So I tweeted yesterday about a candidate that I interviewed, but she had no social footprint that I could find. I was a little (very little actually) surprised at the amount of "What are you crazy" tweets I got back, basically saying IT doesn't need to be social they need to be technical. In fact it morphed into a good thread on G+
Now 140 characters is a little hard to explain so I figured I would elaborate a bit more.
Enterasys is a very social, collaborative, company with a focus on teamwork, transparency and knowledge sharing. Now I know a lot of companies say this, but for us we really do it. Our Chief Customer Officer was just in Forbes magazine talking about it, Our CIO, who was just recognized as one of Boston's most innovative CIO's had been pushing social for years and we even build social into our products.
One of our key requirements in IT is what we call "IT Rocks". At it's simplest it is the one metric we use to measure how we are doing. If anyone in our company gets asked about IT, we want to hear "IT Rocks". ROCKS also stands for
Respectful - I want them to be able to respectfully discuss different opinions.
Open - I want people that will openly share success and failures so we all learn from it.
Collaborative - I want people that engage and work with others, not just in IT but in the rest of the company, and the rest of the world.
Knowledgeable - Clearly they need to have the knowledge to do the job
Social - This doesn't just mean they can retweet, but I want people that can interact with other people and be comfortable engaging with others.
When we look for people we want them to have these qualities. We have a support model in our IT department where we visit in person when possible, even if we can remotely fix something. The idea is, If people know IT they generally like IT. If people like IT they support IT and life is much better.
We want people who collaborate and don't try to hoard knowledge. If only one person knows how to do something, I want them to share it so we all get better as a team.
Can people be a great fit without having a linkedin profile, or tweeting or blogging. Sure, probably. There are other ways to be social than online. Not all creativity needs to be shared via twitter, in fact we many times will not share something because we are working on a patent filing before openly discussing it.
Will I miss out on some good candidates by requiring social? Yup. But I'm not looking for good candidates, I want the top 1%. If I get one great candidate I'm OK missing out on 10 good ones.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Compliance and cloud
Many times when I mention we are a "Cloud first" shop people ask if we are worried about security. The answer is no.
If security is not the first question, than it is about compliance. Actually I'll admit, I was a little nervous about compliance but not anymore.
We had our kick off call with out audit company (one of the big 3, 5, ?) and one of our key financial reporting systems changed from an old in house system to a nice shiny new cloud vendor. During our call we discussed any changes and I was sure that there would be a lot of discussion around this new system.
There wasn't.
They asked if the cloud vendor was SAS70 certified (which is actually now superseded by SSAE16). I said yes and they said "Well as long as they have that and it covers the controls we are testing, that's all we need". Well and that they would want to see our project documentation and testing, but that's normal for any new system.
So if you are worried about compliance the best advice is get to the cloud sooner rather than later. Then compliance becomes someone else's concern.
If security is not the first question, than it is about compliance. Actually I'll admit, I was a little nervous about compliance but not anymore.
We had our kick off call with out audit company (one of the big 3, 5, ?) and one of our key financial reporting systems changed from an old in house system to a nice shiny new cloud vendor. During our call we discussed any changes and I was sure that there would be a lot of discussion around this new system.
There wasn't.
They asked if the cloud vendor was SAS70 certified (which is actually now superseded by SSAE16). I said yes and they said "Well as long as they have that and it covers the controls we are testing, that's all we need". Well and that they would want to see our project documentation and testing, but that's normal for any new system.
So if you are worried about compliance the best advice is get to the cloud sooner rather than later. Then compliance becomes someone else's concern.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Cloudslam 12
I just got back from a conference in San Francisco called Cloudslam12. It was my first time to the bay area and the first time I got to speak about how we chose cloud providers so pretty exciting.
Since it was my first time to San Francisco I wasn't sure what to expect. I was surprised by a few things. The first was that it was colder in California than Maine. Apparently if I had gone inland 10 miles it was a lot warmer, but in the Bay Area it was low 60s versus the low 70s I left in Maine. Somehow that seemed wrong.
I got to spend a few hours at Fisherman's Wharf which I'm told is a requirement for tourists to that area. It was nice and I have to admit they make excellent clam chowder. I feel bad admitting that....
The conference had quite a few vendors that I probably should have, but hadn't heard about. There were companies like orangescape and durgacloud that act sort of like a middleman between your code and cloud providers, so you can write once and run in Amazon EC2, Google Apps or Microsoft Azure. Unfortunately no one seems to take native force.com apps and makes it easy to transport them. Interesting enough Orangescape will let you take Lotus Domino apps to Google apps.
There were actually a few companies that do cloud based log file management. One called Sumologic that gave out squishy sumo wrestlers. Another called loggly. The log files I deal with aren't that big that I need to send them to the cloud for analysis but interesting nonetheless.
Most of the conference was around PAAS or IAAS but one SAAS vendor integrates google mail with salesforce.com. I was pretty excited thinking I found a neat salesforce.com tool before my peers, only to find out not only did they know about Cirrus Insight, but we were actively testing it.
I even got to talk to a few grad students working on an appliance that lets you bring google apps environment into the enterprise. So if you are paranoid about cloud, but want to leverage some of the 500k applications written in the google marketplace, you can. Or more accurately will be able to. They are still in school but talking to VC firms to kick off this summer.
There were actually a lot of discussions like that, in fact over lunch I think we collectively had 3 new start-up ideas. I got to meet Jeff Nessen who is the CEO of Progentus They make tools that allow a sales department to create service statements of work documents in minutes, instead of hours or days. They also make other SAAS tools that make it easier to sell. He had a great talk on helping your sales team sell cloud.
We had Google talk about Google apps for the enterprise. Intel talked about what they see for trends in cloud service providers.
I was truly amazed at the vibe there though. Getting to hear about companies that were going to start, sharing ideas on new companies we want to see, (I'd love to see an app that takes a video and cloudtags it based on the audio to help it easier to find videos) and just the brainstorming that goes on when you get a bunch of smart people around the table (and they don't mind me sitting there listening. :) )
All in all a great trip and amazing experience.
Since it was my first time to San Francisco I wasn't sure what to expect. I was surprised by a few things. The first was that it was colder in California than Maine. Apparently if I had gone inland 10 miles it was a lot warmer, but in the Bay Area it was low 60s versus the low 70s I left in Maine. Somehow that seemed wrong.
I got to spend a few hours at Fisherman's Wharf which I'm told is a requirement for tourists to that area. It was nice and I have to admit they make excellent clam chowder. I feel bad admitting that....
The conference had quite a few vendors that I probably should have, but hadn't heard about. There were companies like orangescape and durgacloud that act sort of like a middleman between your code and cloud providers, so you can write once and run in Amazon EC2, Google Apps or Microsoft Azure. Unfortunately no one seems to take native force.com apps and makes it easy to transport them. Interesting enough Orangescape will let you take Lotus Domino apps to Google apps.
There were actually a few companies that do cloud based log file management. One called Sumologic that gave out squishy sumo wrestlers. Another called loggly. The log files I deal with aren't that big that I need to send them to the cloud for analysis but interesting nonetheless.
Most of the conference was around PAAS or IAAS but one SAAS vendor integrates google mail with salesforce.com. I was pretty excited thinking I found a neat salesforce.com tool before my peers, only to find out not only did they know about Cirrus Insight, but we were actively testing it.
I even got to talk to a few grad students working on an appliance that lets you bring google apps environment into the enterprise. So if you are paranoid about cloud, but want to leverage some of the 500k applications written in the google marketplace, you can. Or more accurately will be able to. They are still in school but talking to VC firms to kick off this summer.
There were actually a lot of discussions like that, in fact over lunch I think we collectively had 3 new start-up ideas. I got to meet Jeff Nessen who is the CEO of Progentus They make tools that allow a sales department to create service statements of work documents in minutes, instead of hours or days. They also make other SAAS tools that make it easier to sell. He had a great talk on helping your sales team sell cloud.
We had Google talk about Google apps for the enterprise. Intel talked about what they see for trends in cloud service providers.
I was truly amazed at the vibe there though. Getting to hear about companies that were going to start, sharing ideas on new companies we want to see, (I'd love to see an app that takes a video and cloudtags it based on the audio to help it easier to find videos) and just the brainstorming that goes on when you get a bunch of smart people around the table (and they don't mind me sitting there listening. :) )
All in all a great trip and amazing experience.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
The power of collaborative network management
When we created ISAAC last year we knew it had potential to be a game changing technology. No one before had combined social, cloud and mobile in with network management and we were right. We just didn't know how right.
The first few months we talked about how easy it was to localize to different languages using aliases. Suddenly there was a network management tool that worked in 80 native languages and could be customized to use vertical specific terminology.
We talked about how it allowed better work and life balance by letting network managers remediate issues via any mobile device, and from any location. For example if you are at dinner and a user is having a network problem, no more did you have to go to your car, boot up your laptop, connect to the cell network, fire up VPN and then start figuring out who was using the bandwidth in Tokyo. You could do it from the dinner table on your iphone.
Soon we realized it was a great way to customize the network management framework and allow users to create alarms, notifications, actions and new commands. Life was great but even with all this I think we missed the most important pieces.
Earlier this year we realized that by using salesforce chatter we could automatically create new tickets based on alerts and, for example, have a power supply already on the way to get fixed and waiting for us in the morning. In fact we had this happen the other day.
We also learned that our support team could perform remote diagnostics and troubleshooting without needing to have a VPN or remote control software In fact multiple support engineers could work using the deep collaboration toolset chatter gives us. to make sure that we aren't duplicating efforts, and best leveraging the expertise in our entire organization.
Even better we were recording our troubleshooting steps so junior engineers could learn and leverage the experience of the entire team. This reduced training time and organically grew our knowledgebase. Plus we were recording our steps so reviewing the order of changes was easy.
Now we are taking this even a step further by using the power of crowdsourcing, or as I like to call it Cloudsourcing. We can connect a community of customers together and they can share commands, knowledge and expertise with each other and with Enterasys engineers.
We are already seeing huge benefits to some of our pilot customers and to us. We can create new functionality in near realtime and with an iterative design approach to make sure that we are building things, not just for the customers, but with the customers.
Imagine a vendor that develops new functionality to support it's customers needs in real time, collaboratively with everyone that can use it. It ensures that what is built is useful and implemented and takes the best ideas and creates them with almost unlimited resources.
Now stop imagining it and start using it. That future is here today at Enterasys with Isaac,and it's just the start of the new generation of network management, brought about by the power of collaborative network management.
The first few months we talked about how easy it was to localize to different languages using aliases. Suddenly there was a network management tool that worked in 80 native languages and could be customized to use vertical specific terminology.
We talked about how it allowed better work and life balance by letting network managers remediate issues via any mobile device, and from any location. For example if you are at dinner and a user is having a network problem, no more did you have to go to your car, boot up your laptop, connect to the cell network, fire up VPN and then start figuring out who was using the bandwidth in Tokyo. You could do it from the dinner table on your iphone.
Soon we realized it was a great way to customize the network management framework and allow users to create alarms, notifications, actions and new commands. Life was great but even with all this I think we missed the most important pieces.
Earlier this year we realized that by using salesforce chatter we could automatically create new tickets based on alerts and, for example, have a power supply already on the way to get fixed and waiting for us in the morning. In fact we had this happen the other day.
We also learned that our support team could perform remote diagnostics and troubleshooting without needing to have a VPN or remote control software In fact multiple support engineers could work using the deep collaboration toolset chatter gives us. to make sure that we aren't duplicating efforts, and best leveraging the expertise in our entire organization.
Even better we were recording our troubleshooting steps so junior engineers could learn and leverage the experience of the entire team. This reduced training time and organically grew our knowledgebase. Plus we were recording our steps so reviewing the order of changes was easy.
Now we are taking this even a step further by using the power of crowdsourcing, or as I like to call it Cloudsourcing. We can connect a community of customers together and they can share commands, knowledge and expertise with each other and with Enterasys engineers.
We are already seeing huge benefits to some of our pilot customers and to us. We can create new functionality in near realtime and with an iterative design approach to make sure that we are building things, not just for the customers, but with the customers.
Imagine a vendor that develops new functionality to support it's customers needs in real time, collaboratively with everyone that can use it. It ensures that what is built is useful and implemented and takes the best ideas and creates them with almost unlimited resources.
Now stop imagining it and start using it. That future is here today at Enterasys with Isaac,and it's just the start of the new generation of network management, brought about by the power of collaborative network management.
Friday, May 25, 2012
The problem with management tools
Management tools, whether they are for network, systems, nuclear power plants, or anything really, are really hard to get right. It's not that they can't report on errors, they can do that. In fact they can report on so many errors that you end up chasing so many errors you don't get to spend time on anything but chasing them.
Now what some people do is turn off everything, and then wait until something bad happens, go back and figure out what alert would have told them about it. This keeps you from missing an alert the second time, but also means you miss the first one. Not a bad approach but pretty time consuming as well.
Many systems have default warning values and while they are reasonable, they often times don't really match my particular environment.
For example we have a server that generally has 97% of disk space used. Now I know the argument is that's too close, you should add more space. But it's always been at 97%. It never fluctuates because none of the temp files are stored there. I don't need an alert every day that it is nearly out of disk space. If it hits 98%, maybe I want to know.
Now I can easily go in and set that particular threshold for that particular server, but there are literally millions of those in our environment. I would need a team just to go through and configure it once, let alone keep up with it. This obviously is not a very scalable approach.
What I really want is a smart configure tool. Really I want it to run and keep track of all the alerts and what it thought was wrong, and every day, or week ask me "How did things run?" If the answer was good. Reset the alerts to be high enough to not get tripped but low enough to alert me still.
Friday, May 18, 2012
What's your vendors CLOUD score?
Are you, like almost everyone, looking at moving to the cloud? Before you move your critical applications to a new provider check out their CLOUD score.
Company
Legal
Openness
Usability
Development
Company: Are they financially stable? Is there management team seasoned and well respected? Who invested in them? Are they making money or burning cash? Will they survive a disaster and be there for you still?
Legal: Is the legal contract right for you? Check out this blog post to see if you have added the right clauses to protect yourself. Having a good relationship is key, but if something goes south the contract is what the courts will look at, not what the sales team said over lunch.
Openness: Can you integrate with other systems easily? Can you move your data out if needed? Can they use third party authentication methods, like LDAP, or SAML? Do they have a "trust" site so you can see if they are having performance or reliability issues? Do they share there roadmap so you can plan appropriately? Is their knowledgebase available and useful?
Usability: Can users learn the tool quickly? Is training online available? Can you make domain wide changes with an administrator tool? Can you do bulk uploads? Is it easy to manage the system? Is it easy to work with support?
Development: How easy is it to customize? Can you make meta changes from the user interface, or do you need a coding expert to make all changes? Do your developers know how to code in the language it uses? If not, how hard is it to find qualified developers, or train yours? Are the API's well written and robust?
If you ask all of these questions and are comfortable with the vendors answers, you can't go wrong. We use a spreadsheet that asks these questions and weights the scores giving us a result. Using the CLOUD score really helps us make the right decisions and avoid problems.
If you want to check out the spreadsheet we use to calculate our vendor's CLOUD score, check it out at http://bit.ly/LAtn1h
Company
Legal
Openness
Usability
Development
Company: Are they financially stable? Is there management team seasoned and well respected? Who invested in them? Are they making money or burning cash? Will they survive a disaster and be there for you still?
Legal: Is the legal contract right for you? Check out this blog post to see if you have added the right clauses to protect yourself. Having a good relationship is key, but if something goes south the contract is what the courts will look at, not what the sales team said over lunch.
Openness: Can you integrate with other systems easily? Can you move your data out if needed? Can they use third party authentication methods, like LDAP, or SAML? Do they have a "trust" site so you can see if they are having performance or reliability issues? Do they share there roadmap so you can plan appropriately? Is their knowledgebase available and useful?
Usability: Can users learn the tool quickly? Is training online available? Can you make domain wide changes with an administrator tool? Can you do bulk uploads? Is it easy to manage the system? Is it easy to work with support?
Development: How easy is it to customize? Can you make meta changes from the user interface, or do you need a coding expert to make all changes? Do your developers know how to code in the language it uses? If not, how hard is it to find qualified developers, or train yours? Are the API's well written and robust?
If you ask all of these questions and are comfortable with the vendors answers, you can't go wrong. We use a spreadsheet that asks these questions and weights the scores giving us a result. Using the CLOUD score really helps us make the right decisions and avoid problems.
If you want to check out the spreadsheet we use to calculate our vendor's CLOUD score, check it out at http://bit.ly/LAtn1h
Friday, May 4, 2012
Stop micromanaging your network
Are you a micro-manager? I don't mean with your staff, with your network? Everyone knows that micro managing causes a drain on energy and efficiency with teams, but did you know it can do the same to your LAN?
In some networks, management traffic like SNMP, netflow and ICMP can use 30% of the bandwidth and can actually cause some of the issues you are trying to stop. Partly this is because of the broken paradigm we use to manage networks. We configure and manage everything separately.
What we really want is a way to communicate with the network and describe the behavior we want, and then let the devices work together to "make it so".
Imagine that you use SAP. (OK many of you do use SAP, so that's not too hard to do right?) SAP runs your company and is obviously very important. Now imagine you could tell your network, the whole network not device by device, that SAP was important so treat it as important.
Now maybe peer to peer traffic isn't important so you don't want to have that take up all of your resources, but if the resources are just sitting there doing nothing but costing you money, let it be used. Some traffic you just may not want on the network ever, either because you don't use it and want to mitigate risks, or it violates a regulation.
As new applications came on that are not classified and start to get used, the network should be smart enough to let you know. "Hey I've seen a lot of traffic using a new application called skype. What do you want me to do with it?"/ and you could communicate back, block it, make it important, make it un-important, and the network would know what that means, and configure itself to do that.
I think this is the future of network management. What do you think? Using things like onefabric, isaac and coreflow2 switches, we are well on the way to this vision of the future being a reality. Learn more by going to www.enterasys.com, or ask me.
In some networks, management traffic like SNMP, netflow and ICMP can use 30% of the bandwidth and can actually cause some of the issues you are trying to stop. Partly this is because of the broken paradigm we use to manage networks. We configure and manage everything separately.
What we really want is a way to communicate with the network and describe the behavior we want, and then let the devices work together to "make it so".
Imagine that you use SAP. (OK many of you do use SAP, so that's not too hard to do right?) SAP runs your company and is obviously very important. Now imagine you could tell your network, the whole network not device by device, that SAP was important so treat it as important.
Now maybe peer to peer traffic isn't important so you don't want to have that take up all of your resources, but if the resources are just sitting there doing nothing but costing you money, let it be used. Some traffic you just may not want on the network ever, either because you don't use it and want to mitigate risks, or it violates a regulation.
As new applications came on that are not classified and start to get used, the network should be smart enough to let you know. "Hey I've seen a lot of traffic using a new application called skype. What do you want me to do with it?"/ and you could communicate back, block it, make it important, make it un-important, and the network would know what that means, and configure itself to do that.
I think this is the future of network management. What do you think? Using things like onefabric, isaac and coreflow2 switches, we are well on the way to this vision of the future being a reality. Learn more by going to www.enterasys.com, or ask me.
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