Windows

Boiling Tape, Screaming Disk & Windows on Steroids

I have been in many a marketing meeting and it can be easy to get caught up in grandiose “creative” plans and “out-of-the-box” thinking – and fly right over your target audience’s head (or at most make their eyes either roll or glaze over).

The smartest move I have seen any marketing professional make is walk right into their local IT manager’s office and ask them what would get them excited about whatever technology their company is hocking.

Boiling Tape Cartridges
About 10 years ago I was with a start-up that invented a new tape technology – VXA (now owned by Tandberg Data).  The cool thing about VXA was that is writes data to helical tape in data packets – then multiple read heads scan the tape to pick up the data.  If there are tape errors, ECC can use data around the surviving packets to rebuild lost data.

But how to market it?

We walked down to the IT folks and they said, “prove it to me.”  How to prove it?  They said, “boil the tape, freeze the tape, dunk it in coffee – torture it and then try a data restore – show me it works as advertised.”

Well, we did it in our labs first – and it worked!  Our VXA “extreme tested” marketing campaign was born.  We attended a Linux World conference and did a live test – we wrote data to a VXA tape, and then asked conference users to drop it into a large container of hot coffee.  We dried it overnight and the next day we restored 100% of the data from the tape – and signed two Linux OEM deals after that conference.

I am glad to say that this campaign is still being touted today, 10 years later!!!

Screaming at Disk Arrays
Sun Solaris has some pretty amazing monitoring and analytics software built in it.  But the best marketing of it I have seen didn’t come from Sun Marketing.  It came one of its developers posting a video of himself yelling at a couple JBODs.

Windows on Steroids
One of my best friends and best reporters on the planet, Hari Sreenivasan, sent me the following video because he knows I am a storage geek.  Kudos to the marketing folks at Samsung for walking down the hallway to talk to their IT folks on what would get other IT folks excited about SSD…

So, another video to add to the IT marketing Hall of Fame:

• Samsung SSD Awesomeness