As I mentioned, I’m visiting the StorageTek facility in Louisville, Colorado this week and next. I find that there are two distinct aspects to what I’m doing here. The obvious bits are the formal meetings – reviewing engineering processes, planning various meetings between Sun and StorageTek engineers* (including a big colloquium next week), and coming up to speed on key programs and technologies. Those are keeping me pretty busy. Less obvious are the ad hoc interactions, on topics ranging from programming tools to document archival, from differences in IT infrastructure to the various techniques used for gathering customer requirements.
If you think about it for a minute, the task of integrating two large companies is truly daunting. There’s a fine balance to be struck. At one extreme would be treating StorageTek as “separate but equal”, operating it as a wholly-owned subsidiary with little or no day-to-day interaction. At the other extreme would be Borg-style “assimilation”, submerging all traces of StorageTek’s culture and practices. Neither is appropriate to this situation. StorageTek is a successful, profitable company, highly regarded by its customers: it’s critical that we preserve that. But both Sun and StorageTek have been limited in what we can do historically: Sun because of an incomplete approach to storage, and StorageTek by a “plug compatible” business model that inhibited innovation at the edge of their systems. The value of the merger is that each company offers new possibilities to the other. Together we have more choices: more ways to address the acquisition, processing, and storage of data from end to end. For me, the way to achieve the right balance is to encourage the business unit managers to conservatively adapt the organization, projects and products to ensure business continuity, while at the same time developing a network of the key innovators – architects, researchers, engineers – to open up the possibilities of radical synergy.
Back to the daunting nature of the task. Like all such endeavours, the elements usually turn out to be simple: meetings of individuals or teams to identify and solve pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And the ad hoc interactions provide the “jiggling” that allows the pieces to fit together (or sometimes identifies a piece that’s in the wrong place). We never budget for these activities, but without them it’s really hard to finish the picture.
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* Yes, I know that we’re all Sun now, but I need some language to refer to the two groups. Maybe oSUNW and oSTK, for “originally Sun” and “originally StorageTek”.