I just learned that Mar­vin Wheeler is leav­ing Ter­re­mark, hav­ing com­pleted their tran­si­tion into Ver­i­zon. Mar­vin is one of nicest and most inter­est­ing peo­ple I’ve worked with.

I met Mar­vin at EMC’s “Road to the Pri­vate Cloud” ana­lyst meet­ing late in 2009. Ter­re­mark was a fea­tured EMC cus­tomer “poster boy” talk­ing about the gov­ern­ment busi­ness they had been cap­tur­ing into their new Cloud data cen­ter offer­ing. I asked Mar­vin what the key to their value propo­si­tion was. He said that his answer would prob­a­bly sur­prise me: it was the secu­rity that they pro­vided. He was right. At the time (and to a large degree still today) secu­rity shows up on the “con” side of the Cloud ledger, not on the “pro.” I asked Mar­vin if we could fol­low up on the topic and he arranged a fol­low on brief­ing with Chris Day, Terremark’s secu­rity leader.

Mar­vin explained that five years prior he had hired Chris, not­ing that when­ever com­puter crime was men­tioned in the Miami papers Chris was always the expert quoted. In that time, Chris had built up an inter­est­ing set of secu­rity ser­vices sold togov­ern­ment clients and in sup­port of areas like foren­sic account­ing. They spe­cial­ized in what you did after you had been pen­e­trated, not just pre­vent­ing pen­e­tra­tion (until recently, the prime focus of the “secu­rity com­pa­nies”): dis­cov­er­ing pen­e­tra­tion; under­stand­ing the nature of the threat and scope; stop­ing the threat; reme­di­at­ing the dam­age. Ter­re­mark had real­ized that in a vir­tu­al­ized SP data cen­ter they could offer ver­sions of these ser­vices that were pre-wired into the infra­struc­ture fab­ric (rather than hav­ing to be patched in after an attack) and they could pro­vide the exper­tise to use these offer­ings whereas their gov­ern­ment cus­tomers couldn’t on their own. On bal­ance, although you might be slightly more vul­ner­a­ble to pen­e­tra­tion in a multi-tenant data cen­ter (or at least it was arguable), you were clearly bet­ter off if you were pen­e­trated. Ter­re­mark was way head of the rest of the world being able to view the Cloud as a new medium with new oppor­tu­ni­ties rather than some­thing where you did what you always did.

I was impressed and added Mar­vin to my “bright peo­ple worth keep­ing in touch with” list, and dis­cov­ered along the way he was one of the “nice” guys in the busi­ness, always pos­si­ble to reach and always use­ful to talk to.  More recently, Mar­vin as been cen­tral to the for­ma­tion of the Open Data Cen­ter Alliance that was spun out of CIO dis­cus­sions that Intel had.  I would guess that the Cloud purists think this is another exam­ple of how hope­less pri­vate clouds are, but ODCA is an impor­tant venue for mak­ing progress on build­ing prac­ti­cal hybrid Cloud integrations.

I can under­stand com­pletely why Ter­re­mark all of a sud­den get­ting much big­ger quickly is a time to move on. I’m sure Mar­vin will show up some­where inter­est­ing soon enough, and wish him the best!