* Posts by SeanMMasters

13 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2015

The great Dell EMC storage slimdown: Giant to trim off product bloat

SeanMMasters

Re: Eh?

Or they integrate to (1) software defined all-Flash server nodes that autoscale as nodes are added, (2) software defined storage that autoscales as storage nodes of any type (in the DellEMC portfolio) are added, or (3) some other option.

Disparate products can be integrated.

VMware-on-AWS is live, and Virtzilla is now a proper SaaS player

SeanMMasters

Re: Why "4 hosts to build a cluster"?

+1

See:

https://cormachogan.com/2016/04/28/expanding-vsan-2-node-3-node-4-node-configuration-considerations/

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/10/24/4-minimum-number-hosts-vsan-ask/

SeanMMasters

Re: All well and good but

"Microsoft already went ahead of Amazon in annual cloud revenue run rate in the last quarter so they already are 'King'"

The devil is in the details, as Microsoft's "cloud" revenue falls under it's "Intelligent Cloud" segment which sells significantly more product lines than just Azure services, many of which have nothing to do with XaaS or really anyone's definition of "cloud".

For reference, the Intelligent Cloud segment includes: "Server products and cloud services, including Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related CALs, and Azure; (also) Enterprise Services, including Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services." https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/segment-information.aspx

Desperate VCs are pretty much just throwing cash at Rubrik now

SeanMMasters

Cost of business

Chris,

I might consider shifting some assumptions. While the QZ article isny entirely off, it may be leaving out signing bonuses, quarterly bonuses or other advanced compensation, and so on.

It's also likely leaving out the 20-30% outside recruiter fee per employee. All of us in Enterprise software would love to think we have the most attractive company for developers in the world, but the fact remains that it's Enterprise software. It's not the latest consumer product, or IoT, or self-drive cars, or easily repeated mobile games, or the lastest hedge or fintech platform, etc. There's a distinct lack of sexiness in Enterprise IT technologies that doesn't exactly attract armies of developers which means we need to offer higher pay, greater benefits, and so on.

At the same time it's my understanding, and this is verified on Glassdoor and other relevant sites, that at least some of Rubrick's development is done outside of their Palo Alto HQ.

That's also just the software development side of the house. The much more likely investment coming, based on Bipul's post, is in sales. This means Account Executives and Sales Engineers. And the costs for those roles are significant right now with a massive hiring burst and all the opportunity on the supply (e.g. the employee) side. Across the US at least, all of the storage startups competition with the big Goliaths for sales and technical sales talent had driven compensation up quite a bit. Not quite back to "EMC golden days" levels, but for example a top sales/SE role even in the middle of the country can command upwards of $200,000/yr OTE plus high benefits and recruiter costs. Fully loaded it's generally $250-300k by location. And that's excluding the major cities such as NYC, SF, and so on where senior/principal talent can eclipse $300k at plan.

This all comes from interviewing hundreds of sales and SE candidates around the US in storage and virtualization over the last 5 years. I can't provide deeper details, but people costs are exploding and that doesn't seem to be changing any time soon.

SeanMMasters

Re: A whole several hundred customers!

At list price for a single unit they need less than 1000 customers. And they almost never sell a single unit, easily driving the customer count, at list price, to $100M down by a factor of 2 or 3.

Assuming 3 units that's over $300k list before maintenance, services, or anything else. Let's wash the margin/discounts since we're excluding all that stuff. Now we're talking just north of 300 customers.

So yes, several hundred customers is all they need to hit a $100M run rate.

Note all pricing is available online at CDW. Again, washing for sales discount.

Why did Nimble sell and why did HPE buy: We drill into $1.2bn biz deal

SeanMMasters

Re: The real value at Nimble?

Not sure what there is to wonder about when their core GTM is predictive analytics. Seems like a pretty basic buy of that IP.

SeanMMasters

Re: What a lovely upbeat article

Given the constant churn of storage sales, marketing, engineering people from storage startups to goliaths I'm not quite sure how skills and effectiveness matter -- clearly this has been figured this out. Buy the storage startup, train the incumbent employees on whatever 1 or 2 small new things there are, drop all the acquired overlap.

Wait, you think anything is *new* in storage? Ah that's the problem then.

Xitore slings 4 million IOPS box under its arm, strides out into the light

SeanMMasters

Speed by itself doesn't lead to a useful storage product, or sales, as evidenced by Violin.

EMC Federation to reveal new hyper-hyper converged appliances

SeanMMasters

VSAN #1? Storage isn't hyper-convergence.

Toshiba denies NAND exit report with 'no decision made' comment

SeanMMasters

"Toshiba Revitalisation Action Plan"? It's a TRAP!

Pure Storage flashes post-IPO results: Get a load of our... revenues

SeanMMasters

Re: Upgrade pricing

Consider the possibility that those customers also simply bought 8-9x additional storage in their first 18 months of ownership.

Not arguing against your point, just providing another angle for why this may be the case.

SeanMMasters

Re: NPS

Nutanix is showing a NPS of 88. http://www.nutanix.com/2015/02/09/nutanix-wins-omega-northface-award-exceptional-customer-satisfaction-loyalty-second-year-row/

AWS outage knocks Amazon, Netflix, Tinder and IMDb in MEGA data collapse

SeanMMasters

Re: Replace the word cloud with electricity...

The number of hospitals and datacenters with 100% uptime approaches zero. If keeping things on-premises granted 100% uptime, everything would be on-prem. Instead it's the opposite since engineering, managing, operating and supporting hyper-uptime systems is cost-prohibitive for a majority of companies.

Instead, we've got backups, continuity solutions, etc.