“That kind of blew my mind”(Farewell Monty Taylor)

Today Monty Taylor announced that he is leaving HP Cloud to join IBM. It seemed entirely wrong to merely tweet or comment on the Facebook wishing Monty well (though all that I’ll do). Monty deserves more than that, and so I’ll do my best here to express my thanks and well wishes here. I am so grateful Monty’s unique leadership and community building skills, his mad tech talent. But even more, I really appreciate his warmth and his friendship. HP will miss him for sure; I’ll miss him dearly.

Here are some quick anecdotes that give a glimpse and how fun and great it was to work with Monty over these last 2 years that I’ve been at HP…

The first time I met Monty was via conference call almost 18 months ago. I’d been at HP for about a week, and people mentioned in hushed tones this name of Monty, who he was and his leadership in and around OpenStack. In my past experience, I’ve found that technology and engineering leaders of efforts like this can be eogtistical, prickly and don’t suffer fools gladly. At that time (and still to a large degree), I was a complete fool relative to OpenStack, so I started the call with great deference. (I might even have called him “Mr. Taylor.”)

Monty is a totally different cat, as you know. Completely warm, funny, and engaging. Rather than being turned off having to talk to some HP n00b who knew nothing about what he was working on, Monty jumped right in to bring me up to speed. Great first impression.

A second anecdote. We had an extremely large deal prospect with an extremely large customer. This customer wanted to learn more about OpenStack, and I had done a briefing or two for them. The key account team execs were group of really terrific sellers. They were like straight out of central casting enterprise selling guys: the crisp suits, haircuts, and beyond that a presence and command in any customer engagement that was awesome. They were outstanding, and no surprise they work on very large enterprise deals.

Anyway, they pulled me aside at the end of one of these briefings, and said we needed to get someone technically deep on OpenStack, who could talk baremetal provisioning in depth. I offered a few names, and then suggested Monty as a great option. I did qualify this by saying something like this though, “Look, I guarantee you Monty will be an outstanding person for you to have with your customer. I’ll warn you though. He won’t have some pretty PowerPoint presentation, and he’ll be the most casually dressed person you ever put in front of a customer. But if you want to make an impact and have a great discussion with the customer on OpenStack and where it’s going with baremetal provisioning, get Monty.”

The account guys got Monty.

The morning of this briefing, Monty comes on in — a tie-dye shirt and jeans in a maw of blazers and khakis. The customer kicked off the presentation, and they walked through their expectations for the day, what technical questions and use cases they wanted to discuss. Very thorough, professional and put together presentation. As the customer presented, our account guys started getting nervous. They’d never met Monty, and didn’t know him. One of the sales guys leaned over at one point as the customer was talking and asked me, “Jay is this going to be alright?”

“I guarantee it will be outstanding.”

And no surprise, it was. At the end of the hour, the customer’s presentation concluded. Monty stood up at a white board, no presentation, no notes, no nothing, and basically talked nonstop for 3 hours to this customer. He was dazzling.

When Monty finished, and we broke for lunch, I remember the key tech leader from the customer saying basically, “I need a few minutes to just collect my thoughts. That kind of blew my mind.”

My final and best anecdote is from the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, in spring 2014. One day at this Summit, I was packed with customer meetings from morning until night. Although it was a fine day of customer meetings, by the end of the day, I was exhausted. I was also pretty frustrated, because although the meetings were fine and useful, I didn’t feel as though I’d been able to help any customer really move forward or solve any real problems. I’d just spent a day talking, for the purpose of talking more at a future date.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I’m about to head back to my hotel when I get a call from a sales exec who asks me to urgently join a customer dinner with some execs from one of our large customers. I agree, and hop in a cab to the dinner. When I show at dinner, where there must be 30 people, and I catch the key exec for a few minutes before he runs to catch a plane.

I’m then alone at this table, starting to feel bad that of all these customer discussions, I’d helped sell and market and position and discuss, but I’d not really helped any customer move forward or solve a concrete problem that they had. I’m considering this as a I play my fork over my salad.

I glance up, and in this big table of folks in blazers, khakis and pant suits, I see 3 guys sitting near me across the table in t-shirts and jeans. I perk up slightly — these must be engineers! I introduce myself to them, and as luck would have it, they’re engineers working at this particular customer.

After a few pleasantries, I say this, “Look guys, it’s been a really long day. Seriously, I’m not here to sell or pitch you anything or have a long discussion, I just haveone question for you: is there anything that I can do to help you guys in terms of what you’re trying to do with OpenStack?”

The three engineers were kind of taken aback and they looked at each other. One then said, “we actually would really like to talk with Monty. We’ve got some interesting code that’ll drop in OpenStack trunk in a bit around IPv6, and we’d like to work with Monty to ensure that the testing and CI/CD lab are ready for it. It’d be awesome if we could meet up with him.”

“Let me text him.”

Long story short, the next morning, the final morning of the OpenStack Summit, Monty rolls into a breakfast with these guys. Monty must have been exhausted at the end of this show. He joined us, they talked through what they were doing with IPv6 and asked Monty if he thought it might be a good idea around updating the CI/CD lab and so on.

“I think it’s like the best idea ever,” said Monty. And we were off to the races as Monty and the customer worked through how they’d make it work.

Ice broken. Progress made. Sappy music as credits roll. And scene.

So I’m a huge Monty fanboy. I wish him all the continuing success in the world, in life and in work.

I may wish IBM slightly less success ;) (vendors gotta vend yo), but I’m sure we’ll find lots of great opportunities to continue to push OpenStack and Cloud Foundry forward.

On behalf of all of us at HP, Monty, we’ll miss you! And I’ll miss you a ton, my friend — it’s been an absolute blast knowing you — see you in NYC next time I’m in town!