To OEM or not OEM? 'Zilla touches on this in his blog post 'Mr BackUp gets it wrong' in response to a post by W. Curtis Preston. I must admit that I have sympathies with both points of view; I regularly 'ding' vendors with questions along the lines of 'What happens when you fall out of bed with your OEM?'
Obviously one of my favourite companies to throw that question at is HP after the EMC fall-out but there a fair few vendors which the question is applicable to. I could ask the question of EMC, what happens if you fall out of bed with IBM and they won't sell you Power any more? No more DMX? What happens if you fall out of bed with Intel? Seagate, Hitachi etc, etc. Lets face it the whole IT industry is based on people using other people's components and even whole products; competitors regularly have to co-operate. No one company does it all.
So in reality, OEMed equipment doesn't really bother as an end-user. I'd rather buy OEMed equipment from a larger company than from the smaller OEM, why? Because I trust people like IBM, EMC and HP not to go out of business and even if the OEM goes, I know that they will continue to support me and assist me to migrate if I need too.
In the current economic climate, this goes double. My due diligence process is alot more diligent at the moment, especially with regards to some of the smaller vendors. For example, I wouldn't buy Pillar at the moment; not without a good look at their finances. If they had a number of OEM agreements in place, I'd still be twitchy but I'd be a little happier.
And if some OEM agreements help some of the smaller, innovation (that word again) driven companies survive whilst enhancing the market offerings of the big boys, so much the better.
Interesting thing. HP fell out of bed with EMC but HP Test & Measurement were beating down our door to sell us logic analyzers as were their PC and UNIX divisions who supplied our laptop, desktop and server hardware.
We cancelled all those contracts immediately and that goes to show that you don’t walk away from the customer they walk away from you.
I wanted to make a correction here. HP didn’t have an OEM relationship with EMC – ever. We were a Symm reseller. I was very familiar with that agreement and would love to say a lot more about it but I can not. “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” and Symmetrix was the only hammer EMC had at the time. Suffice to say, I’d fall out of that bed 20 times a night.
I was also part of the team that parterned with Hitachi Japan (not HDS as many like to say) as an OEM and joint development agreement. That relationship has been in place close to 10 years and is as strong as ever.
Zilla – last I checked, HP’s PC, laptop, and server hardware is doing pretty well without EMC’s business. Whst PC’s and servers will you be sourcing if DELL ends their agreement with EMC?
I also remember EMC doing every thing they could to stay close to our UNIX business. My only regret is that our UNIX server team didn’t stop working with EMC as quickly as EMC ran from HP.
I am very careful to say that HP partner with Hitachi as opposed to HDS. However, HDS have a very different take on it.
And you are right, HP never OEMed the Sym but the relationship was very close and when it fractured, it was not pretty for either company.