After 32 years in the IT industry I’ve seen just about every trick a vendor can play on a prospective client. This is the third in a series of the most egregiously bad, deceptive or just plain wrong Stupid Vendor Tricks I’ve seen over the years. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
In my previous Stupid Vendor Tricks post, I discussed the “one piece at a time” philosophy of some vendors, whereby they assemble full solutions by smooshing together “suites” of products they have picked up in various acquisitions. (This sounds like a great idea until you must actually use them.)
A closely related Stupid Vendor Trick is the “give away the razors; make money on the blades” pricing model. A big indicator that a vendor is a razors & blades devotee is the complexity of its configurations. For example if you have a quote for a new network storage and/or D2D backup system that requires more than a half-dozen part numbers to complete, congratulations; you’re dealing with a razors & blades vendor. (The “suite” idea is an attempt to hide this from you by combining several, sometimes completely unrelated, products under one part number.)
A peek under the hood.
Here’s how razors & blades pricing works: The base portion of the solution – a storage array, as an example – will be at a very aggressive price, but everything else is a la carte, and is also expensive. Every feature is sold separately – replication, deduplication, thin provisioning, mirroring, etc.
Pay ‘em now or pay ‘em later. Either way, you pay ‘em.
Razors & blades licensing may result in an attractive initial acquisition cost, but beware – over time, the cost of the options and features can far exceed the cost of the base product.
In addition, razors & blades licensing can seriously cramp your flexibility as your needs change. Some backup software vendors, for example, require agent license fees for each new client you would like to add to your backup schema. The same applies to replication options that are licensed by the amount of data they replicate. In the present day, when a new VM client can be spun up in a matter of minutes, this can cause serious headaches, and can dramatically run up the long-term cost of ownership.
The Good News: Razors & blades vendors are on the wrong side of history
The trend in the IT industry – especially in storage and backup – is toward all-inclusive feature sets that offer full feature compliments right from the start, with very few options. This simplifies acquisition, implementation and long-term management costs.
All of the vendors in the Southern Data Storage portfolio – Unitrends, NexGen Storage, Nimble Storage, ExaGrid, Nasuni, PHD Virtual and Gridstore – offer highly integrated, full featured solutions that won’t nickel-and-dime you to death. This is another key criteria I use to select them in the first place.
For more info on how to get away from your razors & blades vendor, contact me at mark@southerndatastorage.com or 888-255-6889.
[...] After 32 years in the IT industry I’ve seen just about every trick a vendor can play on a prospective client. This is the fourth in a series of the most egregiously bad, deceptive or just plain wrong Stupid Vendor Tricks I’ve seen over the years. See Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here. [...]
[...] plain wrong Stupid Vendor Tricks I’ve seen over the years. (Click here for parts one, two, three & [...]