I met with SNIA whilst at SNW and had an interesting discussion about SNIA in Europe and potential for future directions. But before I get into that; a couple of people mentioned that they prefer SNW Europe to SNW USA on the grounds that the attendance in Europe is more real and that there are more end-users as opposed to a bunch of industry insiders, an interesting observation.
Still back to SNIA; I'm hoping that all my readers are at least vaguely familiar with SNIA, although I have horrible suspicion that many aren't. And I think that is the main problem with SNIA; for example, the attendance at SNW Europe was 1764 delegates which is a record attendance; yet compare that to some of the larger industry events and it's a pretty poor. I wonder why this is? In theory, the audience for SNW should be as large if not larger than those events focused on a single technology.
For some reason, SNIA appear to be struggling to find a real role in what is still a huge growth IT area; take the SNIA certifications. How many people are aware that SNIA offer vendor-neutral certifications? How many people would even look for them on a CV (Resume)? I'm certainly aware of their existence but it has ever occured to me to look for it when I'm recruiting? Nope, never!
However, a vendor-neutral certification should be pretty important when looking for designers, architects etc; it should show that the person can think beyond what their most recent vendor told them. I gather that it has more value and recognition in the US but in the UK? It's really a non-factor; I wonder whether it would be possible to turn the SNIA certifications which have a level of recognition akin to that of the CISSP? That's one of the challenges that I think SNIA need to take on.
End-user engagement; getting end-users involved somehow in their standard's initiatives might bring a healthy dose of reality to them. But we are all busy people and getting time away from the day job to do this sort of work is hard but maybe SNIA can engage with a good social media strategy; Twitter, Blogs (their own but also commenting and engaging in debate on the existing blogs), turning up to #storagebeers and generally getting more visibility.
Fortunately, SNIA seem to understand all this and certainly have ambitions to do many of these things; let's all of us encourage them! Face it without the end-users, there is no Storage Networking Industry and hence no need for an Association. I think that we need to be telling these guys what we want to ensure that they stay relevant to us.
Go to the Academy events; if you don't get anything of value from them, collar the organisers and explain (politely) what would make them better. Go to SNW if you can and do the same. And the SNIA guys, come along to #storagebeers; if you aren't engaging with the sort of people who attend #storagebeers, you are missing out on a whole bunch of end-user enthusiasts who could do you a lot of good.
Storagebod: a refreshing call to action!
As a longstanding SNIA watcher, the end-user involvement is clearly lacking. Ambitions have been high, but participation did not reach the heyday of GUIDE and SHARE as an example.
Conversely, imagine storage networking run in isolation by proprietarily minded vendors: truly dreadful. So SNIA made a very positive difference.
But committee work is slow and cannot keep up with innovation. Hence it ended up being a vendor club, as customers ran out of steam to volunteer.
Rereading the vision and mission statement, it appears to confirm the vendor focus. And certification never really took off, as I recall.
The European Academies are good and so is the idea of nurturing social networking. If this is valuable enough, then peer-to-peer pressure could re-ignite the SNIA end-user contingent.
Having experienced the energy of the un-conference and un-panels of CloudCamp, SNIA should learn from these initiatives which are very much in the spirit of modern social networks. And #storagebeers does not need to be invented, it is already there!