After my recent articles on XIV, I got invited out to lunch to meet with some of the UK XIV Sales team this afternoon. Lots of interesting stuff came out but I stumbled into a really strange story. One of my contacts claims that IBM have recruited an extra 400 salespeople (so far) to promote XIV and that about 300 of this new team come straight out of EMC, the rest from all over (Copan, HP etc..) although interestingly no one could place anyone coming from HDS. This 400 is a global number and an informal one that I need to get validated but the source is credible and ought to know the numbers.

Why is Big Blue recruiting salespeople like mad in the middle of a recession and what is it that is making these highly paid individuals jump ship? Have I missed something? Did anyone else know that this was going on?

I think that this is really interesting and if true, exposes two key issues:

• IBM are pretty confident that they can shift XIV in volume and are constrained by the number of salespeople they can deploy. This is a huge investment as my information is that IBM consider a sales appointment as a million dollar investment.
• Either there are a lot of Salespeople who were feeling the market closing in and decided to jump ship before getting pushed or the IBM XIV proposition is compelling financially, that is the guys can make good money selling it.

I am keen to get to the bottom of this and want to reach out to The Hot Aisle readers:

Are you one of these new XIV salespeople or have you been approached to join IBM? Are IBM paying big bucks? What is going on, why did you jump?

As always, confidences will be respected, drop me a note at The Hot Aisle or use the comment system.