Tag: tradeshow

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Deduplication Marketing

Data Domain keynote at SNW – Slootman’s surprising response

I attended multiple keynote and breakout sessions at SNW last week, but my busy meeting schedule conflicted with many of the morning sessions. I was able to attend to Data Domain’s talk given by Frank Slootman and wanted to provide some commentary.

The bulk of the session was boring and included what appeared to be a standard corporate slide deck which I am sure any salesperson could present in their sleep.  The presentation could be summarized with Data Domain’s usual message: inline deduplication is good and everything else is bad, and, of course, Data Domain’s deduplication is the best.  I was definitely hoping for something more interesting and was sorely disappointed; however, things changed when it came to the Q&A.

Just to provide a bit of background, my experience with SNW is described here.  There were a large number of end users in attendance both at the expo and the keynote sessions and I estimate that many of the show’s 900 end users were in attendance for this talk.  At the end of the planned remarks, Slootman opened the floor to questions.

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Deduplication Marketing

SNW Recap

I returned from SNW in Phoenix last night and wanted to recap the event.  I had 10+ meetings at the show and there were multiple sessions and so am providing my perspectives on the event in general and the sessions I did attend.

Deduplication remains hot and still confuses many
I attended 5 different sessions on deduplication.  The content overlapped quite a bit and yet all but one of them was full.  The presentation in all cases focused primarily on deduplication and data protection.  I heard that there was a great panel discussion on primary storage deduplication which I unfortunately missed. Clearly, primary storage dedupe was not ignored, but it appeared that data protection remained the focus of the dedupe sessions.

Anecdotally, the most common deduplication question related to the difference between target and source deduplication.  It also appeared that deduplication adoption was limited.  When asked who was using some form of deduplication about 50% of the audience raised their hand, but when queried about system size, hands went down rapidly at around 10-15 TB.

The key takeaway is that deduplication remains a strong point of interest.  It appears that end users are still trying to understand the technology and how to implement it on a larger scale.

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Marketing

AboutRestore Nomination and Musings on a Virtual Tradeshow

First, AboutRestore.com was recently nominated as a top storage vendor blog over at StorageMonkeys, and there is an open vote to decide the winner. Here is a link to the voting page and I encourage my readers to participate.

Second, I attended the Storage Decisions Data Deduplication Virtual Tradeshow a couple of weeks ago. The last time I attended a virtual trade show was about a year ago and it was interesting to revisit this medium.

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Marketing

Tradeshow giveaway gone bad: the video

Tradeshow marketers spend hours trying to scheme up new and unique programs to drive booth traffic and these often include free giveaways. Ironically, the simplest things such as t-shirts or bags can be good traffic generators, and it is amazing that people can get so excited about tchotchkes that cost $2 or less.

One common approach is a two tiered program where you hand out an inexpensive item (like a t-shirt) and tell booth visitors that they must be wearing it to be eligible for a future drawing for a more expensive item. In order for this to work, the vendor must have an ample supply of the initial giveaway and the final item must be of high enough value to encourage participation. As you can imagine, marketers spend a ton of time and money putting together these programs.

Now fast forward to the recent VMWorld show, FalconStor used a two tier program where they offered free t-shirts at their booth and then had a drawing for a Segway scooter. The program stipulated that attendees must be wearing the FalconStor t-shirt at the time of the drawing to be eligible.

Well, in classic case of sales people ignoring the marketing people, the sales folks at the booth picked a winner who was not wearing a t-shirt and decided to give him the Segway anyway. This contradicted the terms of the program and the audience did not react favorably. This is a marketers worst nightmare; their carefully orchestrated program has been ruined and it is clear that many booth visitors left feeling angry. Click more to see the YouTube video which shows what happened; it is quite humorous and makes you wonder “what were they thinking?”

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Deduplication Marketing

Tradeshow perspectives

I spent last week at a tradeshow in New York. These events are interesting because of the various end user perspectives. Those of us in the industry often get embroiled in the minutiae of products and features, and so it is very useful to understand the views of the end users on the show floor. Storage Decisions is a show that prides itself on highly qualified attendees.

One of the most curious things about the show was attendees’ obsession with inline vs post process deduplication. Numerous end users stopped by asking only about when DeltaStor deduplicates data. In the rush of the show, there was little time to discuss the question in much detail. It struck me as odd that these attendees focused on this question which in my opinion is the wrong question to ask. I can only surmise that they had gotten an earful form competing vendors who swore that inline is the best approach.

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