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It’s all fine….

Last week, I sat in a vendor update session with a vendor who wants to sell more into our company; we've a couple of deployments of their stuff and it's fine but there's no real appetite for putting any more footprint on the floor. So we get to the end of the update and the vendor looks up with enthusiasm and pride in their hearts and ask me what I think.

'It looks fine; it ticks all the boxes but I really can't see why I'd buy your product over anyone else's!'

But the roadmap, they say, the roadmap looks good doesn't it?

'It looks fine; certainly doing the right things but it's no different to anyone else's really!'

So what would make you interested? 

'Four to five year costs breakdown? TCO model? ROI model?'

We've got industry leading TCO and ROI figures; we've got customers who save millions using our kit!

'Care to share those figures, what base-line are they starting from? For all I know they might have been the worst managed storage division in history? What industry? I mean if you look at some my proposed metrics for our environment, a large number of storage managers and administrators could be looking to have me shot but my use-case is very different.'

And then the conversation peters out because they can't give me the figures I need. It's going to get harder to sell storage on features, you've all got them or at least they are road-mapped. 

I'm not going to tell you which vendor it was but it could have been pretty much any one of them. Perhaps one of the upcoming announcements will regain my enthusiasm for storage technology but until then, 'It's all fine….'


2 Comments

  1. Visiotech says:

    Many years ago it was performance (IOPS, MB/sec, latency). Few years after it was price per MB because most storage were about the same on performance. Recently it was features like snapshots, remote copies, dedup etc.
    Are you saying that we are back to price per GB because all vendors are equal?
    I know it is not true yet but the trend is there. One major issue is the fact that we have limited high-end vendors and few rock solid storage vendors to deal with.
    If I look at what happen in oil and gas acquisition back in the 70-80’s the price will be set by less than a hand full of vendors.
    So you are right. Soon or later we will pay more…

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