Audience participation in storage networking. (first in / first out).

Nothing adds to an experience like audience participation. Bringing the spectator into the plot adds considerably to the value of an event, as entertainers like Carol Burnett and game show icon Monty Hall can attest. In the world of computer mass storage, though, audience participation has risen to the next level. This represents a welcome change from the traditional "take it or leave it" attitude that many vendors have leveraged over the years.

SNIA's effort to involve CIOs in the plot is made flesh in the organization's Customer Executive Council. Its charter is to benefit both customers and vendors of storage networking technology. Customers benefit by having a direct voice into the storage networking industry to assert their shared storage requirements and strategic goals. Vendors benefit by having a broader exposure to the customer base and its needs. The Customer Executive Council thus provides a means to streamline the process of turning shared storage requirements into solutions, which expands business opportunities for vendors and puts viable products into the customers' hands sooner.

The council and its goals certainly play to the current marketing philosophies of the storage community. Vendors and analysts in the industry all point to the need to identify a customer's "pain" and to develop products, architectures and infrastructures that relieve that "pain" in a profitable way. The CEC is composed of corporate and institutional IT executives and managers who are responsible for the storage strategies of their organizations. End-user participants in the Customer Executive Council are not required to be SNIA members.

One of the spark plugs engaged with the CEC is technologist Tom Clark from Nishan Systems. He comments, "The CEC from a strategic point and the Customer Advisory Council from a hands-on level are looking to channel unfiltered customer input into the industry, as opposed to vendor groups that filter." Clark is referring to the number of vendor user groups whose input is filtered to match a company's technology agenda or strategic worldview. The groups also sometimes keep this kind of customer input to themselves for competitive reasons.

Whether exploring pain or identifying satisfaction, input from CIOs and users is one of the grass-roots requirements in charting the technological course of mass storage hardware, software, systems and subsystems. The SNIA outreaches in this area are valuable, and could easily be some of the stars that chart the course to storage's next generations.