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Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

-       Mending Wall, Robert Frost

Throughout history, there have been many famous walls and armed fortifications.  Walls represent a form of structure that provide security and demarcate national or local boundaries.

Over time, though, all walls fall.

Walls do not fall because they were poorly constructed or do not fulfill their intended missions.   Walls drop because of failures of imagination, because the builders simply could not anticipate or prepare for a transformation.  Walls can also be leaped by transformations. Henry Ford’s assembly line changed the car industry forever.  In computing, the PC, and now the iPad, leapfrogged their predecessors.

The biggest transformation in information technology today is how information is produced, managed, and consumed.  Sometimes people refer to this trend as “mobile, social and cloud.”   The traditional components of the IT stack (a.k.a. hardware and software) are moving into a maelstrom, pulling with them all of us who produce or consume IT.

Following this profound change in the computing world, networking is also transforming.  Client-server is giving way to cloud — a fluid, on-demand model of computing that transcends the enterprise IT model of the past few decades – and the operations and economics of the network must yield as well.   What is cloud if not a new approach to IT operations and economics?

For the first time in a long time, we on the infrastructure side must shift our perspective in a big way.   If you ask an Enterprise CIO, “in 10 years, how much of your infrastructure will be in your own data center run by your badged people?” what do you think they will say?  I have not checked with Gallup folks, but am willing to wager this number will be lower by on the order of 50%.

The network is the barrier to cloud, the keystone in the virtualization “trifecta.”  The server and the storage components gained the benefits of virtualization, but the network is the missing variable that completes the equation.

Network-wise, very little needed to change in the past two decades, the client-server era; thus networks have been relatively static.  Networks did what they were supposed to do.  Then came server virtualization.  Virtualization changed everything.

Virtualization liberated applications from being bound to physical servers, creating a new paradigm – workload mobility. This transformed the architecture and economics of compute.

Now the network is morphing, driving the need for a new software network “above the hardware.”  The software network creates a new operational and economic model to support cloud.  It lives to serve business velocity and operational efficiency.

The shift starts in the data center.   Hypervisors, the “Archimedes lever” of compute, are the focal point for data center networking — not just for computing capacity.  The new edge of the data center network is being pulled into the server, through a virtual switch.  Hence the physical data center network becomes a “pool of capacity” that is managed by software and not just a series of connected network islands.

These pools need to be flexible and programmable to support the change in the computing model.  And there is only one clear and present way to do this: the network needs to emulate the virtualization model of compute.

The network has never been more important:  it is the engine for communications and commerce. The sheer growth of the Internet, the power of enterprise, service provider and consumer networks have changed everything.

And network hardware will continue to play a critical role for decades to come.  It is a highway that keeps getting faster and performs more flawlessly in its core mission: packet forwarding.   The operational state of the data center network – the one that is mostly managed by people – is what is changing.  Continuing to chain the operations and policies to hardware is the technical and ideological wall that needs to come down, just as organizational boundaries in the data center are coming down.

As you can see from Nicira’s customers, market leaders who joined our launch today, these barriers are coming down.  Nicira sprints to market leaders who are transforming their businesses that are moving to the network above the hardware, reinventing the operations and economics of their data centers.

1. Declare (loudly) that the new product requires a new marketing approach (rather than leverage the method that already works well for you).
2. Gather a team of top marketing talent – including folks from completely different areas   – for a 2 hour brainstorming meeting.  Bring coffee and bagels for energy.
3. After 2 hours of passionate dialogue and debate, leave the meeting more confused and frustrated than you started, having just traveled the same path again and again (like Frodo and Sam finding their way into Mordor in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring).
4. Call in the cavalry: a top-level positioning professional (my favorite is Geoffrey Moore) to work with the team for 2-3 sessions
5. Come to a collaborative position that smacks of verisimilitude when you leave the room and gives you night sweats later that evening .

Facing a creative block, what is a marketing professional to do?  My approach is jump onto my road bike to flush my mind and take a fresh crack at a challenge.  The allure of an oxygen deficit at the top of a 1500-foot climb usually does the trick; suddenly, I realize my error.  All of my prior experience as a marketer held me back, chaining my psyche to the rock of an unfinished assignment.  Sound familiar ?

Let me back up.  Classically trained product marketers are suckers for the marketing mix, known colloquially as the 4Ps: product, place, price, and promotion.  Indeed, some of the greatest teachers and practitioners of the marketing arts — including Ted Leavitt, Bill Davidow, Jack Trout & Al Ries, and about 100,000 MBAs — built empires on the back of this framework, originally conceived in the 1960s.   The key premise behind the 4Ps strategic marketing framework is that a good product is the sine qua non: get that part right, tune the pricing and channel strategy, and execute the right advertising, PR, and communications levers, and market dominance is just a hop, skip and a jump away.  Think Mad Men:  a hot car (Camaro), gaming platform (Wii), or phone (Droid) are the magic clay for a marketer to mold.

For tech marketers, in particular, the world is flat (thanks Tom Friedman) and the playing field tougher. In the overheated world of Internet communications, getting through the message pollution, to most buyers of business-to-consumer or business-to-business products and services is daunting.

So I would like to offer a new marketing mix: the 5 Ys.

• Yup:  The customer instantly acknowledges the solution addresses their problem
• Yes:  I like the answer.  It will do the trick.
• Yikes:  I have to deal with the situation now.
• You:  You can help me.  I believe in you.
• Yao!:  It is big: senior management wants to invest.

Yup is like the line in Jerry McGuire, “you had me at hello.”  For Apple, it was the iPod.  Sometimes, getting to yup takes time.  The faster you do it, the faster you win.

Yes turns awareness into consideration, known these days fondly as “now that is why I am talking about!”  For conferencing it was Webex.  Millions of people see it as the way to instantly meet and interact with tens of millions of others.   It took a while to get started.  Now it’s indispensable.

Yikes is about speed – speed to inquire, speed to purchase.  The Prius was an interesting and odd-looking car, until gas hit $4 gallon.  Necessity is the mother of a closed deal

You is akin to Robert DeNiro’s line in Analyze This: “You, you are very good.”    You is recognition from the buyer that the seller is the THE company  from which to buy.  Customers can smell the right company.  They know it immediately (and if your company does not have it, you cannot fake it).  It’s who they want to be associated with.

Yao: this is very big. For several years, Yao Ming was the biggest basketball story in the world (I have a picture standing next to the man at the 2008 All Star game: he is a mountain).   The difference between a bug fix and changing the world is the Yao factor.

While you can always attend an executive education session at Stanford or Kellogg Schools of Business, you can also calibrate your marketing program against 5 short words that begin with Y.    Marketers: ignore them at your peril.

Facebook fatigue?

Email ennui?

Check-in cough?

Here is my take on how to make it better.  Delivered this summer @ Thinking Digital 11 in Newcastle, UK.

1. The business climate appears to be moving back to normal

2. There is strong focus on reducing power consumption across the economy in light of the nuclear power plants that are now offline

3.  The cover of Nikkei Communications practically screamed something we are talking about every day now: “Software-Defined Network”

If anyone thinks this is a fad (or soon will be a fade), they need to mark the works of Akira Arima, President of NTT Communications.  Quoted in this same issues of Nikkei Communications, he stated that NTT will have a network virtualization service up and running by June.  That is a very aggressive timeline for one of the largest and most respected Telcos in the world.  NTT intends to lead, not follow.

覆水盆に帰らず。(translation: spilled water will not return to the tray)

Interesting, the three trends are actually related.  In dozens of meeting with Japanese business and technology executives last week, I began to understand that Japan is following a new script in rebuilding their economy.   Why is this happening in Japan?  One word: necessity. After the oil shocks on the early 1970s, Japan transformed its economy into new consumer electronics and service industries with lower energy-dependency.  In the process, there was an enormous focus on productivity and innovation.  Faced with similar economic and energy shocks caused by the earthquake and a decade of slow growth, it is clear Japan is reinventing its economy again.

The promise of cloud computing, powered by network virtualization, will be the new model in Japan, aligning with a new productivity model. These trends have clear implications for the IT industry: business velocity, operational efficiency and innovation are the order of the day.  What is not on the docket is simply layering another level of work arounds to the networking industry’s protocol “Tower Of Babel.”

Software Defined Networking, with its promise of network automation and massive scale, will shift power back from the vendors to the people who run networks.  In addition, software networks, unlike their hardware counterparts, will not look or operate the same way.  They will be simpler, more programmable and deliver new services, many of which we can only imagine today.   It will not happen overnight, but flash forward 5-10 years, and you can see it will be the norm.

There is some tangibly different about the past few weeks.

The networking industry is alive with the promise of network virtualization, whether it falls in the buzz categories of OpenFlow or Software-Defined Networking.  This energy was amplified and focused during the recent Open Networking Summit where my colleague Martin Casado provided a great overview of the history of modern software-defined networking from its humble roots in OpenFlow (which he fathers, as well).

But if this buzz is the symptom, the root cause is something more profound — the promise of cloud computing.  Cloud computing is not simply being driven by utility computing models, it is being driven by business velocity and globalization.   It is about a series of promises we have been waiting for:

-       The promise to change the playing field for large and small businesses alike.

-       The promise of the fast conquering the slow.

-       The promise of innovation leapfrogging the moat of incumbency and taking down the castle (that was the thesis of my earlier blog, The Five Deadly Sins of Incumbency).

My good friend Tom Friedman explores these issues and what it means for our society and business in his recent column, One Country, Two Revolutions.  What I told Tom was that “anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour.” This is speeding up everything — innovation, product cycles and competition.”

Cloud computing is not just an over-hyped flavor-of-the-day.  Since IT is business technology (no business functions today without it), using it wisely can result in competitive advantage.  Ask Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff (also quoted in Tom’s article). The Cloud is a paradigm shift.  Master or miss it at your peril.

This brings me, someone circuitously, to my main point, the promise of business velocity.   When a business gets the right business model, moving quickly on it can yield great advantages: the fast usually eats the slow.  Growing up, my favorite cartoon was The Roadrunner.  Each week, Wile E. Coyote will array an impressive set of technology against the Roadrunner.  Master plans, contraptions and precise timing and patience were always Wile’s trademark move.  But he always missed catching the Roadrunner.

Why?

Because the Roadrunner always ran past him before Wile or any his clearly deadly machines could spring the trap.

Businesses today want the velocity of the Roadrunner tied to the mechanized (or digitized) wonders of Wile E. Coyote.  The inefficiencies of IT assets a la Nicholas Carr (The Big Switch)  will drive the argument for the cloud.  But the winners, the really big winners, will be the fast, those who build cloud or cloud-enabled businesses to make or capture markets before others.  The success of the original iPod was not only the elegant and simple interface to enjoying your music, it included the cloud service called iTunes that made it safe for the music industry to retail songs one at a time, creating a long-tail industry of vast proportions.  It gave Apple the lead on both the device and the service.

And let me make my final point.  There is a sense of how the cloud business model will change the competitive dynamic in industries.  Decades after reading Robert Pirsig great book, I wonder what he would say about the cloud?

Pirsig likely would say to truly experience the benefits of cloud computing, one most both embrace and apply it as it best fits the requirements of a specific business.  I would editorialize, businesses must gain the benefits of the cloud first hand, tailoring it to their business models, not the business models of an IT outsourcer. Your completely in contact with it all.

And through the years, maybe I even knew, if just a little, that “removing the cycle frame” was a subtle reference to speed of software unlocked from the boundaries of hardware.

Beep beep!

After many, many months of talking to the leaders of and investors in Nicira, I had my Billy Crystal moment. The satori about Nicira finally hit, just a few weeks ago, at 3:27 am, like an earthquake.  I knew, I just knew, I had to pass on a carefully planned — and, perhaps, well-deserved — mid-career break faster than the iPhone 4GS will be pulled off the shelf at the Apple Store this Friday.

Why The Network Will Be Virtualized

One of Nicira’s (and my own) guiding values is to only talk about your product and its benefits when your customers are ready to do so — and in a big way.  So this blog entry is not a product launch.  What I can tell you, however, having had my hand in a few networking start-ups and leaders, is what we are working on at Nicira is so different from everything that occurred in the past 30 years, I am still trying to get my head around it. And our customers and partners are both true leaders as well as household names in the business and technology worlds.  Can you say quantum shift?

Virtualization and the cloud is the most profound change in information technology since client-server and the web overtook mainframes and mini computers.  We believe the full promise of virtualization and the cloud can only be fully realized when the network enables rather than hinders this movement.  That is why it needs to be virtualized.

Oh, by the way, OpenFlow is a really small part of the story.  If people think the big shift in networking is simply about OpenFlow, well, they don’t get it.

Nicira’s Excellent Adventure

You build products either because you love technology or what it does for people.  You join a company because the people there either amaze or inspire you.  So when Steve Mullaney, Martin Casado and the gang in Palo Alto asked me to join their excellent adventure, how could I say no? Steve is a deeply experienced and wicked wise networking executive who I have known on-and-off for all of my years in the Valley.  I did not know Martin prior to Nicira, but I am now convinced he is the Ray Ozzie of networking.  The software he and the team are driving will change everything.

This is something that has to happen.  Now I get to be part of a great team that will bring virtualization to the network in ways few can imagine.  As Mark Twain wrote in The Turning Point of My Life: “A person may PLAN as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician CIRCUMSTANCE steps in and takes the matter off his hands.”

“The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.”  - Mark Twain

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen seminal work on how market leaders lose their way, we are exposed to how winning business strategies, over time, fail, unless company leaders can engage in some form of creative destruction, Schumpeter-style.  Indeed, in my last blog, I shared where BMW fell down on several counts and mortally wounded our decade-old relationship. While there are clear and valuable equities to product and service relationships which must endure — value, quality, relationship, performance, etc.– they are increasingly tested at a rapid clip in the hyper-connected economy.

At the end of the day, companies and products are composed of people. And people fail.  What makes people successful frequently does not keep us there – it is what makes us susceptible to the weakness of incumbency.  No relationship prospers when one party takes it for granted.  Or as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall: “…  a relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

So if you are manager of a winning product or service, how do you survive the Innovator’s Dilemma?  The first step, I believe, is to be constantly vigilant of the “five deadly sins of incumbency.”

Sin 1: Manifest Destiny.  This is the market leaders’ sense of entitlement.   Frequently this shows up when a company believes it’s their birthright to maintain disproportionate market share even though they have not innovated or created value in years. Until recently, the U.S. automobile manufacturers belief their customers would simply buy what they sold.  Perhaps this is true if your customers 1. Needed a pick up truck or 2. Had an AARP card. The Big Three: ignored fuel efficiency during the 1970s oil embargoes (score one for team Japan), product quality in the 1980s and 1990s (score two for team Japan), great driving experience in 1990s through 2000s (score – team Germany),and all that plus flat to declining prices in the past 10 years (score team Korea).

Sin 2:  (Lack of) Selfish Inspection.   A good friend of mine once attributed his company’s long-standing success to 3 simple words: “we suck less.”  The discipline to look at your market, products and people with a cold eye is the ABSOLUTE responsibility of management, which is rarely practiced with any rigor (especially when one lives in the world of manifest destiny). Management almost never looks at the metrics and market trends that should make them squirm, tending toward the temporal observations and gauges that allow for preservation or acceleration of the status quo.  Imagine a dictator’s management meeting during the recent Arab Spring: “Oil revenues and foreign aid in place, check; army in place and well paid, check; radicals rounded up, check; cheap food distributed by government, check.  Hopes and aspirations of our people met, huh?  Let’s move on.”  Ask IBM about what 1970s and 1980s management thought of the PC? What did the PC manufacturers think about the iPad 5 years ago?  Who at the PC divisions of Lenovo, Acer, Dell, HP, Sony, etc., lost a bonus the year the iPad was introduced?

Sin 3: Soft Collaboration (vs. Hard Direction) The growing trend in management theory is ubiquitous collaboration (disclaimer: I have spent years pushing collaboration technology). Incumbents with multiple strong businesses are constantly at risk of lacking the will to subjugate one division’s business model in act of disruptive creation.  Sony’s inability to create something like an iPod – even though they owned the electronics, radio and film assets, and consumer distribution to be a natural leader — stemmed from a senior executive lapse in 1. seeing how to bring the world of Napster, Diamond Multimedia and the Internet were changing how music consumption (selfish inspection), and 2. lack of executive will to force different divisions to work together.

Sin 4:  Weak Envy & Tentative Assault.  Even when strong companies can recognize and organize for business model change, frequently they hold back in execution, either because of uncertainty or channel conflict concerns.  After 8 years tip-toeing through the tulips of the music downloading business, the world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart exited the MP3 music business.  Although I don’t shop at Wal-Mart, about a hundred million people around the could easily prove me wrong.  So it’s likely they could have made a run in the music business if they activated their base.  If you are going to take on Apple, Amazon and the other heavyweights, be ready to rumble. Never forget the famous words of Junior Soprano to Tony early in season one when they are in the middle of a power struggle.  ”Next time you come to see me, come heavy, or not at all.”

Sin 5: Misguided Overreach.  Companies and countries fail when they reach into territories where they either don’t belong or are not willing to commit their resources to win in the long-term.   HP’s recent dalliance with Palm stands out as a great example.  HP knows they need to move into the post-PC era, but did they: a. pick the right way to do it? and b. retreat at the beginning of the battle?  Contrast this with their arch nemesis Oracle which has proven the model of rapid expansion through acquisition, integration and scale, and ruthless execution, making them the alpha gorilla of enterprise software.  Many of my neighbors are former PeopleSofties who gave way to the Oracle siege engines over time.  Ambition is not a crime.  Smart ambition and ruthless focus/execution is the issue.

Your customer relationships and brand are the moats competitors need to cross in any competitive market.  However, make sure someone has not moved the castle.  In today’s economy, all advantages are perishable, time-allocated assets.  You don’t want the 5 sins of incumbency transposing you from the secure position inside the castle to the exile on the road out-of-town.

“Achilles is in your alleyway
He don’t want me here
He does brag
He’s pointing to the sky
And he’s hungry, like a man in drag
How come you get someone like him to be your guard ?”

- Bob Dylan, Temporary Like Achilles

After the repairs were completed, I was shocked to learn that there would be no reimbursement or support of any kind from BMW.  I wrote and called the President of BMW North America, and was told by his staff there was nothing BMW of North America could do, as I already decided to proceed to replace the transmission.  In a Kafkaesque moment, I realized that following the advice of BMW’s trained and authorized representatives was a bad idea.  The front line guys were wrong.

This seemed out of context with how BMW positions its own brand.  According to a North American Marketing Executive:  “…BMW does not like to have any products in the maturity or decline stage of the product life cycle. “If a product is declining, we would prefer to withdraw it from the market, as opposed to having a strategy for dealing with the declining product. We’re kind of a progressive, go get ‘em company, and we don’t think it does our brand image any good to have any declining products out there.”

Other than real estate, automobiles are usually the second most expensive purchase most consumers make.  Moreover, the represent a transaction that is part practical need (transportation) and part personal statement (how people see themselves).  Moreover, automobile manufacturers stress “lifetime relationships.”  BMW, here is your wake-up call:

• You sell expensive luxury cars with faulty parts (what transmission goes at 55,000 miles, the equivalent of $1000/mile driven, I wonder).  My prior BMW had 125K miles with no transmission issues
• You made their dealers look like fools.  In addition to charging me an arm and a leg to change the transmission, you were completely off message with the kool aid they were pouring.  Moreover, I got a used part (rebuilt)
• You are losing a customer for life.  Load that in the lifetime value model.  Expect additional negatives from my friends and family.

This represents the ultimate arrogance of incumbency (in a future blog, I will share the “seven deadly sins of incumbency”).  The worst part is BMW cracked open the door for a challenger brand, a nightmare event in the marketing game.  In my case, it was Audi, a choice I am very happy with.  Challenger brands like Audi:

• Study the market position of incumbents
• Identify and exploit gaps in the whole product strategy (price, features, experience, service)
• Innovate one or more steps past the incumbent
• Deliver value
• Just try harder.

Incumbents almost always seem susceptible to good challenger brands, but it usually takes a poor customer experience to open the door.   It took me decades of working before I could afford my first BMW.  So it was an emotional decision to bid BMW adieu for future purchases.

But I am sanguine about Audi’s prospects and happily made the buying decision after reading an interview with their Chairman Rupert Stadler.  As he told CAR magazine

“You can never stop or be satisfied as an entrepreneur unless you innovate. We have given ourselves really ambitious targets for our 2015 strategy – but that’s good. You have to set yourself ambitious targets for your future – because then you really push your organisation.  Look at what we’ve done in past few years: Audi has really done a great job in improving its image, increasing its prestige and growing the product portfolio. And this was a big stimulation for our dealer body, because we invested in new products and they saw them before the public did. Dealers said to me: ‘If this is true, then I will invest in this brand.”

If anything goes wrong with my new A5, I hope and pray I will not get a runaround from the dealer and the manufacturer.

In his seminal work, Joyce exposures us to the inner dialogue of his ever-present doppelgänger, Stephen Dedalus, the anti-hero and autobiographical narrator of much of his canon.  The infamous opening of the Proteus chapter is Joyce’s plunge into the inner dialogue of the artist as a young man — the soul of his literary power, green, unvarnished and somewhat dizzying.  For decades, this interior monologue was considered either the seeding of pure literary genius or the adolescent cry of a wannabe writer in early 20th century Ireland.  In either case it provided the mental feedstock for generations of wordsmiths, including my own humbling attempts at the scribbling trade.

Today, at one of many intersections of my career, I am introducing a new blog that reflects — perhaps naively, like the young Stephen Dedalus — some thoughts on the worlds of technology and marketing, spheres within which I make my way.  My goal is to share a few reflections on the “signatures of all things.”  Hence some of the postings will be random commentary and rarely a direct connection to any form of actual employment (i.e., marketing guy writing thinly-veiled blog to advance his company’s position).  If I am talking about my job, you will know it.

Increasingly in our hyper-connected reality, relationships among people, products and companies are actually becoming surreal, the “duh” Homer Simpson moment we experience multiple times a day.  When Tom Friedman introduced us to the concept of the “flat” world, he focused on the speed and interconnected of people, societies, commerce and ideas.  This very speed, however, firmly underscores the potential to either accelerate or rapidly fray the relationships among this quartet.  And at the end of the day, to me, at least, relationships are the most important element of our lives.  Beyond the very basic human needs, commerce thrives on relationships (although the reverse can be true, as well).

Any why the title ineluctable modality?   According to our friends at Merriam Webster, ineluctable means “not to be avoided, changed, or resisted.” And modality means “the quality or state of being.”  Said simply, reality, like your right hand, held directly in front of your face.  It’s about finding the inevitable reality which, I noted, is frequently masked in the jargon-stained commentary we swim in each day.

So, enough high-minded introspection  As entertainers have commenced throughout the ages, now on with the show.