Category Archives for QNX

Why I’m at NetApp

Making the move from BlackBerry/QNX was not an easy decision to make, so many great people and a ton of great work being done on the IoT products.  However, NetApp’s appeal to me is their concept of the Data Fabric.

It dawned on me while while working on an IoT cloud that Enterprise customers will be accumulating massive new datasets that reside on premise behind the firewall, in the public cloud or private clouds.  Giving customers the ability to easily manage their data across all three of these data locations is of high value, indeed it’s also high risk but high rewards if done well. Delivering on this customer scenario is absolutely what we’re working on here at NetApp.

Our first products for the cloud now reside in the Amazon AWS Marketplace, current customers will see product names that they know and use today.  However, this is just the first step towards delivering on NetApp’s Data Fabric vision, and while our customers can now use the same OnCommand data management tools to now manage their Data Fabric across all three data locations there’s much more to come.

I’ll be writing more about what we’re up to here, as well as what I see from my new seat out in the Ecosystem.

Mo’data and mo’data

Happy New Year and may it be a happy and prosperous one for all!

As I looked at customer IOT scenarios for QNX, it became clear to me that managing the coming (or already upon us) crush of data coming from IOT devices would be a challenge for our Enterprise customers.  While I view this as a great sign of coming success for my old friends @ QNX, I knew that management of this data would become increasingly complex with customer’s data in combinations of public clouds, private clouds and hybrids.

This all said, I’m moving on to NetApp who’s customer footprint in these Enterprise customer accounts is already sizable and I’ll have more to say about our plans to take control of your own data to keep pace with your business needs.

With a New Year, a new focus

Beginning in the New Year I’m moving on from my role at QNX Software to both a new role and a new employer. I’ll discuss my new Ecosystem focus once I’ve settled into role in the new year.

I want to say thank you to so many people at both greater BlackBerry/QNX and the best Community I’ve had the pleasure of working with during my career. It’s been a great pleasure and honor to work with so many of you around the world over the last three years. I leave with great memories and proud of the accomplishments that we all achieved together.

Please keep in touch, I know that we’ll all run in to each other again out in the Ecosystem.

Happy Holidays and a Great New Year to you all!

Back at El Rancho de IoT

This week I’ve been up at QNX HQ in planning meetings.  This was a great experience for a number of reasons, but, primarily just seeing the QNX leadership team in action.  I’m a guy who bears the scars of product review meetings with Bill Gates over the years, so, when people say technology isn’t a contact sport I beg to differ.  I have to say what I saw this week was very close to sessions I remember from Microsoft at it’s peak in the 1990’s.  The good news, seeing the emphasis on architecture.

Having been @MSFT for the genesis of the Windows NT operating system in ’89/’90, and the long run it’s had for the industry I can testify first hand about the importance of getting your architecture right, the pay off is obvious.  I worked closely with Dave Cutler’s team (now Chief Technical Fellow @ MSFT) and took their designs and reviewed them with the leaders in technology of the day, ecosystem friends and competitors.  There are subsystems in Windows that still manifest the impact of this review loop today.
I’m pleased to report we’re doing the same thing for my new products, talking to customers early, working hard to get things right.  We’re both building a cloud based system, but also getting it right on the device.  If your on device agents processing markedly changes device state, you’re really not measuring the true device state, are you?   Architecture matters, it’s not easy to do, but will show it’s value over time.

Gnarled two week IoT veteran speaks

I have been in my new gig for just over two weeks and have spent a lot of this time reading up on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) landscape, Clearly, the tech industry hype machine is in overdrive.  I guess these two weeks now makes me an industry veteran, at least given the rapidly shifting market landscape and the divergent approaches that exist today.

Maybe it’s my old PC systems management background or even my recent mobile MDM bias, but a lot of what’s being built in the market appears to be modeled upon those pioneering systems. I think this is the wrong approach,  The Internet of Things is all about the device and it’s unique functional characteristics.  Period.  Hence, any product built to address IoT scenarios must take a device first approach.

It should not be a surprise for me to say given the institutional knowledge @QNX that this is the design approach we’re taking.  Now you’re asking, “What does that mean?”.  I will from time to time share more thoughts as we make our way to market and what it means to be truly device first.