Data Center Industry Veteran Lynn Comp Shares 3 Patterns Observed Over 30 Years in Tech
Learning to learn in a structured manner is the only way to maintain a long career in technology. I tell those I mentor they should settle into the reality they will likely have 5+ careers in this industry.
“Don’t be scared, just stay curious,” I say. “Do everything in your power to be the positive influence on every collaboration you engage in.”
Technology domains are small communities, and being the individual who consistently demonstrates high EIQ, dignifies vs. degrades others (regardless of the role they play) is a superpower for the long haul.
Many of us with a longer tenure in technology see patterns in industry transformations, both for good and for ill. Example: years ago, I was informed by a long tenured mainframe/UNIX expert that virtualization was a mainframe feature for decades. If a server solution was considered to be equivalent to “…a toy you find at the bottom of a cereal box”, why bother with virtualization technology that limits performance? (Extra credit: Name the CEO that gave us the soundbite comparing servers to Fruit Loops without doing a web search!)
To kick off my blog series with Tech Arena, I decided to share three patterns I have consistently seen across ~30 yrs of technology inflections.
The “best” solution in the eyes of a customer rarely offers the best raw performance.
As a hardcore engineer fresh out of college, I got my hands dirty coding some of the most complex SOCs with firmware and compiled languages. I was convinced RISC was the ‘best’ architecture. I was so excited to promote the first >100MHz System on Chip (SOC) for the ARM ISA, thinking it would be easy to sell ‘better technology.’ I instead learned about legacy code and ‘good enough’ x86/68K/PowerPC incumbency. “The best technology” may cause such an operational hassle, customers will admire, but never purchase “the best.” A company can’t maintain a profitable business on glowing reviews from technology analysts or journalists.
Corollary Lesson: Being boring, reliable, easy to debug, offering ways to sample operational data without impacting run time performance is surprisingly underrated by technology providers. To service providers, this list is REALLY important to deliver a good customer experience. Using a car analogy, a Lamborghini may be the “best” auto on a racetrack as measured by its top end speed, but when driving grade school carpools, a Lamborghini is limited to the same 25 MPH zones that a Toyota Corolla or Minivan comfortably achieves.
“What compute performance giveth, the network can taketh away.”
Maintaining optimal compute/throughput/storage is a never-ending battle. Equilibrium with enough compute power that processes data, balanced by enough storage in the right tiers, plus the right network capacity to keep the data moving – it just never lasts for long.
There are so many examples, I’ll just point you to two deeper articles to explore. Both The Register on high core count CPUs and GPUs, and Broadcomm’s article with Meta’s data on AI instance efficiency offer depth on the consequences of imbalanced systems. Now, imagine the ‘inside voice’ conversations within infrastructure operators who pay ~$1B for AI processing hardware and only see ~$500m of work done on it.
“Immutable ‘laws’ vs. Ideology and narrative”
A favorite comic in my family included something related to exercise in every routine. A classic quote is “I don’t do ups, I do DOWNS, because gravity is the law, and I obey the law!” In commercial airplanes, applied physics temporarily suspend the effects of the law of gravity, but eventually gravity wins, and the plane must land. Similarly, in every technology era, exuberance for a hot technology seems to temporarily suspend the laws of economics and the principles of supply and demand. Countless breakthroughs have promised a new utopia, to replace or better humanity, and to keep humanity from…well, being itself! The internet evangelists in 2001 claimed ‘borders didn’t matter’ and ‘information wants to be free!” Here in 2024, how many paywalls have you run into this week? Economics clapped back on utopia, because it turns out that you need to make more money than you spend to stay in business. There are a few hard lessons in the fact that customers/consumers will not spend at the level of the difficult engineering that built the product. Do consumers save more money? Do enterprises see benefits well beyond what they must spend to afford the product?
Concluding thoughts
Many of these ‘rules of thumb’ don’t need to be stated when business and technology together offer a solution that legitimately solves more problems than it causes. That often happens years after the discovery of a new technology innovation – so stay curious, keep learning and share your thoughts in the comments!
Lynn A. Comp is a Vice President and Director of the Microsoft Global Account Team in the Intel Sales and Marketing Group. Lynn’s mission is to align the unique benefits that Intel and Microsoft offer their customers through access to unparalleled technology at scale, enabling the broadest ecosystems to innovate solutions to the most challenging business problems. Lynn returns to Intel from AMD where she served as the VP and GM of the EPYC CPU Cloud Business and the VP of EPYC Product Marketing.
Lynn has a wide range of experiences spanning her ~30 years in the tech industry, from strategic planning and go to market of RISC SOCs for both communications infrastructure and mobile phones, to software offers laying the groundwork for rapid video-based services innovation, to pioneering the foundational libraries that paved the way for ‘software defined’ networking with telecommunications operators.
Lynn has extensive experience in marketing, product management, product planning, and strategy development across software, hardware, cloud, and communications service providers (CoSPs).
Lynn has a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Virginia Technology and an MBA from University of Phoenix.
Learning to learn in a structured manner is the only way to maintain a long career in technology. I tell those I mentor they should settle into the reality they will likely have 5+ careers in this industry.
“Don’t be scared, just stay curious,” I say. “Do everything in your power to be the positive influence on every collaboration you engage in.”
Technology domains are small communities, and being the individual who consistently demonstrates high EIQ, dignifies vs. degrades others (regardless of the role they play) is a superpower for the long haul.
Many of us with a longer tenure in technology see patterns in industry transformations, both for good and for ill. Example: years ago, I was informed by a long tenured mainframe/UNIX expert that virtualization was a mainframe feature for decades. If a server solution was considered to be equivalent to “…a toy you find at the bottom of a cereal box”, why bother with virtualization technology that limits performance? (Extra credit: Name the CEO that gave us the soundbite comparing servers to Fruit Loops without doing a web search!)
To kick off my blog series with Tech Arena, I decided to share three patterns I have consistently seen across ~30 yrs of technology inflections.
The “best” solution in the eyes of a customer rarely offers the best raw performance.
As a hardcore engineer fresh out of college, I got my hands dirty coding some of the most complex SOCs with firmware and compiled languages. I was convinced RISC was the ‘best’ architecture. I was so excited to promote the first >100MHz System on Chip (SOC) for the ARM ISA, thinking it would be easy to sell ‘better technology.’ I instead learned about legacy code and ‘good enough’ x86/68K/PowerPC incumbency. “The best technology” may cause such an operational hassle, customers will admire, but never purchase “the best.” A company can’t maintain a profitable business on glowing reviews from technology analysts or journalists.
Corollary Lesson: Being boring, reliable, easy to debug, offering ways to sample operational data without impacting run time performance is surprisingly underrated by technology providers. To service providers, this list is REALLY important to deliver a good customer experience. Using a car analogy, a Lamborghini may be the “best” auto on a racetrack as measured by its top end speed, but when driving grade school carpools, a Lamborghini is limited to the same 25 MPH zones that a Toyota Corolla or Minivan comfortably achieves.
“What compute performance giveth, the network can taketh away.”
Maintaining optimal compute/throughput/storage is a never-ending battle. Equilibrium with enough compute power that processes data, balanced by enough storage in the right tiers, plus the right network capacity to keep the data moving – it just never lasts for long.
There are so many examples, I’ll just point you to two deeper articles to explore. Both The Register on high core count CPUs and GPUs, and Broadcomm’s article with Meta’s data on AI instance efficiency offer depth on the consequences of imbalanced systems. Now, imagine the ‘inside voice’ conversations within infrastructure operators who pay ~$1B for AI processing hardware and only see ~$500m of work done on it.
“Immutable ‘laws’ vs. Ideology and narrative”
A favorite comic in my family included something related to exercise in every routine. A classic quote is “I don’t do ups, I do DOWNS, because gravity is the law, and I obey the law!” In commercial airplanes, applied physics temporarily suspend the effects of the law of gravity, but eventually gravity wins, and the plane must land. Similarly, in every technology era, exuberance for a hot technology seems to temporarily suspend the laws of economics and the principles of supply and demand. Countless breakthroughs have promised a new utopia, to replace or better humanity, and to keep humanity from…well, being itself! The internet evangelists in 2001 claimed ‘borders didn’t matter’ and ‘information wants to be free!” Here in 2024, how many paywalls have you run into this week? Economics clapped back on utopia, because it turns out that you need to make more money than you spend to stay in business. There are a few hard lessons in the fact that customers/consumers will not spend at the level of the difficult engineering that built the product. Do consumers save more money? Do enterprises see benefits well beyond what they must spend to afford the product?
Concluding thoughts
Many of these ‘rules of thumb’ don’t need to be stated when business and technology together offer a solution that legitimately solves more problems than it causes. That often happens years after the discovery of a new technology innovation – so stay curious, keep learning and share your thoughts in the comments!
Lynn A. Comp is a Vice President and Director of the Microsoft Global Account Team in the Intel Sales and Marketing Group. Lynn’s mission is to align the unique benefits that Intel and Microsoft offer their customers through access to unparalleled technology at scale, enabling the broadest ecosystems to innovate solutions to the most challenging business problems. Lynn returns to Intel from AMD where she served as the VP and GM of the EPYC CPU Cloud Business and the VP of EPYC Product Marketing.
Lynn has a wide range of experiences spanning her ~30 years in the tech industry, from strategic planning and go to market of RISC SOCs for both communications infrastructure and mobile phones, to software offers laying the groundwork for rapid video-based services innovation, to pioneering the foundational libraries that paved the way for ‘software defined’ networking with telecommunications operators.
Lynn has extensive experience in marketing, product management, product planning, and strategy development across software, hardware, cloud, and communications service providers (CoSPs).
Lynn has a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Virginia Technology and an MBA from University of Phoenix.
