John Gannon

This past Thursday I left the friendly confines of VMTurbo HQ and attended Highland Capital Partners‘ “Sales 2.0″ conference in Cambridge, MA.    The conference was dedicated to sharing knowledge about the “low touch” sales model -  a sales model that does not depend on an army o... (more)

SEO Journal on Ulitzer Aside from not blogging recently, I have been spending alot of time speaking with folks in the online marketing space as I work on building the go-to-market strategy and machinery for VMTurbo.  One area which I knew little about when I started having these... (more)

I often have career discussions with entrepreneurs – both young and more mature – whether they should join company “X” or not. I usually pull the old trick of answering a question with a question. My reply is usually, “is it time for you to earn or to learn?” via Is it Time for ... (more)

A quick diagnostic I now use for marketing departments: if you are in a startup selling to a specific set of customers and/or industry and your marketing department doesn’t have any people from that industry, your tenure as a VP of Marketing has passed its half-life. via Steve B... (more)

Image via Wikipedia Would you share anonymized data about the configuration of your systems and networks if by contributing that data you were entitled to review the aggregated data (scrubbed of any personally identifiable information)? As far as I know, this configuration data is... (more)

Loved this snippet from a recent Burton Group blog post… “complexity makes life interesting and ensures full employment” via Data Center Strategies: Storage is too complex. Posted in Uncategorized ... (more)

You can find it here. If you’re interested in cloud, virtualization, or IT management, expect to see a few posts per week on those topics. Hope to see you there! Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: vmturbo ... (more)

Facebook on Ulitzer David Sze, a venture capitalist from Greylock Capital and investor in Facebook, says he has watched Zuckerberg over the past two years since his investment, and may have underestimated Zuckerberg’s ability to scale. “When I invested, I thought Mark was one in ... (more)

Interesting VC associate role in NYC for someone with ‘big data’ experience and an MBA.  Brief snippet below and more details here. I am currently spending a lot of time evaluating companies targeting “big-data,” predictive analytics, anomaly detection, machine learning, high-pe... (more)

So true…the original post by @cdixon is also great… msuster wrote: Chris, I’m so glad you wrote this. Everybody asks the question and now I’ll just send them the link ;-) We recently hired an associated. I got > 700 resumes and I didn’t even post that widely. 65 of them were of ... (more)

We just launched a very simple website for my new company, VMTurbo.  If you’re interested in VMware, virtualization, or cloud, drop in and register so we can keep you up to date with what we’re doing. We also just grabbed the VMTurbo twitter account, although we’re not using it ... (more)

Image via CrunchBase I wish LinkedIn would allow me to forward an email to an alias (like Salesforce, Basecamp, Tripit, and various other services that allow records to be added via email) and then automatically send a connection request to the person who was in the From: line fr... (more)

As a member of the virtualization startup ecosystem, it was good to see one of our own (Springsource) get picked up by VMware for a cool $400MM+ this week.  The private market and public market (really any market) are terrible right now so it is encouraging to see one of the tech... (more)

3Par, a Fremont, Calif.-based maker of storage arrays for data centers, pre-announced lowered earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2009 yesterday, blaming, among other things, the fact that customers don’t have access to the electricity needed to add 3Par gear to the... (more)

I recently decided to make a career change and at the end of the month will be leaving the world of venture capital (as some affectionately refer to as ‘The Dark Side’) for the maybe greener and definitely more uncertain pastures of the startup world.  My time at L Capital over t... (more)

I have found that there’s a simple test for whether you are learning in your career. Look back 3–5 years from today and ask yourself if you could have been substantially more effective at your past job in your present form. If you look back a few years and feel like in comparison... (more)

Is VMware’s new vCenter Chargeback dead on arrival? At its current list price of $750 per managed processor, it may well be. Even though some VMware users understand how Chargeback could help them better utilize resources and reduce sprawl, its price tag will make it a hard sell.... (more)

My favorite portfolio CEO quote of the day – “Pleasant persistence overcomes resistance.” via Joe Medved (joevc) on Twitter. Posted in Uncategorized ... (more)

Image by DavidDMuir via Flickr VMware announced GA for a bunch of products today, including the vCenter chargeback package. I’m a little surprised that they have not priced it lower, or decided to give it away for free. Most enterprise IT shops talk a good game about doing charge... (more)

Set aside one hour daily for active marketing: Software developers love to spend days and nights coding great stuff. Focusing on marketing, sales and customer activities is not quite as exciting. Put some discipline in place. A good starting point is to devote one hour per day of... (more)