IT Partnerships blanket the planet. 
They make up our industry.
They define how we work.
And define how we transact.
Influence our productivity.
Extend our reach.
Extend our relationships.
Jul 22
Admittedly, this blog has entered near dormancy over the last 6 months. During this time, I’ve been on a ‘temporary business-visa’ in Australia establishing life with my family, lodging (and waiting) for permanent residency, and in parallel laying groundwork to extend the global reach of my employer into the APAC region. 
Writing publicly about anything of permanent nature was not advised (due to unsaid risk in a country facing unreal immigration challenges). As of becoming a permanent resident last week, I can now publicly disclose permanent ambitions and start hammering through a million mini-milestones in the course of running a regional start-up.
About a month after beginning ‘aka the honeymoon period’, I realised starting a regional extension to the company was going to be less like a regular role and more like running a startup business.
It all started with a business plan. At the time it looked outstanding on paper, including ground intel, an EBIDTA budget, go-to-market services, strategic approach, and even a pro-forma revenue model. Now, the business plan has undergone a minor-organ transplant and some cosmetic surgery, taking on a regionally adapted identity and focus. A good business plan goes through constant change. If you don’t have one, you won’t take the time to examine your path. If you have one, expect it to evolve.
Another eureka of starting a services region far from the company base, is regionalisation is incredibly important. Not only having the proper business setup, local resources, in-region footprint, but also embracing cultural norms no matter how minor and not getting too wrapped up in your own national identity (although I do think hailing from Boston is a good thing). One of the funniest examples is a business partner mildly condemning my colloquial use of ‘reach out’ in business dialogue. Apparently it implies a southern evangelical undertone, which is going to unnerve Australians who are by majority agnostic or religiously indifferent. I liked his advice so much that I proposed some snake handling after a key account meeting- I’m not sure he knew if I was kidding but it was amusing watching his eyes grow large!
The best advice: keeping activity levels high yields results. This holds true on all fronts, ranging from finding clients, driving opportunities, engaging partners, attracting talent, and maintaining a focus through the chaos. In a market that’s growing and skirted through the GFC relatively unscathed, setting up a services company in a country with 5% unemployment, compounded by a skilled labour shortage and increasingly rigid immigration scheme, there are countless challenges and opportunities at hand. So long supply, hello demand.
Jun 05
For the last 20 years, power and space have been treated as endless commodities. We procure, rack and stack, run, and decom, growing the data centre infrastructure until the facilities department pulls the ‘out of power’ alarm, or the data centre manager forecasts space at a premium, and reactive measures take hold.
Enterprise data centres (say of 500 assets or more) usually don’t maintain an accurate inventory of what’s running inside and how much energy/power is being consumed. Scattered inventory of applications to host relationships, inaccurate inventory of equipment, and no earthly idea of power consumption is more the rule than the exception.
According to Connection Research, only 3.5% of CIO’s have responsibility and budget for the data centre power bill, 66% have NO visibility or responsibility, and the remainder have some visibility and some accountability (which isn’t saying much since this is a self-assessment scoring, usually biasing results to the favor of the assessed!).
Many ITIL advocates envisage cloud public/private architecture as the 3rd incarnation of ITIL, but seriously if basic inventory and asset management didn’t manifest in the last 10 years of ITIL adoption, I’m not sure it’s going to happen now when the pace of data centre virtualisation/consolidation is accelerating. If people power couldn’t keep pace with physical inventory there’s not a hope in the hell of asset management it will keep up with virtualized infrastructure….
If you look at a non-innovative data centre, you might be looking at over 1000 watts per server, while the present day opportunity to virtualise and consolidate could collapse an entire data centre into a score of high-density racks of x86 infrastructure and an astounding 45-60 kW/rack power draw nearly demanding water cooling, or high-velocity air-cooling techniques only found in containers or psueudo-containers.
All of a sudden, space (and it’s cooling design) and power are crucial considerations as data centre footprints have an opportunity to shrink in the face of steady growth. As this happens, application to virtual asset inventory will become more crucial, and the physical inventory itself may become less relevant as non-virtualised infrastructures diminish. Logical management, metering, and measurement of the virtual infrastructure (still in it’s infancy) articulating power draw per application, and virtual compute/storage run-time consumption will then be the true measure between private and public infrastructure. But then, the graph above underscores the primitive nature of our ways in the midst of accelerating changes to the distributed computing landscape.
Feb 20
One of the more perplexing aspects of spending time in Sydney & Melbourne as of late is the non-stop rivalry between the cities. Coming from Boston (and rival NYC), this originally seemed like old news (big city, smaller city, sports teams, etc.). But digging in, this is more than a sports-team rivalry, something brewing in the fabric of each city culture.
At first, it’s subtle commentary from people on both sides. Nonchalant jabs to the groin, “I detest Melbourne”, “I’d never live in Sydney”. While I really don’t mind either way, it’s amazing when you see both cities are brilliant in comparison to let’s say, MOST port cities in the rest of the world.
So while my taste of both places is fresh and not-yet tainted by experiential bias, here is a collection of naïve first impressions.
Feb 15
In planning this next stage of the career, one of the questions I tabled to all the top business developers I could meet was ‘what do you use to manage your business contacts and networks’?
The responses varied from whiteboards, to weekly planners, to moleskins, to prodigious use of www.linkedin.com, all with their strengths and limits for keeping track of a rapidly expanding network of contacts and relationships.
But the problem I’m grappling with is that your average notebook requires consistency and ‘reviews’, yet ultimately will be mothballed when spaces are used up. For pages turned, you have ‘out of sight, out of mind’ issues, and with sales databases (such as www.salesforce.com) you have powerful relational database schemes, but again the tendency for information to become entered, catalogued, and ultimately forgotten unless searched upon.
Linkedin is incredibly powerful and helps you visualize network connections, search in and out of network, and view the ‘degrees of separation’ between you and key contacts, yet involves it’s own gamut of online eqituette, and ultimately leaves your network wide open to those in your network. Not always what you want or need…
So, as part-experiment, part-need, I’ve started using mind-mapping software (mindjet’s mind manager for mac since the XP version is more costly and my mac is better for this) to build and visualize the network of people, relationships, and contacts currently in the works. It was tough coughing up the funds and departing from the open source equivalent Freemind, but the transition has been worthwhile already. Some interesting results that you won’t find elsewhere:
- Ability to visualize networks and intra-
network relationships - Add tasks with date reminders to contacts
- Single view of all network contacts, due dates, action items
- Dynamically scale, add, delete, link, unlink relationships
- Highlight high-priority contacts and activities
- Keep track of contacts that require follow up weeks/months down the path
- Export data to other standard formats (office, flat files, etc.)
So far so good, and eventually this may cost-justify a 27″ imac to manage the overall network in a large screen view!
