Imagine if before you saved a PDF on your corporate storage a statement came up that said “This 500 meg file will cost you $1.00 to save on our corporate system.” Charging users for storage is something that is talked about often, but rarely put into place. Setting up the parameters for creating a system would not be that hard, budgets could be set by departments and per person. And there could be extra charges for saving files on based on different back up criteria. The program could also provide weekly, monthly and quarterly email to users suggesting which files…
Last week I was in Texas visiting clients and working with them to solve their enterprise storage management problems. I really enjoyed working with my clients, many of them said that our products and pricing were right on target and that they would be pulling the trigger soon.
We had our Dallas customer appreciation dinner and had a great time with our customers and friends. Jon Toigo gave a presentation on the state of Enterprise Storage and it was very well received and prompted many discussions during dinner.
Last year was the first time we ever displayed at EMC World and it was a great success for us. We saw many of our customers and met many new folks who are trying to control their support costs. The folks at EMC put on a great show last year in Orlando, and we expect this year to be just as good in Boston.
Jon Toigo initiated another dialogue with me which you can read below.
Conversations with Mike 2
Once again, I exchanged some emails with a guy who is in the trenches with customers as much as I am: Mike Linett, CEO of Zerowait. This is from a continuing email exchange that I thought was worth sharing.
Hi Mike,
Several inquiries have been coming my way to perform storage assessments as companies seek to drive cost out of infrastructure. One, in particular, is looking for a better management plan to reduce the costs of labor associated with storage…
One of our European customers has been getting the run around from their current vendor's sales team on their equipment pricing, upgrade and licensing policies and has been working with our European sales team to try to get to the bottom of the issue. The root cause of the issue is that the OEM sales team is focused on new product sales through bonuses and incentives, and hence that is the direction that they take. Our business is a service business. Our focus is long term retention of customers by providing them with affordable service and support.
This week I visited several clients in North Carolina. Although their budgets are tight they are still trying to manage their growing storage requirements. The companies I visited with are working with our company to help them manage more storage with less money. Most of the clients I was meeting were referred to our company through the years and have referred our company to their peers. Two of the clients I met with were customers at their old companies and as they moved to new positions they recommended us and eventually their new employers became our clients also.
Earlier this week I was visiting some of our clients in Canada. Each of the clients had a story to tell about how they were stretching their IT budgets and finding new ways to redeploy or use their older equipment. Rather than buying new, they have recognized that their older equipment is still High Availability although it has been superseded by the manufacturer. We have entered an era of austerity and the virtues of conservation of capital will become evident to the CFO's of many organizations over the next few years.
One of the comments we hear a lot from field engineers is the difficulty of getting a 4 post rack mount kit that is adaptable to almost any configuration of 19" rack and doesn’t cost a small fortune. Our company has always focused on customer service, so we searched for a solution to this seemingly easy problem. We weren’t able to find one either, so last year we said "enough, we‘ll build it ourselves", and our rack kit – easily adjusted and priced right- is now available from our store.
Jon Toigo and I have been chatting about tactical and strategic storage decision making for many years. He posted a thread of a recent conversation on his blog site and we decided to cross post his blog.
The Long Slog Forward - A Dialog Begins
My previous post about the long slog ahead for IT business prompted a communique from my friend and fellow blogger, Mike Linett, over at Zerowait. We have been chatting back and forth via email over the past few days and I thought I would post the emails here so that others can…
One OEM has been a big believer in the usage of Avatars for a few years now, as this story from 2007 highlights. The second link shows how the movie industry has embraced the idea, and may have created a product from it.
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2007/06/25/stories/2007062550110800.htm Network Appliance (NetApp) is a $2.8-billion storage networking firm up against the likes of EMC Corporation and Hewlett-Packard. Maintaining the culture of innovation amongst its engineers so products are creative and useful is a prime focus to reach up the market share ladder. One way of developing better products is by tuning…
