With batteries being hot for Solar, seems like the Data Center industry could benefit

Batteries are common in so many data centers, and technology has not changed that much.  With Solar’s growth, it looks like batteries are the new hot thing.  Gigaom’s Katie Fehrenbacher posts on a SF solar trade show.

At a big solar show, batteries take center stage

by 

 

6 HOURS AGO

No Comments

LG's battery at Intersolar, Image courtesy of Gigaom
photo: Image courtesy of Gigaom.
SUMMARY:

While solar companies descend on San Francisco this week, it’s the batteries that everyone’s talking about.

How big will this get?

But one entrepreneur’s attention doesn’t make a market. Energy storage has its own momentum. The entire energy storage market is predicted to explode over the next five years, due to a combination in the growth of solar, state mandates (like the one in California) that are pushing storage, and more unpredictable weather that can cause blackouts and require backup storage systems.

Research firm IHS predicts that the energy storage market (which includes batteries but also other storage technologies) will grow from a small base of 0.34 GW installed in 2013 to an annual installation size of 6 GW in 2017 and over 40 GW by 2022. The U.S. is supposed to be the largest market in the world, followed by Germany and Japan.

When making an introduction do you ask for permission?

When someone asks to meet one of your friends, do you fire off an e-mail right away with both parties on it or do you contact your friend and ask for permission to introduce you to a person?  It kind of depends on the circumstances.  Where things get most sensitive is one party could be a buyer and the other is a seller.  I would say you definitely want to get permission from both parties to connect before you make an introduction.

A Drone's view, seeing Fireworks from an immersive view

This Fireworks video has gone viral with over 7 mil views.  Note this is not a 4th of July posting as it went up on May 13, 2014.

One of the cool features of the DSLRPro Drones is a FLIR option.

Cameras are typically not allowed in a data center, but with the growth in drones it seems like a good idea to try to integrate into operations.

 

 

Death of the Tradeshow, transitioning from shallow to deep relationships

One of my LinkedIn connections, Dave Mendlen has a post on why the tradeshow is dead.

Senior Technology Marketing Leader/CMO, Former Microsoft Executive, Speechwriter for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer

I know David from working on speeches for Bill and Steve and when David moved to Visual Studio Marketing.  David’s post on the death of the tradeshow makes excellent points that I am sure many of you will nod your head.

The next time you are at one of those trade shows, watch the engagement model. You will see that almost every customer spends less than a minute at any given booth. They pick up literature, scan their badge to enter the raffle and maybe ask a question or two. In exchange what do you get?

An unqualified lead. I'd argue that the customer likely was interested in winning a free iPad or whatever it is you were raffling off and is not a good, qualified lead. So in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing spend you now have a list of hundreds of unqualified leads - the sales team will call them garbage and they are not wrong.

We’ll see if other marketing companies try to change.

It's time to try a different approach to engage customers. This surface connection to customers is a bad use of marketing dollars and doesn't move the needle.

It's time to drive deeper conversations with customers.

There are exceptions to this, but is it worth the huge marketing spend?  

There are a number of ways to get closer, deeper conversations. It's time to try something different.

Time can support credibility, Google vs. Microsoft outage reports

One of my friends has made the switch from Google to Microsoft.  Well actually I have many friends who have made the switch.  There are also many who have Google to go to Microsoft.  One friend who made who knows how Microsoft works and Google made the point on how the outage reporting posts from the companies differ. 

Microsoft had an Outlook outage with this post on the event.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, some of our Office 365 customers hosted in our North America datacenters experienced unrelated service issues with our Lync Online and Exchange Online services. First, I want to apologize on behalf of the Office 365 team for the impact and inconvenience this has caused. Email and real-time communications are critical to your business, and my team and I fully recognize our accountability and responsibility as your partner and service provider.

Google reported on one of its outages with this.

Earlier today, most Google users who use logged-in services like Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents found they were unable to access those services for approximately 25 minutes. For about 10 percent of users, the problem persisted for as much as 30 minutes longer. Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies—we strive to make all of Google’s services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today.

One way to look at the contrast is Google is specific with the time of 25 minutes, 30 minutes longer.

Microsoft says they have full understanding of the issues, but doesn’t provide the specifics on time.

We have a full understanding of the issues, and the root causes of both the Exchange Online and Lync Online services have already been fixed.

Google had another outage where specifics are reported down to the minute.

Issue Summary

From 6:26 PM to 7:58 PM PT, requests to most Google APIs resulted in 500 error response messages. Google applications that rely on these APIs also returned errors or had reduced functionality. At its peak, the issue affected 100% of traffic to this API infrastructure. Users could continue to access certain APIs that run on separate infrastructures. The root cause of this outage was an invalid configuration change that exposed a bug in a widely used internal library.

Timeline (all times Pacific Time)

  • 6:19 PM: Configuration push begins
  • 6:26 PM: Outage begins
  • 6:26 PM: Pagers alerted teams
  • 6:54 PM: Failed configuration change rollback
  • 7:15 PM: Successful configuration change rollback
  • 7:19 PM: Server restarts begin
  • 7:58 PM: 100% of traffic back online

Outages are painful for all companies.  

Suggestion for when you report your own outage if you include the time of events, then your communication can be viewed as more credible.  Using terms like “some” or “brief” doesn’t work when you are the one who is affected by the outage and brief would mean a minute of outage.