So this rant was conceived one night while laying in bed and thinking about the term “Trusted Advisor” I am not sure why but I keep getting a vision of a guy trying to sell me a whole life policy – maybe this is because this term  is so heavily associated with the insurance and certified financial planning industry – maybe this is why the term “Trusted Advisor” makes me feel like I need to take a shower.  2007 marks my 12th year working in the storage industry in a customer facing role, over the twelve years I have meet with thousands of customer and I can honestly say never once have I billed myself as a “Trusted Advisor” but I have built hundreds of “Trusted Relationships”, I asked myself why the two terms are different to me and the following is what came to mind.  Technology is a moving target and as advisors we draw upon market data, practical experience and technical acumen but there are no true guarantees.  Is trust and can trust be the product of advice?  In my humble opinion trust is built on relationship and a relationship is built on something far less tangible than advice.

I gave this analogy to my wife last night.  I have a financial advisor who has delivered me good financial returns over the past 10 years, he considers himself “Trusted Advisor” – I consider him a financial advisor who makes me money because it makes him money.  This is not a negative statement but rather reality as he is running a business not a philanthropy.  BTW – I don’t “Trust” him, he does a good job and his competence and diligent nature is what keeps him around, he works hard and invests his personal time in me which I value.  On the other hand my brother is the worse financial mind possibly in the history of homo sapiens, but we have a trusted relationship, I trust him because of our relationship and the assurances that relationship provides, the fact that I just know he would never intentionally or knowing screw me is what I call “Trust”.

As technologists or financial advisors should we be or is it even possible to gain trust trough advice, in situations where hundreds, maybe even thousands of variables can affect the effectiveness of our advice?

I don’t have the answer, what I do know is that in my experience personal relationships are not replaceable and are not earned through solicited or unsolicited advice.  People trust people, not advice or technologies. 

Finally I have given advice on solutions over the past 12 years on solutions that made people heroes and I have provided advice that absolutely sucked, sometimes due to my own doing and sometimes due to variables outside my control.  The thing that I am most proud of is never abandoned anyone and I have never burnt a relationship – I have always worked hardest to make sure the perception was one of success – ultimately this is the only thing that matters.  In my opinion the strong personal bond that is a relationship can not be formed between a corporation and an individual, this will always be the job of individuals and the value of “Trusted Relationship” lies in the hands of the individual.  Corporations can only hope to be lucky enough to cash in on the dividends of the “Trusted Relationship”.

So what do this all really mean, well to me advice and trust have nothing to do with each and it should stay that way.  On the other hand trust and relationship go hand-and-hand, good advice or bad advice may very well effect these but neither trust nor relationship should be predicated on advice.

Not sure if anyone watches “The Colbert Report” but Steven Colbert uses the word “truthiness” in the political context.  Today every “Trusted Advisor” has their own sense of “truthiness”.  Betting my relationships or trust on truthiness just does not seem like a good idea 🙂

Well this is definitely a rant.  Oh and there is plenty of “truthiness” to go around as well 🙂

So I have been pretty busy the past couple of weeks.  Two weeks in Vegas, first the 2006 Gartner Data Center Conference and then Storage Decisions.  While I was flying around as always my brain was thinking of the topics that would make for a good rant.  So I am working on the following blogs to be published in the coming days:

1. The “Trusted Advisor”  and the “Trusted Relationship”
2. Information Technology Segmentation – Why? How? What?
3. Required changes and challenges associated with infrastructure convergence.

Today I am working on the “Trusted Advisor” blog, this blog is one that I believe should prompt some significant discussion.

After reading a post from my good friend Alex Weeks at vi411.org about his opinion on the Microsoft and Novell agreement it reminded me that I wanted to post my take after doing some research. I have come to the conclusion as many others have that this was a big win for Microsoft because they now gain access to the “Pike Patent” – for those of you unfamiliar with this patent it is important to note that Microsoft has been in lose violation of it since the dawn of the Windows OS, now any potential problems have evaporated. In short the Pike patent deals with overlapping windows and transparency, originally granted to AT&T and acquired by Novell, Microsoft now has access to this patent. They also gain access to some interesting SMP and clustering patents. My guess this makes sense for Novell because of the huge influx of cash and the “potential” access to Microsoft technology like AD, cifs, etc… Only time will tell but I think that Microsoft actually gained much more from this deal – some how they always do. Novell, the modern day Gary Kildall?

Heavy focus the evolution toward the virtual infrastructure.  Today x86 virtualization is leading the charge but we are moving towards a virtual infrastructure – Does this remind anyone of the the “Utility Computing Discussion that the emergence of the SAN (Storage Area Network) drove?  Having just returned from VMworld 2006 where VMware talked about virtualization as a revolution and now sitting at Gartner Data Center Conference 2006 listening to the first keynote frame much of the conference around virtualization the VMware folks would be very proud.  Another major point discussed was the driving forces behind what Garner calls Real-Time Infrastructe (to be defined in a later post – ironically I defined something I called JiT (Just-in-Time) Infrastructure two years ago for whatever it’s worth.  Gartner defines three driving forces behing the need to move to a Real-Time Infrastructure:

1. Economics
2. QoS (Quality of Service)
3. Agility

I will explain each of these in a follow-up post but it is not hard to see how virtualization is front and center with drivers like these.

Lastly the Gartner analyst talked about how in the future the Hypervisor will become free and the resource management and orchestration will be where the cost will reside.  Interested in you thoughts specifically on this comment – if, when and why?