Years ago I was a contractor at Adaptec. At that time I was responsible for performance analysis on a product called WinStripe, essentially an early implementation of raid 0 for windows boxes. It was a cool job and I got to geek it up with lots and lots of hardware and some wicked fast (for those days) throughput numbers. However, I felt it keenly that I was a contractor and I didn't like it much. I felt like I was missing the secret knock and wanted desperately to be part of the crowd. When I converted, on November  18th, I was very very happy.

About a year ago I had the chance to reconnect with a colleague of mine from Adaptec and she joined my organization as a contractor to help manage my community. Together we launched Storage Stop (our blog about storage goings on), started editing and recording video of the projects we are doing as well as helping with our portal. I came up with the idea to start translating blogs, and  Deirdré came up with cool ideas to fund it. We launched an effort to measure our metrics and run analysis on our communication trafficking and wrote dozens of interesting presentations and storage related blogs. In one short year we helped change the face of our storage communication. Deirdré is responsible for a tectonic shift in the way we communicate and we are much more prolific in terms of messaging and communicating.

Deirdré has (sadly) left my organization to become part of our Business Communications team. I am a bit sad because Deirdré is a phenomenally good communicator and having her in my organization was great. We did a lot of cool things together. On the other hand, this is a larger role for Deirdré and I can foresee great things in her future. Additionally, since I run an engineering organization and not a marketing communications organization, it would have been difficult to convert her to a regular employee. In her new role, conversion was axiomatic. So, I am very happy for Deirdré, she is now a formal Sun employee, and it is great.

Welcome Deirdré (again) and thank you for all your help and efforts. Good luck with your new role and I look forward to working together (again) for many years.