Interview: Steve Jackson, Sr. Director, Development - IMS, Symantec Corporation

What are the top pain points of an IT administrator from storage stand point? What are the related trends in solutions space?
Lack of ability to effectively manage storage is among the major pain points. The IT administrators are unaware of how full the disk systems are and how fast they are filling. This requires storage resource management (SRM).

Another point worth mentioning is that although the window of time for performing a backup is shrinking, the actual time to take a backup is growing; this is primarily because of the rising data volume.

What technologies and solutions are required to address the rapidly growing small and midsize business (SMB) market?
I believe there are many including storage, security, authentication, encryption, etc. My focus is on delivering information integrity solutions to the SMB market. This includes providing secure backup and recovery solutions with focus on deployment, patching, and disposal of systems.

Symantec Corporation is one of the R&D companies that have effectively used distributed development for its benefit. What are the best practices and pitfalls for distributed development?
The best practices that we have found in our successfully deployed distributed development model are:

• Frequent and complete communication through conference calls, onsite visits, video calls, and e-mail, etc.
• Treating the team as one with no splits across the ocean
• Giving clear project goals to the entire team
• Equal ownership across all team members
• Formal training of all team members on technology, processes, and standards
• Having people onsite from the distributed team to act as leads

Some of the pitfalls are:

• Treating the team as two teams
• Inadequate specs for the project
• Failure to realize the purpose of leveraging a distributed model
• Failure to hold everyone on the team at the same level of accountability