A Trend toward Simplicity
Sunday, July 19th, 2009Side Note: As I travel the country talking to companies, I have been asked why I have not posted another blog entry in a long time. I guess I could justify it by saying that I don’t have anything new worth saying, and that I don’t want to waste your time with a lot of marketing hype. That may be true, but the real reason is just a lack of time. There is a saying that, “there are those that do, and those that teach.” For those rare cases where an expert does both well, I tip my hat to them. I enjoy the rare ability to actually work with the technology in customer environments as well as sell and architect the solutions. Hopefully I can share some valuable insites that keep you coming back.
So what have I learned that might be of value to you?
There seems to be an industry trend to look to simplify. Our friends at Data Domain (recently acquired by EMC) taught us that you can sell a limited ‘lunchbox’ dedupe engine and make a lot of money. It is not fair to say that Data Domain did a good job of “putting lipstick on a pig.” (But I will anyway.) They have taught me that it is important to have solutions supported with detailed process and best practice documents. This proves more challenging the more features and capabilities that the product has. Our OEMs will often restrict the use of certain features to simplify the support and complexity. You should be able to have the best of both worlds.
Even the medium-to-large sized organizations are more often looking for integrated (simplified) solutions instead of deploying our software solutions on their own hardware. Whether this is due to the economy or just the evolution of the technology, I cannot say. Falconstor is responding to this trend by packaging their industry leading “Totally Open” scalable solutions in standard configurations. This will lead to simplified deployments and support, improving the overall success of the solution.
Falconstor is not a hardware vendor, so customer can still elect to purchase their own server and storage, potentially saving money. But the hardware must be identical and configured to the tested standard configuration. The simplest integrated solution requires a few cables to be connected and then hit the power and go. A scalable and feature rich solution does not have to be complicated. Do you really need to know the underlying server and storage hardware as long as it works and is supported by one throat to choke? So consider the benefits of pulling up to the window and ordering a small, medium, or large combo meal, and spend less time in the kitchen.Please feel free to comment here or twitter me on @pkfalconstor. If you follow me, I promise not to tweet unless there is something important to say.