* Vendors can learn a lot more from academia
As Frank Moss tells it, we can expect companies to an increasing degree to look beyond their own walls for the majority of their intellectual property. Moss, former chairman and CEO at Tivoli, is the new director of MIT’s Media Laboratory, which for decades now has been developing interesting new technologies that eventually find their way into the marketplace.
If he is correct – and I am betting he is – we now find ourselves approaching an especially notable point in the history of how technology companies do business. Why? Because this means we are nearing the point at which a time-honored tradition in the computer business – the NIH (“Not Invented Here”) syndrome – may at last be consigned to history’s trash heap.
NIH has been a particularly vexing issue for at least 25 years. Any of you who have worked for technology vendors during the last few decades know exactly what I mean – a potential technology partner comes along offering us a technology that would get our own product out into the marketplace a few quarters earlier than if we developed it ourselves. But we turn down the opportunity because we know, in our technological heart of hearts, that we can build it better.
And perhaps we can, but that is hardly the point. In a world where time-to-market carries great value, and where being first into the marketplace always buys mindshare, speedy delivery trumps just about everything. And so many engineering-driven companies turned down technology from outside vendors in the past, and are now just a memory. And some, once quite large, aren’t even that. The Greeks called this hubris.
If you don’t know what I’m referring to here, find a friend who is an ex-DECie or a former DG-er, and feel his pain.
In today’s world, the rule for getting a product out the door is “better never than late.”
Obviously, if Frank Moss is correct vendors will be hiring more alliance managers and people with the technical and interpersonal skills who can create effective interfaces between companies. But if he is correct, vendors will also have a number of other alternatives to consider as well.
For instance, while many companies have had good success partnering with other companies, some vendors have explored additional, alternative routes. And so, in addition to companies partnering with one another, we are also likely to see – in places where vendors have the ambition is to push the technology envelope – much stronger links between the corporate and academic communities as well.
Obviously, the business and academic worlds have been dancing together for many years now, but it’s clear that in many areas of storage the “deep” research that is now taking place at universities throughout the world can evolve from technology into product when vendors and academics build strong bonds. In such cases, it is likely that both groups, and perhaps the users as well, will come out ahead.
I’ve seen several such interesting projects of late where university-vendor partnerships are likely to yield a mass of useful results that neither university nor vendor could accomplish on its own. Once such effort, the “Human Speechome Project,” is building one of the world’s largest storage arrays (using mostly standard components) at MIT’s Media Lab. Another, Carnegie Mellon University’s Data Center Observatory, is a real-world examination of power-efficiency in data centers and had its grand opening last month.
Both are interesting and likely fruitful partnerships between academe and the business world. I hope to report on the progress of these, and perhaps other such research partnerships, as the summer progresses.
(For lots more about networking research at universities and other labs, check out Network World’s new Alpha Doggs blog – Ed.)
**** Will you be at the StorageWorld Conference in Long Beach, Calif., later this month? This conference differs from many of the others because, rather than being a “vendor love fest” where the vendors spend much of their time preening before their competitors, this gathering is really aimed at IT management and staffers (would you believe it’s actually FREE to IT-ers? It is.)
If you’ll be there on the 21st of this month, please stop by and say hello. I’ll be running the SMB storage panel at 3 p.m. on the 21st, and will sit in on as many analyst face-to-face sessions as time allows. Stop by and say hello – or take your best shot.
