And Two Become One
When I started this blog, I promised to share insight on the excitement of working in Storage at Sun...with that in mind, I have to fill you in on the last week, as it truly represented a milestone.
As many know, I joined StorageTek as the company CMO only about a month before the acquisition by Sun. Since the acquisition was announced in June of '05, we have been laser focused on maintaining the best of both companies while gaining incremental growth. Three major (or not so major) milestones happened last week that signaled the emergence of a single company:
1. We hosted over 1K sales and marketing professionals and Sun partners at The Storage Top Gun Sales Academy last week in San Francisco. Let me explain: The US Naval Academy's Top Gun program was designed to train the Navy's most elite fighter pilots in air combat tactics - specifically improving performance in shooting down MiGs - and the results were dramatic. Similarly, Sun's StorageTek Top Gun Academy was singularly focused on providing Sun's elite storage sales force the training and tactics necessary to win against the competition.
For the first time since the acquisition, the marketing, sales and executive teams seemed to truly internalize the fact that we are all on the same team. What was really exciting is the understanding and articulation of Sun's unique systems value from the hundreds of presenters (from Jonathan Schwartz to individual product managers and sales folks).
For those Sun employees that were not at the event, please check out this month's special edition of the Storage Podcast featuring "LIVE from Top Gun" interviews with Jonathan Schwartz, David Kenyon and myself.
2. We announced the end of life of the 69XX product family. As any good marketing team does, we continually assess our portfolio to ensure we make the right decisions for Sun customers and shareholders. What we found when we dug into the 6920 was that customers purchased it for one of two reasons: its virtualization capabilities or its price/performance. For those customers interested in virtualization, the 9985 has a proven track record at Sun and is the gold standard for storage virtualization. To best provide our current 6920 customers with sustained engineering support for the next 5 years, we have entered a support services agreement with HDS.
So, why is this important to the coming together of two companies? In our negotiations with HDS on the support services agreement mentioned above, the industry rumor mill began to work over time...I answered "is Sun selling its (insert your choice: 6920, disk business, storage business) to HDS" 100s of times, 10s of articles were printed saying the same and even the analyst community seemed a bit confused. I believe now that this question has been taken off the table, we can now move our conversations on to more positive and productive things.
3. And finally, my team made the move from Louisville to the Broomfield campus. We are all now located in a single area, have our own SunRays and can dial collegues using the 5 digit internal dialing system! What seems like a small step has already made a hugely positive impact.
So with that, I am off to New York to speak to our Financial Services customers and share the good news!
Posted at 11:17AM Mar 08, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[2]
Posted by Taylor Allis on March 09, 2007 at 01:03 PM MST #
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Posted by Steve Miller on April 29, 2008 at 11:04 AM MDT #