History 2002: Way to Go, Joe!

We weren’t terribly kind to EMC’s chairman and CEO Joe Tucci in our January issue, confening upon him SN’s “Lemon” award after his company’s spectacular decline in 2001.

Which explains, perhaps, why we’re now delighted to have an opportunity to congratulate him.

In a recent interview in ZDNet Australia, Tucci strongly denounced any efforts to use the events of September 11 for marketing purposes to sell storage products. We agree with him 100%. There has hardly been a single PowerPoint presentation or PDF press release that doesn’t include some evocation of that awful day: “Watch out, it could happen to you. Is your data protected?“

The idea here is to capitalize on the fear of another disaster in order to sell remote backup and DR solutions, in other words, to sell 2 storage configurations instead of only one, not to mention the associated network and software add-ons,

To be fair, the press helped pave the way to this approach, with almost every article about storage suggesting that September 11 would jump-start the industry.

But it strikes us as particularly cynical, and reprehensible, to transform the death of 3,000 people into a marketing opportunity. Does the storage industry really want to have September 11 to thank for its recovery? For those of us observing from Europe, it is more than disconnecting to see US storage manufacturers so unashamedly jumping on such a tasteless bandwagon (“Buy this tape array, or the terrorists have won“).

If nothing else, there’s a decided lack of imagination, since there are other, less sensational reasons for protecting data that could be used just as effectively in marketing efforts: human error, bugs, hardware failure, hackers (at the very least, raising the specter of cyber-terrorism wouldn’t seem quite so cynical), natural disasters, and so on. Which is why it’s so surprising, and refreshing, that a single voice, and an influential one no less, that of the head of the world’s leading storage manufacturer, has finally said ‘Enough,’ there are limits that, for the sake of decency, must not be transgressed.

Not all behavior can be justified by the bottom line or wrapped in the American flag. How you go about making your money does matter. Of course, some may question the sincerity of Joe Tucci’s ‘Enough.’

CEO’s declarations are not unlike those of politicians, and should be taken with a grain of salt, since they often hide a strategy – an attempt to enhance one’s image, whether with shareholders and customers, or constituents. Could this be merely an attempt to earn sympathy by a company that has taken a fair amount of flack in recent months from both employees and customers, not to mention the easy for all those US web sites to offer a sympathetic phrase to the pain and heroism of September 11 – it cost so little, and helps to ease the conscience.

Perhaps the worst excess came with all those statements issued with quarterly financial results, blaming the attacks for low revenues and poor performance that clearly cannot all be laid at September 11 ‘s door.

Shorty after the events, Exabyte, Overland Data, Qualstar and Quantum formed a consortium, an initiative that attracted some 20 storage firms, to offer free data recovery services to companies affected by the attacks.

This at least was a step in the right direction, even if it didn’t harm the companies’ images either.

Tucci also told ZDNet, “We have done everything possible not to use (September 11) as a marketing tool.” Not quite everything. EMC’s web site still offers a document entitled: “Lessons learned: September 11 in IT perspective, is your business protected?“.

Let’s just assume that EMC forgot to pull that report, and will do so soon. It’s not unreasonable to hope that Tucci is not the most diabolically cynical man on earth, to the point that he would risk pointing a critical figure at competitors merely to enhance EMC’s image as a moral corporate citizen, for purely commercial ends. Even if this were true, however, we’d still have to say, “Way to go, Joe” just for daring to say, loud and clear, “Enough.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 170 on March 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.