The Innovation Pitch

Yesterday the EMC Innovation Showcase began, and I spent a large part of the day on my feet pitching my idea for “Solving the 100 Year Problem”. Thirty finalists were standing in front of posters of their idea whilst the executives quizzed us on our proposals.

I received a bit of heckling from a non-executive who somehow snuck in without an invite to the private judging session. This was the first time I had met Mark Twomey in person. ;>)

My idea was centered around the problem of not only the preservation of digital content, but also the ability to interpret the content data format for years to come. Not surpringly, at the center of my proposal was a unique product custom made for digital preservation.

Centera.

I won’t cover all the details of my proposal (yet), but I thought it went over well with the executives. One gentleman that I didn’t recognize absolutely grilled me with some tough, tough questions. I asked for his name and found out it was Rory Bolt of Avamar. If you ever want a great devil’s advocate well just run your idea by Rory. I appreciated some of the insight he gave me, and part of his expertise is certainly due to the fact that the Avamar product and the Centera RAIN architecture have their similarities.

In the afternoon the judging was opened up to the wider technical community, and the interchanges with my co-workers were outstanding. I received comments such as:

• It’s not a 100-year problem, it’s a 5-year problem.
• My customer’s run into the problem all the time and are very concerned about it
• I run into this problem all the time at home with four year old video formats
• “Infinite backward compatibility?” “Are you crazy?”
• I like your idea. You explained it to me in 20 seconds and I get it.
• EMC needs to articulate the solution to this problem

It was a good time. As we speak I’m sitting in the second general session waiting for a full day’s agenda of innovative speakers and guests, including university speakers, customers, and EMC executives.  The awards for the ideas will be given out in the afternoon, and the awards for the XAM Coding Challenge will occur at the end of the morning session.

The conference is being broadcast live from around the world and questions have been coming in from across the globe.

More to come. I’m having a great time and have yet to find an employee that’s not appreciative of the opportunity, whether in person or virtually present.

Steve