So this morning in my LinkedIn feed there’s someone, a VC, going on about a company that just went public, Nutanix.  I don’t really get what the company does from his piece but I’m curious so I go to the “What We Do” section Nutanix’s of website.  It reads:

Nutanix delivers solutions that elevate IT to focus on the applications and services that power their business. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform natively converges compute, virtualization and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The world’s most advanced enterprise datacenters rely on Nutanix technology and solutions to power their most demanding workloads at any scale.

The last sentence seems straightforward enough and first is vague but I think I get the gist of it.  The middle though?  What the @#$% is that?   “Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Enterprise Datacenters” is what exactly?  How do I use it?  (Whatever it is, somebody thinks it’s worth a lot of money.)

Contrast Nutanix’s statement with Heilmeier’s Catechism for evaluating a research project:

1. What are you trying to do? (Articulate your objectives quantitatively, using absolutely no jargon)
2. How is it done today and what are the limits of current practice?
3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
4. Who cares? If it is successful, what difference will it make?
5. How will you commercialize or transition the technology to the users?  What resources or strategic partners will you need?
6. What are the risks in implementing your approach and how will you address them in your project?
7. How much will it cost to reach your ultimate objective? How long will it take?
8. What are the intermediate and final milestones that will demonstrate success?

If you’ve already got a product, as Nutanix does, then just speak to the first four.   Never mind research, the eight questions above are a good frame for just about anything you set out to do.