Looking for the more useful Data Center vendor, Find the Challenger

You can't go to any data center event without running into the vendors and the sales people.  The easy thing for me is they don't bother me as I tell them I don't buy things. On the other hand, the people I hang out with buy lots of things and we get frequent laughs watching the sales people maneuver.  We rarely seek out a vendor as almost all are just looking to build relationships with the people they see, saying what they do and exchanging business cards.

One of the funny things we discussed at the Facebook Open Compute Summit is how it would be great if we get could have penalty flags for inappropriate vendor behavior.

So, what would be a vendor that people would want to talk to.  Consider this Book and new sales research.

Presenting The Challenger Sale

New book from Corporate Executive Board uses research to confront traditional sales wisdom.

In a world of hesitant, risk-averse, empowered customers, what sales approach consistently wins?

To find out, Corporate Executive Board surveyed over 6,000 sales reps across geographies and industries. The research revealed that sales reps fall into one of five profiles:

  1. The Hard Worker
  2. The Problem Solver
  3. The Challenger
  4. The Relationship Builder
  5. The Lone Wolf

And the winner is?  The challenger, not the relationship builder.

Each profile can turn in average performance, but only one consistently outperforms – the Challenger.

In The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson show how this critical finding has turned conventional wisdom on its head. While most companies focus on building customer relationships, the best focus on pushing customers’ thinking, introducing new solutions to their problems and illuminating problems customers overlook. That is, they challenge their customers.

The Challenger Sale is a must-read book for any business leader, sales manager or rep. It explains why Challengers win and, more importantly, how companies can build the Challengers they need to drive customer loyalty and higher growth.

Think about.  How many data center sales people know how to be a challenger?

Open Compute Project Subscribe Link Lists of Technical Workshops - Virtual IO, DC Design, Openrack, Storage, and HW Mgmt

For those of you Open Compute Project fans that Facebook has hosted in Palo Alto and NYC. The following are the subscriber lists you can get updates on the latest discussions.

NewImage

Hacking Conventional Computing Infrastructure

We started a project at Facebook a little over a year ago with a pretty big goal: to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. We decided to honor our hacker roots and challenge convention by custom designing and building our software, servers and data centers from the ground up – and then share these technologies as they evolve.

 

  • VIRTUAL IO http://lists.opencompute.com/mailman/listinfo/opencompute-virtualio
  • DATACENTER DESIGN http://lists.opencompute.com/mailman/listinfo/opencompute-datacenterdesign
  • OPENRACK http://lists.opencompute.com/mailman/listinfo/opencompute-openrack
  • STORAGE http://lists.opencompute.org/mailman/listinfo/opencompute-storage
  • HARDWARE MNGT http://lists.opencompute.org/mailman/listinfo/opencompute-hardwaremngt
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    Tuna Industry attacks Greenpeace, lessons for the data center industry?

    WSJ has an article and video on Greenpeace vs. the Tuna industry where part of the accusation is Greenpeace is focused on fund raising.  It would be interesting to know how much money Greenpeace has collected due to the uncoal Facebook data center campaign. The Tuna Industry must be pretty fed up to go to the media with their story.

    The WSJ articles is here.

    Unfortunately, this attack on canned tuna isn't about science. It's about fund raising, and Greenpeace has discovered a recipe for success: Target something that's easily recognizable (like tuna), make some scary claims in the media, parade around in funny costumes—and start raking in the donations. It's a recipe that Greenpeace has perfected over the past two decades.

    Here is the video Greenpeace has put on line.

    87,675

    Uploaded by  on Aug 14, 2011

    Each year the canned tuna industry kills thousands of sharks, rays, turtles and seabirds. Now that's a dirty little secret. Greenpeace is launching a new campaign to get the canned tuna industry to clean up its act and end its destructive ways. To kick things off we've teamed up with Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Mark Fiore on this video. Help expose the the tuna industry's dirty little secret by sharing this video with everyone you know.

    Learn more at www.greenpeace.org

    • likes, 114 dislikes

     

    Note how much dislikes (114) vs. likes (259).

    SSDs arrive in the Public Cloud, Is CloudSigma starting a new trend

    I speculated a year and half ago that AWS would add SSD, but I was wrong and AWS added HPC instead.

    GigaOm reports on CloudSigma adding SSD support.

    CloudSigma adds SSDs to its public cloud

    By  Nov. 8, 2011, 11:44am PT No Comments

    Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. SSDs (aka flash memory) are well known for their ability to significantly increase storage I/O performance and decrease power consumption when compared with hard disk drives, but until recently they have been too expensive for consideration in most data centers that aren’t backed by serious computing needs and deep pockets. That’s starting to change with the advent of new companies promising ever-lower prices on enterprise-grade flash storage, but making flash available as a service to cloud customers is still relatively unheard of.

    There is mention of the lower power consumption, but the key is performance.  BTW, part of why I like my MacBook Air is its 256GB SSD that makes my machine outperform my other laptops.

    The SSD is meant for high performance areas of the cloud.

    At this point, CloudSigma is targeting its flash offering at tiered storage environments in which companies place “hot” data or data that requires high I/O throughput on flash, while keeping less-performance-intensive data and backup operations on hard disks.

    Is it time for unbiased journalism to end, what happens if writers have opinions? More interesting news?

    One of the classic rules of media journalism is being unbiased.  But is unbiased journalism real?

    The Illusion of Unbiased Journalism

    The title is not a misprint. There is no such thing as unbiased journalism, just like the term "political science" is an oxymoron. There is no quantitative scientific formula for winning an election, for the variable of the voter's mind is too inconsistent, and thus there is no such thing as unbiased journalism because of that same human factor.

    GigaOm writes on the issues of Twitter and Journalism.

    Twitter and journalism: It shouldn’t be that complicated

    By  Nov. 8, 2011, 9:34am PT No Comments

    The Associated Press caused a minor furore recently when the news-wire serviceupdated its social-media policy and forbid its writers from expressing any opinions on Twitter, including implied opinions caused by retweeting others. In the wake of that controversy, Jeff Sonderman at the Poynter Institute has suggested thatjournalists could use their own Twitter shorthand to prevent anyone from getting the wrong impression when a reporter retweets something. But as I’ve argued before, all we really have to do is admit that journalists of all kinds might have opinions, instead of trying to pretend that they don’t, or trying to force them not to.

    Anyone who thinks journalists don't have a bias hasn't had a lengthy conversation with one in a bar.  Most have very strong opinions, but when they write for their job the "unbiased journalism" rules kick in.

    I have lost the articles I found that discussed how part of what got unbiased journalism its start is when a newspaper became a monopoly in area news it was in its best interest to tell both sides of the story to maximize readership which then maximizes subscriptions and advertising.

    But in this day, monopoly news is out.  People want to hear opinions.  And it is what they expect.  How many times have you read something expecting some good points and are disappointed there is no clear opinions.  I know many who have had media interviews spent a lot of time explaining their issues, and then when the article comes out their expert opinion is compared to a nobody, but a nobody who has the opposing view that allows the journalist to appear unbiased.

    By pretending that their journalists don’t have opinions, when everyone knows that they do, mainstream media outlets are suggesting their viewers or readers are too stupid to figure out where the truth lies, or too thick to consider the facts of a story if the reporter happens to have retweeted someone or joined a Facebook page. Given that kind of treatment, many of those looking for news are likely to migrate to sources that admit they have views on events, rather than continue to be talked down to by newspapers and TV networks that pretend they are above that sort of thing.

    GIgaOm highlights the power of Twitter.

    But all that reinforces is how media entities like CNN are missing the point about social media, or seeing only the potential negatives instead of the positives. As journalism professor Robert Hernandez noted on Twitter:


    Robert Hernandez
    The thing is RT/Twitter/social media is working fine. It's traditionalists that don't get it and want to 'fix it,' aka control it.