Cofio AIMstor

• Originally Posted by Tony Cerqueira on Wed, Sep 16, 2009 @ 10:30 AM

So . . . Company A (which ships one of these, maybe a Backup, or a Replication, or a File Archive product) acquires Company X (the creator of say, a CDP Product), and then announces their sincere plans to combine both solutions and to deliver huge value to their existing user base.  A few weeks later, they have a brand spanking new CDP software box on the website, a new data sheet showing what seems to be tight integration of Company X Product into Company A Product, and a press release that extols the virtues of this newly integrated solution, promising “Single Pane of Glass” yadayada yada.  Hey, they might even have gotten the GUI from the CDP product to work a tad bit with the Company A Product (always in a meaningless way, but, working together none-the-less).

Don’t be fooled.  The game of product integration, the headaches it creates, and the expenses and risks associated with it are all still there.  Understand this: Integrated solutions are not bad. They are necessary, and they are your only choice in many circumstances.

What is bad is the “Marketing Spin” you get from some vendors, that things are “fully integrated” to a level where the products look and work in a “seamless” fashion.

Don’t they know you can go to hell for lying?

Sure, for the customer, now there is one vendor and one throat to choke, but those solutions are still separated, in every material way that matters.  And sure enough, too many calls to support will soon mean that your most recent investment in the new product from your old supplier, will eventually turn into shelf-ware. Your investment is lost, and your problem and pain remains.

Stove-piped solutions that are forced together by the sheer will and cost of vendor provided professional services, are lessons in complexity, poor ROI, and overworked IT staff. Sometimes you have no other choice, and must deal with it, regardless of the cost and pain. The desire customers have, to believe vendors who acquire products, and buy into their claims of getting a platform, instead of several separate products, is what gets them into trouble.

“Hey, wait a minute” you say, “these are big, big companies, with hundreds of engineers.  They will make the solutions work together, and I will get the solution that I want.”

That makes sense, until you look at the track records of all major vendors in the storage/data management space.  After hundreds of acquisitions, billions of dollars spent, thousands of infrastructures uprooted and redone, it is still hard to show tight integration between any of the solutions.

It is however, easy to show the disparities between them, the incompatible metadata, the separate business processes, the redundant repositories, the conflicting data movers, the contradictory data classification schemes, the incompatible policy schemes, and the archaic mindsets that emanate from legacy architectures that date back 15 to 20 years.

I have no beef with honest vendors who go out and give it their best to integrate with other products, or multiple products they offer, in order to deliver a solution.  We do the same thing at Cofio with some solutions, and of course we have the advantage of a TRULY UNIFIED set of solutions in a single product, AIMstor.  What  I have a hard time understanding, is how some vendors (you know who you are, big and small) can lie so boldly, mislead customers, and claim unified or tight integration, where none exists.