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.

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:

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.