Vignettes I Heard this Week….

Another week in a startup, means another week on the road.  I was in BOS, NYC, SFO and Palo Alto this week for a mix of customer meetings, conferences and networking.  I enjoy spending time in PA because I always get a good mix of topical conversation with VCs, entrepreneurs, colleagues, customers and others.  Here are some things I overheard that made me think:

– VC: The social networking IPO window is now closed, if you did not get out, it could be a long wait and could impact returns.

– VC: We think the market that turns next will be the enterprise infrastructure market.  A lot of people stopped investing in this space a decade ago, but it looks to be hot in 2013.

– IT Practitioner: SSDs will be great, but it is their power consumption that is compelling — not IOPs

– IT Practitioner: We need to have a focus on applications as in defining the infrastructure from the needs of the application. Let the applications automate network infrastructure by having the applications tell the network what to build or provision.

– IT Practitioner:  Service is more important than technology, infrastructure world needs to be application aware, we have ten of thousands of servers and they average 10% utilization, 

– IT Practitioner: Our goals are to automate, normalize and build orchestration and contextual references to data

– IT Practitioner:  Networks were designed from the wires up and that is bad.  We are turning that upside down.  We are designing networks that are application aware.  We started with a modeling tool that looks at the app and designs the network to meet the needs of the app.  We want to deliver the network to the applications needs.

– IT Practitioner: IaaS is very immature.  Vendors supplying systems for IaaS are large companies and they move slow.  When large companies look to large vendors to provide innovation, nothing gets done.  Big vendors want to buy small companies as innovators, but that just ruins the innovation.

– IT Practitioner: Fault domain has to be one of the very first things you discuss with us.  It is a shared environment killer.

– Startup Employee: We are building SDN without OpenFlow

– Networking Employee: We are looking at all the SDN startups, what do you do?

– Startup Employee: Does your firm attempt to influence regulators on polices of security?

– Startup Employee: At one point do you just stop trying to secure your IT infrastructure and just buy an insurance policy?  10%, 20% secure?

– Networking Employee: Cisco is really going after Arista in the switching market.

– Networking Employee: I have been BYOD for about seven years now, my IT department has yet to authorize BYOD and is looking for me.

– Analyst: More struggling tech companies should do the Sycamore.    

– VC: We do not invest in semi companies and have not in more than a decade.

/wrk