appICU

by Woody Hutsell, appICU

Wherever you are in your career, there is probably some place where you thought you would stay forever, a place where you developed the deepest roots or made the most impact. Things happen, you decide to move on, but you continue to feel a connection. For me, this was the case at Texas Memory Systems.

As those of you who have followed this blog know, I spent ten years of my life building the RAM and then flash systems business at Texas Memory Systems (TMS). Leaving in 2010 was a hard but necessary decision. When I left, I was not certain I would stay in the enterprise flash storage industry. In fact, a trip to the Flash Memory Summit in 2010 left me fairly certain the industry was not maturing in a way that was compelling, to me or to many enterprise storage buyers. Nonetheless, I still felt linked to and defined by my experience in the solid state storage business and started blogging through this site. I joined ViON and had a terrific experience selling enterprise storage to the enterprise, including solid state storage. I presented at the Flash Memory Summit in 2011 representing ViON and realized that I missed the industry more than I expected. More importantly, the industry was changing in some really interesting ways that made it enticing to return. I was presented with a great opportunity to work with Fusion-io on a software defined storage solution that we ended up calling the ION Data Accelerator.

In the background, the industry continued to mature, with the big companies finally moving into flash in a serious way. What started as OEM relationships and partnerships between companies was evolving into acquisitions. The most significant of these acquisitions was IBM’s decision to acquire Texas Memory Systems. Because my association with TMS reached back over 20 years, and because most of my friends in Houston were still employed at TMS, my interest in returning began to increase. As I listened to these friends and former co-workers, I realized that IBM was serious about this move into the flash market. I could see the culture and processes at TMS improving in ways I had literally dreamed that they could when I was at TMS years before. I gave the process a few months, just to make sure the post-acquisition honeymoon was not distorting opinions. Simultaneously, something really important started to happen; some of the really talented people that had left TMS were coming back and I could see that combined with the people IBM was bringing in, this new entity might really impact the market. The more people started returning to TMS, the more interested I became. The thing that finally clinched it was my realization that IBM was creating a flash division within the Systems and Technology Group less than two miles from my home. My decision was made and I am home again.

Here I am, nearly 15 months into the experience. I have to admit some initial fear about joining a big company like IBM. Will the TMS culture be crushed? Will the product suffer? Will IBM be too big and too slow to move fast in the flash market? Will the internal bureaucracy make the day-to-day work unpleasant? I definitely felt all of those concerns. Now, while there is no way to escape the size of IBM, I can say with conviction that most of my fears have not come true. But this was not without some struggle. The IBM team leading the integration has done everything in their power to preserve the culture and pace of TMS. IBM has done small things like preventing people from scheduling meetings over lunch hours so that the fairly notorious big lunch groups could continue. IBM has done big things like taking frequent surveys of employees to monitor their engagement, with real follow-through on issues identified. Yes, there is the back drop of a complex organization with some surging and some declining lines of business, but more than anything I see a depth of talent and resources that I consider to be unmatched.

The accolades that are accompanying IBM’s success in flash are rewarding, but it is really about the people and the journey. My compliments to the IBMers who moved to the FlashSystem team, and to the former TMSers who have worked harder than ever to deliver. I think sometimes the great people get lost in big organizations, so I want to recognize some spectacular contributions from Terri Mitchell, the IBM integration executive for fighting for this team; Jan Janick and Mike Nealon for preserving the engineering culture; Mike Kuhn for learning the flash market faster than I could have possibly imagined; Andy Walls for his architectural brilliance, as well as the hundreds of people on the FlashSystem team who are pushing every boundary and changing minds within and outside of IBM. This effort to become the unqualified leader in the all-flash array category is just beginning, but it is nice to get a great start with a strong team. Happy two year anniversary to the IBM Flash team!

This week I will be at IBM Enterprise 2014 Conference in Las Vegas presenting in three different sessions about FlashSystem. Also, make sure and visit http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/flash/ for the latest product features coming October 6th.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2014 at 10:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.