An NDA for analysts?
As a newly minted analyst I was looking forward to going to EMC’s annual analyst meeting, getting industrial strength marketing smoke blown at me. Then I found they insist on a Non-Disclosure Agreement.
Let me get this straight: the analysts job is to talk and write about the industry to current and potential clients, the press and on the occasional blog, and you expect them to keep secrets?
Is it just me or is that brain dead? On the other hand lots of folks from Gartner, IDC and even Data Mobility were there, so I’m sure they (now) know something I don’t. Not that you’ll hear about it from me. Or them.
In contrast, NetApp, for one, doesn’t ask for NDAs.
I passed
I only sign NDAs with clients because:
- I take NDAs seriously and I don’t want to know trade secrets unless we have a business reason
- NDAs are usually a ploy to shift focus from the current shabby reality to some wonderful and ever-receding future
- The revelations are usually horse-pucky since delivery always slips, prices always rise and features always shrink.
So I’ll continue to just look at what they do, without the benefit of deep insight into where they claim they’re going.
Next!
One day I noticed a hit from StorageZilla, where they’d linked to one of my posts.
The first thing that caught my eye was the misstatement of my views. Whatever. Then I saw this:
EMC already has more than it’s share of ideas about the future in active development, or being argued about at ear splitting volume by people with Ph.Ds inside the office of the CTO.
EMC has Ph.Ds? What do they do?
StorageMojo reviews technology papers from all kinds of folks, including IBM, Google, Microsoft, HP, CMU, USCD and more. Until I saw the comment in StorageZilla – love the name – it hadn’t occurred to me that no one from EMC had ever made the cut. Admittedly, my “search method” for cool papers is idiosyncratic, but really, how is it that the major independent storage player, with a huge R&D budget, doesn’t have people visibly engaged with the big storage problems of the day?
Let’s start with the CTO
Naturally, the impetus for this comes from EMC founders. I’m more interested in what is going on with EMC research. I think I’ve heard three EMC CTOs speak and the defining characteristic is a single-minded focus on how wonderful it is that EMC has taken care of everything.
Now any good CTO should be able to sell customers and prospects on the technology vision of the company. Ideally, they embody that all-too-rare characteristic of “thought leadership.” That is, their vision of business, technology and cultural trends is so vivid and compelling that they convince deeply conservative IT execs to decide that not only is some change inevitable, it might actually be desirable.
A true CTO should maintain a 360 degree watch for new technologies, business trends and the impact of the various power factors – Moore’s law and disk areal density chief among them – and puts together the technology forecast of what the world will look like in 3-5 years. From that they push and prod engineering teams and (try) educate marketing and customers while picking up the vibes that might alter their vision. I’ve never had the sense that anyone at EMC tries to do that, let alone succeeds.
Quick, who is EMC’s CTO?
EMC’s latest CTO, Jeffrey M. Nick, came from IBM, where for years he toiled in the MVS group and later, the grid computing and on-demand initiatives. He’s been granted some 50 patents, became an IBM Fellow, and is clearly very smart.
But don’t take my word for it, check out the white paper Mr. Nick wrote. I know from his bio that he is actually well informed about grid computing. Yet hardly a paragraph goes by without assuring us that Invista, Rainfinity, Smarts, VMware and Documentum are there to solve our problems.
I’m fine with EMC flogging its stuff. Where they lose me is the lack of a vision, or goal, that EMC is aiming for. Yes, all this stuff is happening and yes we have all these products, but where is EMC investing its R&D dollars to create the products, services and architectures that customers will need in three years?
End of part I. Stay tuned as I explore EMCs R&D further.
Update: Somehow StorageMojo’s normally rigorous editorial progress broke down and a paragraph got left out. A fine old Chianti Classico Riserva may have been a contributing factor. I’ve added the paragraph back in above.
Update II: I added the note about NetApp.
Comments welcome, especially from EMC folks.
Update your link, I’ve moved.
Storagezilla,
That seemed unnecessarily short, so I sent Mark Twomey,, an EMC Senior Solutions Engineer based in Ireland, a note with the header: What’s the magic word?
So he sent me back two notes:
-The first with a one word reply: “Dork?”
-The second said:
“And as I put in my post, just sign the bloody NDA at least then you’ll
have a frame of reference to complain from. ;-p”
The kicker: the post I referenced isn’t on the new site. I couldn’t change the link if I wanted to.
Mark, I predict you have a great future ahead of you at EMC.
Robin
Hey Robin, So you refused to sign their NDA, which means you are still independent of their marketing organization. Good for you! The problem you have now is that they will not pay you to perform analyst duties for them without signing it. That’s not so good for you.
There must be a reason they pad their papers with non-subliminal adverts. Maybe it’s because it works. I hate to think that we (humans) are at the level, but sometimes you just have to wonder. Oh yes, unless I forget, buy EqualLogic products.
I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with on this topic.
Whoa, Netapp have always asked me to sign an NDA – can anyone tell me, is that good or bad? 🙂
Marc,
You are correct. I’m not getting a lot of love from EMC, except for the hottie in marcom. For all their bravado they can be such wimps, fearful of engaging with critics. What they don’t get is that I’d like to see them do well.
Maybe sending all their exec’s to Karl Rove’s “George W. Bush School of Leadership” wasn’t such a great investment.
Now-I-must-go-and-buy-many-EqualLogic-thingies. . . .
Chris,
They be hatin’ on you, man.
Or it could be that they treat analysts differently than they do IT consultants. Were you at the NYC analyst meeting? It was a good event and it improved my take on NetApp.
Robin
Three notes, I sent you three notes not two. The final one was sent 13 minutes after your “mother comment” and while I have no problem with you posting our exchange the fact that you didn’t post all of it is somewhat disappointing.
Looks like I’m just going to have to blog about it.
I’m excited to see what you come up with too, this will be a welcome review. You are always careful in your analysis (regardless of whether I agree or not). One thing I’d really like to read after a review of EMC’s R&D strategy, is your take on the storage industry. Is it becoming commoditized, leaving information management in it’s place, or will the storage industry stay relevant as just a provider of storage?
Robin,
It is pretty much just you. The rest of us (all two of us) in Data Mobility Group think your NDA position is, in a word, dumb, though we still love you anyway, and as you noted, the EMC Analyst Days event was well attended (would it be violating my NDA to disclose that EMC didn’t have enough chairs the first day, so many attendees had to sit on metal chairs that threatened to cause permanent disabilities?).
It strikes me as odd that you would rather go to a NetApp event where you are guaranteed not to hear anything but on-message, for-public-consumption marketing presentations than to the EMC event where it was at least possible that you might glean some information that you couldn’t get from reading the company’s web site.
Honestly, there was hardly anything revealed at EMC Analyst Days that would surprise anyone. I think EMC could email all the presentations directly to their competitors and it would have little to no adverse impact on EMC and be of little to no benefit to the competitors. There were a few things that EMC plans to announce at EMC World that they announced to the analysts, six weeks ahead of time, but I suppose they could have just relied on the standard “gentleman’s embargo” instead of requiring a signed NDA for that stuff.
However, there were a few factoids and opinions that came up in the Q & A and G & T (give and take) that the EMC folks might not have shared had they not had the NDAs in place.
It’s interesting that you decided to lump the NDA dig in with the dig about EMC PhDs (I don’t see any common theme other than it being take-a-swipe-at-EMC day). If you had attended the EMC Analyst Days, you could have participated in a quite candid discussion with Jeff Nick (he’d probably call it a grilling) that included, among other things, the issue of EMC’s visibility / mindshare / participation in the IT “thought-o-sphere” (I just made that word up because I couldn’t think of an actually good way to say what I meant). I have several thoughts about your comments on EMC’s t-o-s performance (I both agree and disagree), but this comment is already over-long, so I’ll save them for later.
BFF,
Walter
(I guess maybe we should ask people to sign an NDA before letting them read these “internal” Data Mobility Group debates — you think?)
another shrill commentary from the storage industry’s smuggest blogger. enjoy your chianti, robin. i’m off to StorageZilla’s blog.