A Nimble Strategy Scores Coverage

For Back-To-Back Product Launches.

ISILON CASE STUDY

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SummaryFast on the heels of one very successful product launch,

scale-out storage leader Isilon had another new offering

to bring to the market. Timing for the new launch would

be dictated by a strategically aligned industry trade show,

presenting the communications team with the opportunity

to tell a timely story. But it would be a challenge to bring

key media and analyst influencers back to briefing table

just weeks after an extensively covered product launch.

Isilon and McBru carefully crafted and persistently

pitched a launch story that, despite prior coverage and

the noise from the trade show, resulted in 32 briefings and 21 feature stories in trade and business publications.

Research & PlanningIn highly competitive, crowded IT markets such as

data storage, innovative new products provide singular

opportunities to boost awareness and portray competitive

differentiation to buyers and influencers. The summer

of 2010 found Isilon ready to launch not one, but two

such products.

In June, McBru served in support of the launch of the

Isilon’s SmartPoolsTM automated data tiering platform

for scale-out storage. McBru developed and managed a

hybrid press tour – equal parts face-to-face road tour and

phone-conference briefings – to earn maximum impact

for what was the company’s most significant product

announcement in more than a year. Hard-to-please

industry press covered the news well, with 18 positive

articles from those briefed and a highly favorable response

from the analyst community.

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Immediately following the SmartPools announcement, a

new launch plan was confirmed: go out and do it again, and do it bigger. With the addition of iSCSI functionality

across its product line, Isilon was poised to announce

another industry first among scale out storage providers

by storing and managing both structured (or block-based)

and unstructured (file-based) data within a single file

system. To that point, the nine-year-old company had built

its business solely on file based data; the new functionality

would position Isilon squarely within a highly desirable

target market for storage consolidation – a market largely

driven by the booming adoption of server virtualization

across the enterprise.

ExecutionIsilon and McBru targeted the announcement for

August 31, during the annual VMworld conference in

San Francisco. The timing would help ensure that the

“Unified Storage Platform” announcement, as it would

be called, would be seen in its proper context as a boon

to virtualization users. However, McBru advised that the

launch team reach out to, and brief, industry press and

analysts well in advance of the conference. VMworld

has grown to become one of IT’s biggest annual events,

attracting leading press and analysts from around the

world and giving the industry’s biggest players a platform

to announce their own groundbreaking products and

make limelight-stealing acquisitions. Rather than peg

the success of the launch on breaking through the

escalating noise level surrounding VMworld, the launch

would rely on a phone tour to begin three weeks prior

to the conference, despite the fact that many of the

influencers targeted for briefings had just been briefed

as part of the SmartPools tour.

To break through to influencers who might otherwise

claim fatigue, McBru developed tightly focused launch

Chris Preimesberger,eWeek

In short, Isilon now enables users to consolidate both file- and block-based applications into one shared pool of virtualized storage. Now that makes things a lot easier, doesn’t it? No more separate apps for separate workloads. A storage engineer’s dream, no doubt.

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messages that made abundantly clear the unique value

propositions, market positioning and newsworthiness of

the Unified Storage Platform, and took those messages

to high-value media and analysts with a campaign of aggressive, proactive pitching. A deep team of experienced

Isilon spokespersons was recruited, giving McBru the right

mix of executive vision, technical depth and sales channel

expertise to deploy for each briefing depending on the

influencer. For each briefing, a McBru representative

facilitated the proceedings, both to help ensure a focused

dialogue and to capture any coverage opportunities that

might emerge. Press and analysts agreed to receive launch

materials under embargo until the August 31 launch

date, allowing McBru to direct the bulk of coverage to

land within the VMworld timeframe while giving writers

ample time to develop and source stories before finding

themselves caught up in the VMworld time crunch.

ResultsIn managing and executing the Isilon Unified Storage

Platform launch, McBru recorded qualitative and

quantifiable results to rival any announcement in Isilon’s

history. The tour generated 32 briefings with top media

from general IT and business publications to storage and

vertical outlets, as well as industry analysts ranging from

IT heavyweights such as Gartner, Forrester and IDC to

Steve Wexler,Network Computing

Pushan Rinnen, research director at Gartner, agrees that this gives Isilon a leg up on the competition. The most significant aspect of this announcement is that Isilon will be the first major scale-out storage architecture vendor to offer file and block support with iSCSI, so it will bring to the market the ease of use of scale-out NAS into the block storage arena, she says. ‘The key thing is the simplicity of Isilon storage systems can now be applied to the block side of the world.’

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influential boutique firms specializing in storage. The tone

of the briefings was extremely favorable, as well-targeted

spokespersons built affinity with influencers, fomenting

more engaged and productive briefings and ultimately,

impacting the tone of media coverage.

Twenty-one feature stories covered the launch news,

with top properties such as Network Computing, eWeek,

SearchStorage and CRN among those who wrote, with the

bulk of the coverage landing during the VMworld timeframe.

Message penetration rated extremely high as the majority

of writers captured the virtualization and consolidation

contexts of the announcement in their stories, and the tone

of the coverage was uniformly positive. Most importantly,

the success of the Unified Storage Platform launch added

considerable momentum to what had become a breakout

year for the company, supporting its solid growth curve in

a highly competitive, extremely noisy marketplace.

Dave RaffoSearchStorage.com

Isilon customer John Welter, vice president of technology at Calgary, Alberta-based North West Geomatics Ltd., was an early adopter of the vendor’s iSCSI and said he’s using it to consolidate onto a single storage platform. He had been running a Dell MD3000 direct-attached storage (DAS) system for block storage.

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elise@mcbru.com

www.mcbru.com

www.mcbrublog.com

@mcbru

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McBru

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