Let me apologize for my long social media silence (twitter and blog). Since my last post, there have been changes internally in both organizational structure and business focus that have consumed my time. However, these shifts have bloggable-value and I thought I would share with you where our team is headed.
Shift in Organizational Structure
At the beginning of August, I was given the opportunity to take a new role in the NetApp Virtualization BU. Since the beginning of August, I have taken the role of Sr. Manager for the Virtualization Technical Marketing Engineers. I am very fortunate to work with a collection of intelligent and capable professionals who are all as committed to Virtualization as I am and we are very excited about our efforts align our efforts under the following core tenants:
- 1.Be the Technical Team of Choice
- 2.“Piss-Off” our Competition (in the spirit of good healthy competition)
- 3.Innovate, Innovate, Innovate
- 4.Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Certainly sounds like a tall-order, but the team thatI have the pleasure to work with are as deeply committed to these tenants as I am.
Being the technical team of choice applies to all areas of cloud computing and virtualization. Our activities and collateral will be focused on driving broader virtualization adoption, dragging NetApp storage to support the infrastructure of course. The goal is to establish subject matter experts in core solutions for virtualization creating a “go-to” person for our NetApp internal customers, partners and our customer base.
Piss-off our competition is meant to use techniques that out-innovate them. This is a dragging effort. The more we push, and they push for that matter, the more we make the core infrastructure support for virtualization better. That is what I mean by in the spirit of good healthy competition. As we push the envelope, we’ll introduce opportunities to not just bring parity in our features, but instead pass by our competition in our activities and deliverables. It is a bit of a friendly competition, as we all want the same thing in the end – to make your virtualization experience and programs as successful as possible. Where possible, we will work with our competitors to participate in virtualization feature development, and where possible, we will use features specific to NetApp to continue to drive the value of running virtualization workloads on top of our portfolio.
Innovate, Innovate, Innovate is about capturing virtualization mindshare and builds on the previous two items while weaving in #4 – we will communicate more than ever – both socially and in normal collateral development.
All of this culminates into the tactical business focus shift I mentioned.
Shift in Business Focus — VMworld 2011
Not a permenant shift mind you, just a tactical position change to bring our resources and activities to bear on VMworld 2011. The team has been very heads down focused on the delivery of assests for VMworld and specifically the NetApp Corporate Booth. This year I am happy to say that we have a lot going on. My next post will be my cliff notes to the NetApp presence at VMworld.
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