10 Reasons NOT to attend Varrow Madness

Brandon Watson at Varrow was scratching his head wondering why an IT person wouldn't come to Varrow Madness and he came up with 10 good reasons not to attend.  Got any more?

Varrow Madness agenda: http://madness.varrow.com/#

10 Reasons NOT to Attend Varrow Madness:

1) Technology and fun should not be mixed.

2) This Cloud thing won’t catch on.

3) What could I possibly learn from 8 VCPs, 5 vExperts, a VCDX, storage and network specialists, 3 Industry CEOs, and 500 of my peers?

4) Mainframes Rule!

5) Why do I need labs when I can just try new things in my production environment?

6) Free education is overrated.

7) I am worried that my IBM rep will find out.

8) My arm is caught in the server rack (Please Help!)

9) I’ll just look for the highlights on YouTube.

10) I heard the Varrow CEO raps.

Not all EMC Signature Partners are Created Equal

One of my Acct Managers was at a customer site this week and an interesting discussion came up that is pertinent to all of our customers and prospective customers.  The customer reached out to him because they are evaluating all their vendor relationships and they are making sure they have the right partners aligned to the right solutions.  Very healthy exercise.  We saw this as a great opportunity to demonstrate how we can help in other areas where we are not working with them today.

When we went through how his discussion went, he mentioned that he told the IT Director that we were the only EMC Signature Partner based in the Carolinas - "Signature" is the highest tier of partner in the EMC partner ecosystem.  I had to tell him that we may still be the only one, but that will likely change very quickly if it hasn't already.

You might think Varrow is no longer the only Signature Partner because other partners have made the necessary exhaustive investments in engineering talent needed to gain this status or have sold a lot of EMC solutions and have earned it. 

The reality is that EMC has lowered the bar for partners to achieve Signature status; they have done so by eliminating the need to invest in services engineers and pass multiple difficult design and implementation tests in order to become Signature.  This was always the barrier to entry for many partners - they could get the sales and presales certs, but the services certs required a level of commitment and investment that most were unwilling to make. 

Now, any EMC partner can become Signature by passing a few sales and presales tests.

So, if you are determining who will be your trusted adviser on EMC and someone tells you they are an EMC Signature Partner, be sure to ask if they are capable of delivering the solution they are proposing. 

Why we chose EMC

We have been leveraging videos with the sales folks quite a bit to stay crisp on our product knowledge and messaging.  We focus on differentiation, making sure that what we are saying about our company or the products we sell is not an "insert vendor name here" type of message.  To date, the reps have done a "Why Varrow?" video and a "Why UCS?" video.  If you'd like to see some of the winners of past video contests, go to: http://www.varrow.com/about/people/ 

Although it is part of my job to torture the sales reps by making them do these types of things, I thought it would only be fair if I participated as well and so I did a medium-dive discussion on EMC.  It is an overview of EMC in the context of how Varrow came to the conclusion to represent EMC in the marketplace 4 years ago.  I start by talking about EMC the company, and then go through much of the product portfolio and discuss some of the key differentiating aspects of each technology.  It is a little long, but EMC's strategy and portfolio is broad, so I wanted to make sure I touched on the high points across most of what we represent from EMC.  Anyways, here it is:


Why we chose EMC from AJ Ragosta on Vimeo.

Action Item to Our Customers and Partners

Alright, the dust has officially settled on 2010.  We started our planning sessions with the teams for 2011 and the wheels keep on turning.  2010 was an amazing year for Varrow.  We brought on board many ridiculously talented and passionate people over the course of the year; some of the best engineering, sales and operations people around, who also contribute in a positive way to the Varrow culture - one where people work hard, play hard, care about each other, and do whatever it takes to create a unique experience for our customers. 

Our focus remains the second biggest reason for our success (the first being our people).  As our customers and partners invest more in us, we invest that money back into adding more expertise and delivering more capabilities and offerings around EMC, Cisco data center, and VMware.  In 2011, we will be announcing some new service-oriented offerings for our customers that will continue to enhance their experience with Varrow.

Overall, Varrow grew revenue 89% in 2010 over 2009.  Thank you to all of our customers and partners whose confidence in Varrow is what enabled us to achieve such growth. 

But, alas, it is a new year and the past is the past.  The responsibility is upon us again in 2011 to not only meet the demands of our customers and partners, not only preserve the quality of the Varrow experience, but improve upon it.  So, if you are a customer or partner reading this, please, the next time you are sitting down with one of your Varrow folks or if you want to just send me an email, either way, speak up.  Let us know what else we can do to really separate the Varrow experience from the usual.

Fun w/ VCE

Life is too short to take yourself too seriously. "Integrity" and "excellence" are two words that come to mind when I think of the people I work with at Varrow, but "fun" is definitely another one.

If you look at it on paper, there never really is time to have fun at work. You can do a cost/benefit analysis and justify not having fun every time. "Well the return on "fun" simply does not justify the investment. Now, where are those TPC reports?"

The team at Varrow is the hardest working group of people I know, but some folks got together earlier this week and made the investment in fun. Here is what came out of it:

People Power

I just found out yesterday that the company I work for - Varrow - was named EMC's Commercial Partner of the Year for the 2nd year in a row.  2200 companies are eligible for the award.  Unbelievable.  Varrow has grown 875% over the last few years, making it one of the fastest growing companies in the country - all in the face of arguably one of the most challenging economic periods in US history.  Humbling.

What is the trick?  How does a company enter a market where there are literally thousands of companies doing the same thing and realize this kind of success?

The simple answer: the people.  That may sound hokey or cheesy or something, but it's true.  People are the most important asset any company has...products, strategies, relationships, efficiencies - these things are all conceived, created, and managed by people. 

Knowing this, the question then becomes how much time do we spend on recruiting?  Do we treat finding the next great person the same way we treat working on a big customer project?  How much time and money are we willing to spend to bring on the next great person?  How much to keep the great people we have?  How much thought do we give to the culture within our organization and its contribution to the overall satisfaction and fulfillment of these great people? 

We've got an unbelievable group of people at Varrow...find below some photos of a handful of our people; these were from a team zipline thing we did, as well as the all-hands company meeting earlier this week.  We do the all-hands meeting every quarter at Natty Greene's in Greensboro.  It gives the management team an opportunity to review the previous quarter's results, give some insight into future direction, and recognize our great people for the work they've done.  Most importantly though, it's an opportunity to get together as a team.

The presentation of the ugly orange blazer is a new "Tradition like no other" that we started this past quarter for the top rep of the quarter.  Nice work Mark!

vBlock - Are customers buying?

Yes.  In fact, we just got signed documents for an order on one today.  This is a powerful solution and now with UIM v.2, the promise to our customers to be able to leverage this "private cloud" as an offering where they can provide compute, network and storage as a service to their internal customers is fast-becoming a reality.

The VCE initiative (VMware, Cisco, EMC) is the real deal and has caused quite a stir in the market.  The battle lines are being drawn.  Various solution "stacks" are being created.  You see HP trying to create their stack with 3Com, 3Par, etc. (note: HP likes to buy companies that have the number "3" in them - is Level 3 next? :), you see Oracle trying to acquire their stack with Sun servers and storage, and you have IBM creating a stack of sorts by playing nice with Juniper and selling rebranded NetApp and a hodge podge of other storage arrays.  Not sure what Dell is doing, but that is another blog.

What I like about the VCE (aka "vBlock") solution:

1) It's comprised of technology-focused companies - these companies are not looking to become consulting companies, or outsourcing companies.  They aren't abandoning hardware for SW & Services.  Each player is focused on its technology and puts its R&D into the technology represented in the vBlock stack.

2) it's open - one of the biggest complaints I hear from Oracle customers is they feel that they are locked into their SW and really have little-to-no leverage in negotiating price...why add hardware to this angst by buying Exadata (Oracle's version of vBlock, but only supports Oracle stuff)

3) The integration is real, not marketing - EMC PowerPath V/E provides VMware with multi-pathing capabilities it doesn't offer on it's own, the Cisco Nexus 1000v is a virtual switch that doesn't exist without VMware, EMC storage looks all the way up into the VM's in VMware and vice-versa, and UIM is the coup de grace in terms of integration across the various components of the vBlock. 

4) One line of support -- the ding on best-of-breed has always been that there is not one line of accountability.  VCE has done away with this by coming together and offering one phone line with one point of accountability for customer support across all components in the vBlock

Varrow is one of the few vBlock certified partners in the world and we are enjoying helping our customers build these data centers of the future one vBlock at a time.