The Company You Keep

Last week I attended a conference. I interacted with some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. Who are they?

They are the people that take care of the world’s data.  They’ve been given the incredibly hard task of storing, retrieving, securing, organizing, searching, and protecting your most critical information. In fact, if you have a bank account, a credit card, a cell phone, a mortgage, or a car, or if you’ve taken a vacation or made a trip to the hospital recently, then it’s likely that they’ve taken care of your data in some important way.

I have attended EMC’s Innovation Conference both years.  This year I noticed that EMC invited a large percentage of junior talent from around the world. Two friends of mine from China “won” a plane ticket to the US to present their innovative ideas. One of my co-workers from Russia also won a seat. I presented an idea while standing next to a junior engineer from France. I also met several employees from India.

Employees that could not attend in person had the option to interact via multi-directional live video feeds and chat technology.

How would I sum up this conference in one sentence?  That’s easy.

I love this place.

Personal Conference Highlights

During the conference I watched in amazement as the Innovation Conference planning team took us on a live world tour of our centers in China, India, Israel, Russia, and Ireland. When our Chinese co-workers flashed up on the screen they went crazy; it looked like they were riding a roller coaster.  Live conversation flowed back and forth between locations as we heard about the innovation going on in each geography. Amazing.

I proposed my own idea. It came in second place. The idea was born during several customer visits I made to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The archivists at the JFK Library have the responsibility to archive JFK’s documents and make them readable for hundreds of years. As part of my second place finish EMC committed resources to build out this idea (and many more).

It’s not just lip service; last year a team of researchers in China built and demonstrated our ideas to customers at EMC World.

Featured speakers at the conference included customers, university researchers, EMC executives, and a speaker from the World Economic Forum. All speakers touched on the topic of innovation.

Thursday Night

On Thursday night my wife and I went out to dinner with several EMC executives. I had been selected by my peers to join the class of EMC Distinguished Engineers. When we arrived my wife received flowers and a card signed by Joe Tucci. After the meal I got the chance to shake hands with Joe. He asked me a few questions and then slapped me on the back and said “Hey, we appreciate everything you do”.

My favorite part of the evening occured when my first boss out of college, Bob Solomon, was recognized as an EMC Fellow. Interestingly enough it was the 20-year anniversary of being hired by Bob to help build what became the CLARiiON storage system. For the next twenty years I’ve been under his technical guidance and career mentoring. EMC couldn’t have picked a better Fellow.

The Investment

It’s not cheap to fly innovators from all over the world to the United States. It’s not cheap to set up the video links that involve employees from around the world. Some might question why software engineers, for example,  are attending fancy dinners with EMC executives, especially given the incredibly challenging economic climate of October 2008.

So why do it?

Joe Tucci and EMC CTO Jeff Nick gave the answer during our dinner on Thursday night. EMC is a technology company; we have to invest in our “innovators”.  It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you work. Listen to the customer. Start thinking. Collaborate with your global co-workers. Submit your ideas. Do these things and you will be rewarded and recognized.

Is It Working?

Take a look at one of the hottest mandates coming from our customers:  “go green”.  Customers need solutions that consume less power and are environmentally friendly. This problem has been bouncing around EMC’s innovative culture for several years. What’s the result?

In January of 2008 EMC announced the shipment of Enterprise Flash Drives for Symmetrix. Not only are EFDs green (roughly 1/3 power savings) but they’re fast. Symmetrix was the first product in the industry to ship EFDs to customers. After ten months there’s only been one other shipping product in the industry to support EFDs: EMC CLARiiON.

This summer East Carolina University announced that they had deployed EMC’s VMWARE product to eliminate servers and shrink there server-based power consumption by 85%.

During 2008 customers deployed the deduplication technology announced by EMC in late 2007. Avamar, Networker, and RecoverPoint products deduplicate redundant information; less information requires less disks, less disks require less power.

So yes, the “innovation investment” is working. EMC innovators are delivering a continual stream of new products that serve the needs of our customers. And they’re delivering many of these technologies earlier than anybody else.

Makes sense business-wise, doesn’t it?  It’s a win-win. EMC continues to announce great earnings, innovative employees continue to be rewarded and recognized.

The Innovation Conference, while fun, is not just a contest.  It’s the fuel for continued revenue growth in 2009 and beyond.

EMC believes that, otherwise they wouldn’t treat their employees to the experience.

I, for one, am going to stick around and reap the benefits.

Steve