At Cloud Field Day 12 in San Jose, Prosimo joined us to explain how they are “more crazy than you guys think we are.” We got a good introduction to the problems they are working on solving, some of the problems they’re not focused on, and yes, we did learn they might be pretty crazy. But it just might work.
Prosimo was founded in early 2019, the second startup for many of the team (hence their CEO Ramesh Prabagaran’s crazy quoted confession above). The connection I didn’t make at the time is that his first startup was Viptela, who were acquired by Cisco in 2017. So after developing an SD-WAN solution, Prabagaran and his team moved up (or down) a layer to address another element of WAN in the clouds. Maybe we could call it CAN, or Cloud Area Networking. Or maybe not.
To get to the good stuff… Prosimo focuses on multicloud transit (the third lozenge pictured above), an element between the users and edge networks and the applications a customer has in any of the three major clouds or their own datacenters/private clouds.
As many of my readers know by now, my time at Cisco came to an end last month. When I decided to leave Disney and come to Cisco 6 1/2 years ago, there were two main things I knew I would miss about being in the “real world” — Disney cast member discounts, and being a Tech Field Day delegate.
Well, there’s no change on the Disney discount front, but this week I’ll be back as a TFD delegate for Tech Field Day 22 the latter half of this week.
Riding in the limo at SFD5 in 2014 – four of the five people pictured will be at TFD22 this week with me
How did you get to this point?
In May 2014, I posted a two part post on storage vendors (“These 3 hot new trends” part 1 and part 2) from Storage Field Day 5, my last full event as a delegate. A month later, I moved to San Francisco for most of a week thanks to TFD sponsors, to participate in my second Cisco Live event and to interview for a position with Cisco.
I was offered the job the day I got home from the event, and a little under a month later I got badged at Building 9 and began the 6+ year adventure in mega-vendor sales engineering. But as a vendor, I wasn’t terribly welcome among the Tech Field Day delegations, although I was still invited to the parties, and managed to qualify for the roundtable at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in 2017. I did continue my participation with Interop over the years, leaving my Cisco ears (instead of my Disney ears) at home, and even attending a Cisco briefing during one of the events, in the former Playboy Club at the Palms in Las Vegas.
What is Tech Field Day? Do I need a ham radio?
If you’re new to Tech Field Day, the idea is pretty much the same as it’s been for over ten years, even if the participation venue has moved from conference rooms to Zoom. Stephen Foskett, founder of Tech Field Day and Gestalt IT, brings together independent analysts, practitioners, geeks, and javelin catchers to meet with companies producing something in the tech sphere.
From the huge established names (like Dell, HPE, Cisco) to companies just coming out of stealth and talking to the public for the first time, you get to see companies facing unstaged questions in realtime, discussing the product or service, the decisions behind them, and how people who might actually use the product or service see it rather than how the company’s marketing and PR team want it to be seen.
And unlike most press conferences and analyst events, anyone on the planet (pretty much) can tune in, watch and learn, and pose their own questions through social media to be answered. There’s no registration required, no event fees, and if you missed a company you can go back and watch within a couple of days.
Pro-tip: If, like me, you’re on the tech job market, Tech Field Day’s archives can be a great resource for learning about companies you might be interested in working for. Just go to the main page and search for a company name. Not everyone is in there, but you can get a good feel for the companies that are, from what they do and how they’ve evolved over the years to how well they understand their product and the market they’re competing in.
So what’s different for you this time?
Tech Field Day 9 in Austin, Texas (June 2013)
After five full delegate events in person, and seven roundtable/TFD Extra events (details), I’ll be back as a different kind of delegate, for obvious reasons. TFD22 looks to be the largest event yet, with twenty-five delegates. No, really, 25 delegates. The nine presenting companies will be split up into early and late shfits to accommodate delegates from around the world, and since none of us are traveling to an in-person location, we can focus on presentations in our own time zones… and some of us will be hopping onto the other shift’s events as well.
The early shift, for my European and Eastern colleagues, will feature Commvault, Veeam, VMware, Quantum, and Red Hat. Their sessions run from 5-10am Pacific, and while I’d love to see them live, I’m not sure 5am is a time I believe in just yet.
You’ll find me in the late shift (11am-3pm Pacific), meeting with MemVerge, Riverbed (who I last visited here in Sunnyvale for SFD2), Illumio, and oddly enough, Cisco. I only see three names among the other 24 who I’ve shared TFD events with, but about half of them are in my online circles and I’m looking forward to meeting the others.
If you’d like to watch along with us, check out the TFD page for livestreams on several platforms starting Wednesday morning, December 9th. You can click on this garishly-large TFD logo to get there if you like. And if you miss the sessions you wanted to watch, they’ll be posted on the same link within a couple of days for you to watch at no cost.
Feel free to follow along on Twitter and ask your questions – tag with the hashtag #TFD22 and the delegates will try to relay your questions to the presenters.
Some more content will be coming as work changes settle in, but I wanted to share this video with my readers.
I’ve been a fan of Opengear for many years, and they sponsored the Tech Field Day Xtra at Cisco Live US 2013 in Orlando that made it possible for me to attend my first CLUS event.
Having met with them at the last few Interop events, and covering the new infrastructure manager box with Ethernet switching built-in, I was pleased to be invited to talk with them for a couple of video features around the Opengear story, the evolution of console server/terminal server technology, and some more general technology perspectives.
The first video was posted today… I’ll update this post with others as they come out. And hopefully I’ll be seeing many of you at Cisco Live US 2018, going back to Orlando.
For the fourth year, I’m spending a week’s vacation in Las Vegas attending Interop. What started with Stephen Foskett inviting me to participate in a Tech Field Day Roundtable at Interop 2013 has become a tradition, thanks to the courtesy of Interop PR. I’ve experienced all four hotels in the Mandalay strip, learned the secret identity of airline chicken, and met some great people with great projects and products and the occasional interesting vending machines.
YOU CAN’T SEE MY HAT
My coworkers were in large part confused that I would take vacation time, come to Las Vegas mostly on my own dime[1], and act like I don’t have a day job. When I did things like this during my employment with Disney, I’d “leave my ears at home,” as I did for the Tech Field Day events. Cisco doesn’t have iconic ears, and I don’t have a bridge hat (as Teren Bryson suggested yesterday). But I still leave work behind.
You’re not going to be able to leave your experience and expertise behind, of course, and there are enough folks out there who know who I work for, but my work phone, work laptop, work business cards, and work identity[2] are left behind for the duration of an event like this.
I’ve attended a couple of Tech Field Day events, and watched/participated remotely (in both senses of the word) in a few more, and each event seems to embody themes and trends in the field covered. Storage Field Day 5 was no exception.
I found a couple of undercurrents in this event’s presentations, and three of these are worth calling out, both to thank those who are following them, and give a hint to the next generation of new product startups to keep them in mind.
This post is the second of a series of two, for your manageable reading pleasure. The first post is here.
Be sure to check out the full event page, with links to presenters and videos of their presentations, at http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd5/
3. The Progressive Effect: Naming Names Is Great, Calling Names Not So Much
Back at the turn of the century, it was common for vendors to focus on their competition in an unhealthy way. As an example, Auspex (remember them) told me that their competitor’s offering of Gigabit Ethernet was superfluous, and that competitor was going out of business within months. I’ll go out on a limb and say this was a stupid thing to say to a company whose product was a wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet routing switch, and, well, you see how quickly Netapp went out of business, right?
At Storage Field Day 5, a couple of vendors presented competitive/comparative analysis of their market segment. This showed a strong awareness of the technology they were touting, understanding of what choices and tradeoffs have to be made, and why each vendor may have made the choices they did.
Beyond that, it can acknowledge the best use for each product, even if it’s the competition’s product. I’ll call this the Progressive Effect, after the insurance company who shows you the competitor’s pricing even if it’s a better deal. If you think your product is perfect for every customer use case, you don’t know your product or the customer very well.
Once again, Diablo Technologies did a comparison specifically naming the obvious competitor (Fusion-io), and it was clear that this was a forward-looking comparison, as you can order a hundred Fusion-io cards and put them into current industry standard servers. That won’t work with most of the servers in your datacenter with the ULLtraDIMMs just yet. But these are products that are likely to be compared in the foreseeable future, so it was useful context and use cases for both platforms were called out.
Solidfire’s CEO Dave Wright really rocked this topic though, tearing apart (in more of an iFixit manner than an Auspex manner) three hyperconverged solutions including his own, showing the details and decisions and where each one makes sense. I suspect most storage company CEOs wouldn’t get into that deep of a dive on their own product, much less the competition, so it was an impressive experience worth checking out if you haven’t already.
MENTION OTHER COMPANY IN PRESENTATION, FUD HULK SMASH YOUR COMPANY. OTHER COMPANY NOT EXIST IN VACUUM. YOUR COMPANY IN VACUUM. SUCKS. #SFD5
There were some rumblings in the Twittersphere about how knowing your competitor and not hiding them behind “Competitor A” or the like was invoking fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). And while it is a conservative, and acceptable, option not to name a competitor if you have a lot of them–Veeam chose this path in their comparisons, for example–that doesn’t mean that it’s automatically deceptive to give a fair and informed comparison within your competitive market.
If Dave Wright had gone in front of the delegates and told us how bad all the competitors were and why they couldn’t do anything right, we probably would’ve caught up on our email backlogs faster, or asked him to change horses even in mid-stream. If he had dodged or danced around questions about his own company’s platform, some (most?) of us would have been disappointed. Luckily, neither of those happened.
But as it stands, he dug into the tech in an even-handed way, definitely adding value to the presentation and giving some insights that not all of us would have had beforehand. In fact, more than one delegate felt that Solidfire’s comparison gave us the best available information on one particular competitor’s product in that space.
This is a post related to Storage Field Day 5, the independent influencer event being held in Silicon Valley April 23-25, 2014. As a delegate to SFD5, I am chosen by the Tech Field Day community and my travel and expenses are covered by Gestalt IT. I am not required to write about any sponsoring vendor, nor is my content reviewed. No compensation has been or will be received for this or other Tech Field Day post.
For the fourth year, I’m spending a week’s vacation in Las Vegas attending Interop. What started with Stephen Foskett inviting me to participate in a Tech Field Day Roundtable at Interop 2013 has become a tradition, thanks to the courtesy of Interop PR. I’ve experienced all four hotels in the Mandalay strip, learned the secret identity of airline chicken, and met some great people with great projects and products and the occasional interesting vending machines.
rsts11 - Robert Novak on system administration 