Category: StorageTek

Now I’m really confused. Jon Benson running storage, David Yen heading up microelectronics… haven’t we seen this movie before?

I’ve been visiting TheSunOperationFormerlyKnownAsStorageTek in Louisville, CO this week, for a series of meetings. For the most part these have revolved around the alignment of technology roadmaps and how best to use ex-STK technology in Sun products and vice versa. As with all such projects, the purpose of the meeting is not to make the final decisions, but to agree on goals and processes and establish working relationships between engineers. The hard work is still to come, but you have to start with the face-to-face connections.
As part of these meetings, John Fowler (EVP of Network Systems) and Glenn Weinberg (VP of Solaris) flew in. Two VPs sounds like a bit of a misfit for a technical meeting, but these guys are engineers: we were soon discussing the finer points of HyperTransport bandwidth with different HBAs on PCI-X and PCI-Express, as well as the build procedures for OpenSolaris code drops.

This evening I was invited to a Christmas party hosted by Barbara Bauer, VP of software in Sun’s Data Management Group. It was great to hang out with the people I’ve been working with over the last six months and not talk about work!!! Many thanks, Barbara – and David for giving me a ride into Denver.

I’m visiting Louisville and Broomfield in Colorado this week as part of the ongoing Sun+StorageTek integration work, and so I took the first flight from Boston to Denver this morning. I had a couple of surprises. First, I was upgraded to first class for some reason (something to do with rectifying another travel agency screwup). Then when I checked in my boarding card was marked “SSSSS“, which meant that I was pulled aside for the full search: bags, wanding, pat-down, even what the agent called “the TSA back-rub”. The wand was turned up so high that the zipper on my trousers set it off!

The flight was uneventful: I slept most of the way. However when I reached Denver, the Avis reservation computers were down, so they were processing every car rental booking by hand. Eventually I got to the front of the (long) line, was asked “Is a red Ford minivan OK?”, said yes, and was given a contract and a bay number. I walked out to that bay, and found a blue Chevy SUV. Different colour, different make, and – most important – different registration. I flagged down a passing Avis staff member, we hunted around a bit for the Ford, and then she gestured to the SUV and said, “Are you OK with this?” I shrugged, “Sure – it’s got four wheels and a tank of gas”, so she amended my contract with the relevant info. So now, for perhaps the first time, I’m driving an oversized SUV. It has the aerodynamics (and wind noise) of a brick, and the driving position is uncomfortably upright, but it works.

Mind you, having AWD may be useful. They’re forecasting 1-3 inches of snow this evening, with 25-40 mph winds….

Yesterday was the first of two big days in the Sun+StorageTek integration work I’m doing here in Colorado. First, we gathered most of the employees at StorageTek’s Louisville facility and Sun’s Broomfield campus in the courtyard at Broomfield for executive speeches, food, music (too loud, but never mind), networking, and celebration. That was from 10 to 12. Then in the afternoon we had a couple of “geek to geek” sessions on file systems and the application of crypto techniques to storage. The second of these ran until about 8; I brought in some food and beer to help the discussions. (The beer caused some confusion: Sun and StorageTek policies are different. But we’re all Sun now.)

Today we’re having an all day colloquium with around 75-80 55 participants, drawn from all over Sun. We’ll have a morning plenary session, with break-outs this afternoon. I’m looking forward to this: the energy levels and enthusiasm seem to be really high. More anon (perhaps with pictures – another policy issue to resolve).

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”.

I flew out from Boston to Denver this afternoon for a ten-day visit to StorageTek. I have an unusual role in all of this, with one foot in engineering and the other in human resources. My main objective is to facilitate the smooth integration of the Sun and StorageTek engineering communities. Now as you’d expect there are groups busily working on what the merged organization structure should look like, who reports to whom, and what the engineering deliverables are; similarly there are HR teams mapping job grades and benefits and stuff like that. I’m not trying to duplicate their efforts. My focus (colleagues might call it a long-standing obsession) is on connecting the engineering community: bringing together creative engineers who might otherwise be isolated in “stove-pipe” organizations, fostering the kind of conversations that create new opportunities. For me, the person who put it best was Lou Gerstner of IBM. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with BusinessWeek about his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?

Q: In the book, you use the phrase “counter-intuitive corporation.” What do you mean?

A: There is this view that has been prevalent for as long as I’ve been in the business world that large companies are slow, ineffective, and that small companies are faster, better, more entrepreneurial. I don’t buy into that. It’s harder to make large companies faster, entrepreneurial, more responsive. But it doesn’t mean they can’t be that way.

This is probably the subject of another management book, but this is all about creating organizations where knowledge moves in a different way than control. Large companies have to have elaborate systems of control because there’s lots of things to count, oversee, report, and add up. You create this kind of skeleton of an organization, which keeps it upright and moving. But you don’t want knowledge, which is what people really leverage in a large institution, moving along the same pathways as control.

You’ve got to free knowledge so that it moves horizontally in an organization, not hierarchically, and allows organizations to leverage the fact that they have a big presence in various markets so they know things. That knowledge can move across the enterprise. Smaller companies have no way to leverage information.

So that’s what I’m up to, in a variety of ways: fostering the horizontal flow of information. To me, that’s what makes the difference between a bunch of engineering teams and an engineering community. And we’re not just talking about product development: this has to include research, development, manufacturing, pre-sales, consulting, and support. More anon.

This afternoon we finally got the email announcing that the Sun–StorageTek deal had officially closed. I’ve been waiting anxiously for this moment, because for the last month or two I’ve been a member of the Integration Team, working on various aspects of the deal. I’m having an absolute blast, working with some really great people and learning about some incredibly cool technologies*, but I haven’t been able to blog about any of it! All of that changes now, and I plan to post a number of pieces about what I’ve been up to and what this deal is all about.

And those of you that have been through M&A** events will know that the pre-close activity is only the beginning: the real work starts tomorrow, Day One. It’s going to be fun – even if it does mean spending more time at Denver airport and relying on the “high-speed Internet” and “complimentary breakfast buffet” in certain medium-stay hotels near Broomfield, CO.

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* all strictly within the legal guidelines, naturally!
** merger and acquisition