Sometimes it’s literally relative. My mother is on her way from North Carolina about to move into an assisted living facility a mile from me. Her biggest concern is whether she can keep her door open into the hallway, as she’s terrified of being alone, but won’t exit the room either. My mother was a pit bull when I was a kid. Now she’s not even 65 but 50 years of non-stop smoking and a few massive coronaries later she looks 90. I have a 16 year old that may result in the death of one of us, and 3 other kids that require unending attention. Now I have mom. It’s the changes you can’t predict that can end up derailing a perfectly good plan.

I listen to short-term tactical and long-term business strategies for a living. Like anything in life, if you see something enough, you can start to spot the problems or the brilliance in fairly short order. Creating a brilliant strategy is hard. Creating one that survives curveballs is art. I’ve heard some of the best overall strategic plans you can imagine – from companies who aren’t around anymore. The key, it seems, is to never be so steadfast in your planning that you can’t get out of your own way when things invariably change.

So how do the successful companies become successful without the benefit of a crisp, thousand page MBA strategic doctrine? Is it luck? Yes. Is it timing? Yes. Is it in the ability to adapt? Absolutely. But the one thing that I learned a hundred years ago from a nice man by the name of Roger Marino about the key to success in business was having "a mediocre plan executed violently". That pretty much sums it up. You can have the best plan on the planet but if you don’t have the people to pull it off, it’s just an academic exercise. Without clear, simple objectives that everyone in the building can rally around, the odds are that failure is inevitable. This is true on a battlefield and true in business. A simple, adaptable plan with the right people pointed in the right direction with the right motivation is the critical common factor of success. Focus on what’s important, and run away from the things that aren’t.

Case in point, I’m writing this from the basement of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. 4 years ago I finished treatment for Hodgkin’s disease (the good Hodgkin’s, for you Larry David fans). Today I appear for my semi-annual nuclear PET scan to make sure the evil cells are still at bay. I’d rather be in my staff meeting, really, but this probably has more profound ramifications. Life is loaded with curveballs, so to think business would be any different seems a tad naïve.

I spent some time last week running away from my kids and spending some time with a few clients, discussing a myriad of plans based on a myriad of factors. Here are some of the highlights;

Riverbed CEO Jerry Kennelly is impossible not to like. He rides the bus to and from work. You just have to love a supremely wealthy success story that rides the bus to work. The company has executed just about as well as can be done. Their growth has been meteoric and their prospects even better. They have fended off Cisco and smaller folks, and are about as dominantly positioned as anyone can be. Their numbers and ratio’s are to die for. So what should Riverbed be worried about? You might think the global recession would be a concern, but it isn’t. People who make existing infrastructure investments work 50 times better are better off in a recession, as crazy as that seems. When cost matters, the guy who provides the value that is easiest to see gets the money. When cost doesn’t matter, the market leader gets the money. Jerry has both right now. Wall St. should be a concern, but not for business reasons. People have a tendency to try to run their business for Wall St. analysts instead of customers once they go public, and that’s about as big a mistake as you can make. Wall St. is a distraction, not an asset. Use them when it’s advantageous public relations wise, but never build a strategic plan with them mind. I think Jerry’s issue is around teaching the world that the stuff they make – WAN plumbing acceleration (which means LAN is around the corner) is not only a killer way to increase the value of your existing investments but a mandatory element if you want to play in the wacky world of Web 2.0 – where everything is a big, fat file and everyone who needs to create it, store it, or access it is a zillion miles away. This is an important area that eventually will get Riverbed snatched up, and then maybe Jerry can upgrade to the Trolley Cars.

There are a bunch of other folks who have been wildly successful creating and executing in a new market, that are now working on the next stage of life. Data Domain has continued to execute well and now needs to foster more consumption. I like that they are willing to look into the mirror and ask themselves hard questions. It’s easy to question yourself when you are failing; it’s really hard to do so when the Brinks truck is unloading piles of cash into your lobby. The recently public darlings of industry are now on an even faster treadmill, and this time it’s under a microscope. Compellent, Isilon, 3PAR, CommVault, and Netezza have taken the plunge – and it hasn’t made their lives any easier overall. They are all adapting to their own new realities, and need to do so without losing focus on the changing environment around them. At this point, they all continue to execute, but they all face hurdles that will challenge each more and more.

I saw some smaller guys with some really interesting strategic thoughts. ExaGrid is run by the numbers. Bill Andrews is a data nut (and, he’s short, which I admire for some reason). The man knows his business. Getting that business to accelerate fast enough to take control of a market or sub-market is the challenge. In the right market opportunity, they win. In the wrong one, they lose. If he can keep the (rapidly growing – which is a whole different challenge) team focused on right plays and find a leverage model to put them into more deals, they have a legit shot to riches, but it’s a fine line. Step out of bounds and there are a lot of big sharks ready to eat you. Move too far downstream and you don’t have the reach or distribution to succeed. Bill’s key, like almost any business, is to know where you belong and violently attack that space.

On an even smaller note, I spent some time with Gaal Naor, CEO of StorWize. Formerly a classic Israeli technology startup, Gaal recognized that to make a serious bid for stardom, the company needed to build its sales, marketing, support, and executive operations in the U.S. and moved his family and team to Silicon Valley. I’d rather be in Tuscany, personally, but I don’t make the rules. The company spent the last several years perfecting their technology – inline compression for primary disk systems. With all the de-duplication efforts going on in the data protection area, these guys went right at the toughest slice of the market first – the database. The database is the Holy Grail of data management applications, as it tends to cost a ton itself, sits at the heart of the most visible business applications, and is surrounded by the most expensive infrastructure a company has to buy. Gaal tells me that he can prove 90% capacity reduction and performance GAINS for an Oracle environment. Our Lab guys are going to figure out if my friend has been breathing 101 exhaust shortly, but imagine how popular this could become if even close to true. Think of the disruptive potential for everything from backup/archiving to all of a sudden being able to tell the VP of Infrastructure that you won’t be needing any more high-end arrays for a while – or ever. Assuming it all pans out, the challenge is not the technology – the challenge is the ability to demonstrate how seamless, easy, and non-disruptive it can be – because no one is going to add risk or complexity to that critical environment. It appears that StorWize has a marketing challenge – which is much more difficult than an engineering challenge (with all due respect to my math centric friends). History is littered with brilliant technology that died on the vine because the company focused on the technology instead of on the market requirements and an executable strategy to conquer it. Case in point, until a short time ago, the company name was StorWiz. Apparently GigaDump was already taken (line flagrantly stolen from Mike Beaudet). You get my point. Like it or not, you have to think like an idiot American to sell to an idiot American. Anything with "Wiz" in it is going to be mocked by idiot Americans – myself included.

Finally, in a much different strategy exercise, the folks at Kazeon are faced with even more interesting possibilities. Kazeon builds enterprise search functionality. They, and the rest of the planet, call it all sorts of different things, but when you summarize it they provide an organization – or sub-organization – the ability to find relevance in the sea of unstructured data. The good news for Kazeon and others is that people are finally figuring out that search (and preferably relevant search) is THE killer application. The bad news is there aren’t enough people who have figured that out yet. Kazeon has been taking the low hanging fruit, which today is all about litigation support and e-discovery, but needs the market to broaden its appetite. In a way, they are very similar to VMware in that both need to enable consumption in order to move to the next level. Server virtualization is even hotter than search in the world, and clearly the revenue numbers back that up on the vendor side, but both need those who see the value to be able to accelerate adoption. Think of the way that Google changed the way to monetize their software service, aka search. They did it with eyeballs. The users’ value realized is the search service. Google could have tried to sell us all their search software, but it knew that would be a barrier to consumption. If the way that business is currently conducted is not conducive to mass consumption – either because of the way companies buy or what budget something has to come out of – then maybe it’s time to think about a different go to market strategy.

A big strategy is cool, but it’s the little details that can kill you. Four years ago I didn’t have a hair on me. I looked like a short, fat, Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Who would have thought that eyelashes would be so important? Not me. Turns out eyelashes aren’t just to look pretty – they actually keep stuff out of your eyes. I didn’t pay attention to them while I had them, but they caused huge problems being able to see or keep things out of my eyeballs when they were gone. A little thing like that which is taken for granted or ignored can throw the whole strategy off kilter in no time.

I checked out fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.

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3. Closing the Gap between IT and the Business by Virtualizing Data
4. The End Of The Storage Business……..
5. Business Continuance vs. Disaster Recovery