Analysis

posted on 18 April 2008 14:54

It's the end of the week and one's mind turns reflective. Mine started thinking about Quantum and HP and EMC and Overland Storage and the similarities and differences. It became fixated on the differences between entrepreneurs and conductors.

Rick Belluzzo seems to me to be of an entrepreneurial cast of mind for a CEO. He had a wild, wild success with HP's printer business. He was the CEO at Silicon Graphics and then he joined Microsoft as president and COO but left a relatively short time later not having achieved, it seems to me, as commensurate a level of success as he enjoyed at HP.

The next stop was Quantum where he has been esconced as CEO for a few years and made a big difference. Yet the firm's performance has not been stellar. It hasn't, to my mind, lived up to its potential.

With the LTO tape formats on an unstoppable rise, he saw the LTO writing on the wall and instituted a transition from Quantum's proprietary DLT format to LTO. He took the opportunity to buy Certance when Seagate decided to get out of the LTO tape business and thus gained one of the three seats at the LTO consortium's top table.

When Peter Van Oppen appeared receptive to an offer after failing to buy Overland Storage (was he ever really serious about that?) Belluzzo bought ADIC and used its technology to build a DXi de-duplicating, disk-based, data protection product line.

He took Quantum into removable disk storage with the GoVault product. He came to an arrangement with Data Domain about licensing an ADIC/Rocksoft-provided and patented de-dupe technology. But Quantum failed to persuade Riverbed to license that IP and so sued but the case was dismissed. It was a detail-level mistake. When Quantum filed the suit against Riverbed it didn't actually own the patent in question. That was owned by ADIC/Rocksoft; legally not the same entity.

Of course the Quantum lawyers should have picked it up. But they didn't. Details can be devastating when they are missed. Quantum has refiled its suit and it is now pending in California.  .

No question but that Belluzzo has made a difference at Quantum, yet ... where are the HP printer-like results? Quantum is $150 million in debt and the virtual tape library (VTL) line is looking, well, tired some might say. According to a person familiar with the situation, Quantum's VTL clock has been comprehensively cleaned by other VTL vendors.

For example, there are more than 6,000 REO VTLs from Overland installed and that company's resellers seem to be quite confident of overcoming Quantum VTL competition in bids.

Another knowledgable whisper is that the first iteration of the de-duping DXi line was not as sccessful as it might have been, the word 'stumbled' being used.

Then here's GoVault which is another comprehensive clock cleaning situation. ProStor's RDX has cleaned up, thank you Dell, and has perhaps 90 percent of that market.

There's a picture we could draw here, of Belluzzo being a CEO who can see the big pictures very clearly and take decisive action to add new instrumental sections to the Quantum orchestra and retire outmoded ones. But the sound the resulting orchestra produces is not - this is just an impression - is not as good as that which a different kind of leader might produce.

Take HP. Carly Fiorina was another big picture person who could see her way to construct a new form of company but then couldn't get the new HP to perform effectively. That took a different sort of leader, a combination of bean counter, manager and conductor, someone who had more attention to interlocking details.

Look at what Mark Hurd has done with HP. That organisation has evolved from the Fiorina drama days to the apparently smaller scale attentions of Hurd and is now booming. Take a step back into the data protection world and see how Vern Loforti is quietly and efficiently reconstructing Overland Storage with a totally refreshed product line and a company that has recovered its confidence and self esteem.

Good conductor-style CEOs can do this. They combine a sense of the big picture with a sense of how the pieces and details interlock and get their companies moving. They might look like tortoise-style companies when these CEOs start but end up leaving the flashier hares behind as those entrepreneurial creatures zig-zag here and there sorting out the latest big picture drama and relying on management underneath them to do the dull, everyday management detail stuff.

Tucci at EMC is another Hurd-like guy, but he is a combined visionary entrepreneur and detail-minded conductor, a rare, rare breed. So back to Quantum and Rick Belluzzo and the question; when is Belluzzo's Quantum going to perform to the limit of its potential? Can Belluzzo pull off the entrepeneur and conductor combination or is he just (just!) an entrepreneurial, a very impressive entrepreneurial, CEO?

^{[Chris Mellor.]}