Applying Innovation in the Workplace

Those of us in this IT industry need not be reminded that IT is as much of a consumer of solutions as it is a provider of services.  Advancing technologies attempt to provide services that are faster, more resilient, and feature rich. Sometimes advancement brings unintended consequences while simultaneously creating even more room to innovate. Exciting for sure, but all of this can become a bit precarious if you hold decision making responsibilities on what technologies best suite your environment. Go too deep on the unproven edge, and risk the well-being of your company, and possibly your career. Arguably more dangerous is to stay too conservative, and risk being a Luddite holding onto unused, outdated or failed vestiges of your IT past. It is a delicate balance, but rarely does it reward the status quo. There is an IT administrator out there somewhere that still doesn’t trust x86 servers, let alone virtualization.

Nobody in this industry is the sole proprietor of innovation, and we are all better off for it. Good ideas are everywhere, and it is fun to see them materialize into functional products. IT departments get a front row seat in seeing how different solutions solve problems. Some ideas are better than others. Others create more problems than they fix. Many companies providing a solution are victims of bad timing, bad marketing, or poor execution. In the continuum of progress and changing market conditions, others fail to acknowledge the change and course correct, or simply lost sight of why they exist in the first place.

Then, there are some solutions that show up as a gem. Perhaps they are transformational to how a problem is solved. Maybe they win you over by their elegance in masking the terribly complex with clean and simple. Maybe the solution has a bit of both. Those who are responsible for running environments get pretty good at recognizing the standouts.

Innovation’s impact on thinking differently
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse" — Henry Ford

It started out as a simple trial of some beta software. It ended up as an integral component of my infrastructure; viewed in the same way as my compute, switchgear, storage, and hypervisor. That is basically the story of how PernixData FVP became a part of my environment. For the next 18 months I would watch daily, hourly, even by the minute as to how my very demanding workloads were improved because of this new approach to solving a common problem. The results were immediate, and obvious. Faster code compiling times. Lower latencies and more predictable performance for all of our applications. All while gaining better visibility to the behavior and needs of our workloads. And of course, storage arrays that were no longer paralyzed by I/O requests. Even the best of slide decks couldn’t convey what I was seeing. I got to see it happen every day, and much like the magic of virtualization in general, it never got old.

It is for that reason that I’ve joined the team at PernixData. I get the chance to help others understand how the PernixData approach can help their environment, and is more than just a faster horse. I’m no longer responsible for my own workloads, but now get to help people better understand their own. Since I’ve always had a passion for virtualization, IT infrastructures, and how real application workloads impact an environment, I think it’s going to be a great fit. I look forward to working with an unbelievably talented group of people. It is quite an honor.

A tip of the hat
I leave an organization that is top notch. Tecplot is a market leader in data visualization, and is routinely voted in the top 100 companies to work for. This doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from great people, great leadership, and has resulted in trusted, innovative products. I would like to thank the ownership group for allowing me the opportunity to be a part of their team, as it has been an absolute pleasure to work there. I’ve learned a lot from smart, principled folks that make up that company, and am better off for it. I leave behind the day to day administrative duties and challenges of a virtualized environment, but I am very excited to join a great team of really smart people who have helped change how challenges in modern IT infrastructures are viewed, and addressed.

Happy New Year.

– Pete