Archives for October 2008

Tips for Telling a Clear Story

October 21, 2008 Leave a Comment

While doing some office cleaning, I came across a checklists that I received from Sramana Mitra that is an excellent check list for companies that are trying to tell a story. Whether you’re a new company starting up, an established company that needs to do a sanity check, or even a product manager putting together the story for a product, these two lists can be useful to make sure that you have covered all the bases:

Rather than just bookmark these for my own future refernce, I’m posting these in hope that you find these checklists useful as well.

Technology Preview of vCAP Available

October 20, 2008 Leave a Comment

VMware recently released a technology preview of vCenter Administrator Portal (vCAP) over on the VMware Communities site. vCAP is a web based console that allows a central view into your VMware environment across mutliple vCenter Servers and allows you to monitor events and alarms,search and track inventory, or connect via the VI Client to any vCenter Server.

You can download the preview (beta) of vCAP as an full installable image, an appliance, or OVF. Just keep in mind that it is a technology preview, so make sure you provide your feedback about things that don’t seem to work or work right.

(Thanks to JJ and Matt for making me aware of this!)

(Disclaimer: I am currently employed at VMware as a Solutions Consultant)

Calling Shenanigans on IDC Numbers

October 20, 2008 Leave a Comment

Over the years of playing the Technology Vendor game, I have learned not to give too much attention to IT Analysts statistics. This comes from understanding of how the Analysts’ game is usually played from dealing with them from both the end user client and IT vendor perspective. So when I come across statistics, I usually glance at them and move along. This morning, however, when I came across IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker press release (thanks to virtualization.com’s recent post) I had to stop and take a deeper look.

The single line that made me stop was (emphasis mine):

However, in its first quarter of general availability Microsoft Hyper-V delivered a strong showing, and when combined with Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft’s market share is 23% of new shipments.

It was the two phrases in red that makes me call Shenanigans on this data.

First, this report is for the second calendar quarter of 2008 (April, May, June). Hyper-V was release just a few days before the end of June; see Microsoft’s Hyper-V press release announcing availability date on June 26. My first reaction to this point was one of disbelief that any company, even Microsoft, could go from zero to 23% market share in three business days (Thursday June 26, Friday June 27th, and Monday June 30th).

Second, the nuance of what products were included shed light on how that amazing growth happened. The report didn’t just count Hyper-V shipments, but also Virtual Server 2005. It also didn’t indicate if the Hyper-V shipments that were counted included betas that would have been in use well before the release of the product. This artificially inflated market share numbers skews the perception of this part of the report.

This leads me to wonder why the numbers were skewed this way in the first place. Was IDC just looking for some big bang to be able to report on to drive sales of the report and their own corporate visibility? Or was Microsoft involved in some way in the generation of this report and influenced the skewing of these numbers?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have this level of transparency from an Analyst with regards to their reports? Why not show us the break down numbers of just ESX and Hyper-V shipments?

(Disclaimer: I am currently employed at VMware as a Solutions Consultant)