I had [done this before], but it is always worth doing again!

The class is four days long. I had six presentations. Here were the first three:

• Selling IBM Storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified. Scott McPeek had already covered SAN Volume Controller (SVC), so it was easy to explain the Storwize V7000. For the V7000 Unified, I went into more detail of the file-based protocols and features, paving the way for Vic's "Selling SONAS" later in the week.
   
• Selling IBM Storwize V3700. Having covered the SVC and Storwize V7000, my presentation on the Storwize V3700 focuses more on the positioning of when to sell which product for particular workloads.
   
• Understanding IBM's Big Four Initiatives. This was an interesting request. I was asked to cover Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (what we internally call SMAC) from a storage perspective. Social included Social Media, Social Networking and Social Business. Mobile focused on IBM's Mobile First campaign. Analytics included big data, Hadoop, and our various solutions for performing analytics. Cloud included IBM's Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA), IBM SmartCloud Enterprise storage, our Backup and Archive clouds, and the new SmartCloud Storage portfolio.

I will save the rest of the week for the next post!

technorati tags: IBM, Storwize, V7000, V7000U, V3700, Social, Mobile, Analytics, big data, Cloud, Storage, SmartCloud, Top Gun, Joe Ebidia, Auckland, New Zealand