Blogs

It’s always fascinating to see how the truly big vendor events play out – and of course when it comes to Dell, “big” applies to both the vendor and the event. As such, DTW can be either or both a reflection and/or driver of the IT world.

Clearly, we won’t be talking about any of the actual news ahead of time, and just as clearly the tenor of the event cannot be determined today, but we can speculate, wonder and point out things we’d like to find out. That’s just what I asked my colleagues Scott Sinclair and Mike Leone to do – and you can see what they had to say in this short video. By way of a spoiler (although, perhaps, not really!?), they were not much focused on individual product introductions, important as those are within their own IT sub-ecosystems.

IBM’s Think 2019 event was made to do just that – make you think. Unlike many vendors, whose events can be like giant market stalls, Think was more more like a visit to your old college; and that's  not a pejorative, it’s a compliment.

Sure, it could get a tad calculated or even over-earnest at times, but overall it was a refreshing take – stopping and thinking...though in San Francisco last week it was advisable to undertake your contemplations inside the Moscone Center, as it poured with rain on the main mid-week days! Weather aside, the move from Vegas to San Francisco was a good one.

The positive changes at NetApp over the last few years have been impressive and hard to ignore. One can argue about what is chicken and what is egg in terms of strategy and execution, but the bottom-line results speak for themselves. 

On a recent visit to the UK, I had time to pop in to NetApp's Uxbridge headquarters and chat through the topic of 'change' with John Rollason, NetApp's European marketing lead. The interview is pretty much unedited, but broken into two logical parts: