May 29, 2007

Smarter than a Fifth Grader

I know that counting numbers, ratios, and comparative percentages can be challenging, even for professional adults. For example, taking a ratio like "we beat our competitor 98% of the time this quarter". A simple enough equation -- "98 of 100 times we won." However, to make that equation have any value, you first have to get accurate underlying data. Then you can do the math and hopefully win a round at "Smarter than a Fifth Grader".

But getting the initial data right isn't always so easy. Or maybe just not in everyone's best interest. Take for example Cisco's recent entrance into the rapidly growing "WAN optimization" market. A hot market by anyone's standards -- the market analysts see it as nearly $600M last year (2006) and growing to $800M-$1B over the next 2-3 years. Cisco itself can claim around 500 new customers in the last 6 months, and nearly 1000 to date.

So if you extrapolate that math from the ratio we noted above -- other vendors claiming 98% win rate in their external reports and reporter calls -- then the total market must be HUGE, since this sample vendor must have won 25,000+ customers over that same six months (25,000 = 500 Cisco wins @ 2% of market). But here's where the numbers and ratios we noted above can be challenging -- the noted vendor in this example claims only 2000 customers to date, and that's from a very recent announcement.

The impact of these math errors can often have far reaching consequences, with even trade magazines, full-scale business publications and Wall St. analysts covering these "equations" without verifying the background data.

Smarter than a fifth grader? If we're talking about people possibly "adjusting" market data to deliver smart-sounding ratios, absolutely at high school-level. If we're talking about actually believing those numbers without solid data to back it up, then no way -- you'll lose to the fifth grader every time.

Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Am I? Let's talk about it.

Posted by Mark Weiner at 11:05 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

May 17, 2007

A lightbulb and a SAN Director - Can you tell the difference?

In the last two of days I have received more than a couple of emails (mostly from Cisco technical sales people) about some testing that our main storage networking competitor has done to show how the power consumption of our MDS 9500 director is higher than that of their current generation of products. Everybody was giving me tons of reasons why the comparison was not correct and how real life environment were different than the test set up.

I thought about posting a very long explanation of the fallacies of such a test with all of the technical details behind that, but then I realized that there may be an easier way to explain.

I am in the midst of a small home remodeling project and I have to make a couple of decisions on lighting for the backyard. Guess what? One of the key decisions is about choosing the light bulbs (it's a bit complicated as the types of lighting are varied).

I had the option of putting multiple small light bulbs in the back yard (they consume less power, don't they?) but that would be a less desirable choice. The efficiency of many small light bulbs is significantly lower than that of one large light bulb (which has been designed to light a broad space such as my back yard) and to get the same lighting power. To get the same light from multiple small bulbs distributed around the yard I would have had to consume much more power overall. Also, with many small light bulbs distributed around the yard, I would need to pull wires all around the yard to make sure that there is enough light in each corner, which creates another set of issues (installing and protecting the wiring infrastructure, etc). And I could go on forever on why this is wrong, but I think you have got the point by now.

I am not going to make the story too long and we can certainly continue this discussion in the post session with more technically accurate arguments, but I hope this example makes the point.

Can you tell the difference between a SAN Director and a light bulb now?

Posted by Dante Malagrino at 06:50 AM Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)