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.
