Stupid Vendor Tricks, Part 2: One Piece at a Time

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 second in a series of the most egregiously bad, deceptive or just plain wrong Stupid Vendor Tricks I’ve seen over the years.  To see part 1 of the series, click here.

Stupid Vendor Tricks, Part 2: One Piece at a Time

Have you ever heard “One Piece At A Time” by Johnny Cash?  If you are an IT professional you would do well to give it a listen.  The song is about a guy who goes to work in a Cadillac assembly plant and decides to steal himself one, smuggling it out one piece at a time.  It takes him years.  The fun starts when he finally has all the parts and starts assembling the car at home.  The finished product has two headlights on one side and only one on the other, the rear end only has one tail fin, the transmission is a ’53 and the engine is a ’73, and so on.

This is directly analogous to the way many of the biggest IT vendors have assembled their product lines, and just like the Cadillac referenced above, sometimes the results can be pretty peculiar.

Imagine a Ford-illac

In the IT world it’s actually worse than assembling a fictional Cadillac from years and years of parts.  The big IT vendors routinely buy smaller companies and smoosh the new products into existing product lines, using fancy marketing-speak like “product suite” to give the impression that they somehow belong together.  To me it’s analogous to Ford buying Cadillac and subsequently slapping Cadillac parts on Ford vehicles, a Ford-illac, if you will.

Beware the Steep Learning Curve

A big problem with the one-piece-at-a-time vendors is that the so-called “suite” products are often completely different code bases written by different teams at different companies, prior to their absorption into the hopeless bureaucracy of the parent company.  This means separate control screens, separate command sets & sometimes even separate support teams within the parent vendor.  It also means steep learning curves for users.  (See my prior blog post about a particularly egregious example of this.)

Fear Not; The Tide is Turning

There is substantial evidence that the one-piece-at-a-time vendors are falling out of favor, particularly with mid-sized IT shops who have neither the time, the manpower or the money to cope with this outdated way of doing business.  The most rapidly growing vendors in the storage and backup sectors are the ones offering seamless, vertically integrated solutions that are built as all-in-one platforms with very few options.  Simplicity of configuration is usually always accompanied by simplicity of use, even with very full, enterprise-class feature sets.  Not surprisingly, users really like this concept.

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 are simple to deploy but yet have powerful, enterprise-class feature sets.  This is a key criteria I use to select them in the first place.

For more info on how to get away from your one-piece-at-a-time vendor, contact me at mark@southerndatastorage.com or 888-255-6889.

Backup, D2D Backup, data storage, ExaGrid, Nasuni, NexGen Storage, Nimble Storage, PHD Virtual, Southern Data Storage, Unitrends