Bladewatch.com

It has been a busy few months for a number of reasons, the blog has been re-designed, we’ve been talking as a team about the direction of the content and scheduling more interviews, more content.  At the same time, a change of jobs on a personal level means I’m as busy as ever, that said the blog continues, with a break for the past few weeks. To all those that have been emailing their announcements, I’m working on them and am scheduling them in with a few of our interviews, thanks for keeping me up to date.

So what has been on my mind recently having spoken with managers/CIOs and server guys? A number of things, the middle east, India and China seem to be areas of real growth and excitement, in the city bonuses, salaries and job security are all on the radar (rightly or wrongly). There is also a sense of change of mindset towards acceptance of virtualization, but when I say that it’s not that we never accepted it before, it’s more that the way we procure and supply elements of the infrastructure is changing, concepts of saying to someone ‘that’s not core, give it to someone else to worry about’, which might refer to backups, to the email system or the HPC solution we use, are becoming more acceptable or at least discussed, that I might ask HP or Dell, or IBM or a service provider to supply me with a grid in a box solution, or buy the capacity or services I need rather than specifically deploy the infrastructure and support it myself. We’re not there now, but we’re talking about it, and this leads to possibilities, and further talks about the commodization of the infrastructure which can only be good and bad for the vendors at the same time. Good in the respect that I might now find more opportunities where they might not have been ‘We only buy IBM’, might not be as set in their ways, well what can you Dell, Cisco, HP, Oracle or Fujitsu (to name a few) can you do for me?

As a geek, as a blogger and someone who likes to watch the industry (whether it’s the car, the business sector) or IT, it’s interesting to see the convergence of the different elements of the IT service and infrastructure markets. What does it mean going forward?

The way I see it, we have to change two things. As a vendor I need to become more vendor neutral whilst maintaining my own indivuality and USP or brand you might say. Turning around and saying no we don’t work with them isn’t good enough, as an end user we will find someone that does. What is increasingly important which I may bore people by going on about is WHAT IS INCLUDED, NOT WHAT IS NOT. It’s wonderful to hear the vendor sales guys compare producsts, compare features ‘their one only has four onboard network ports’ etc, but what they are missing is the concept of what use, what individual need that product fulfills. We need to manage the pride we have with our products, our business with linking it to the business need.

More and more, going forward in the enterprise space it’s compatibility, it’s lowest operating costs, the absolute cheapest way we can do it to achieve a specific need. The concept of change can be world ending, the G6 uses a different array controller, can’t do it, it’ll take three months for Jim to change the driver in the build.

For the SMB they will all say it’s about money, however linked into that is the ability to call someone at 11am, at 3am and say it’s broken help me, that’s where all the non-chargeable bits come into play. How the support concept works, how you log a call, how you are treated, what benefit of the doubt is deployed, the ratio of computer says no, mixed with the ability to google the technical message on screen all transforms the end user experience.

So how do we bridge or converge (the buzz word I keep hearing) these two markets, and how do vendors approach their customers going forward? I think we need to reduce the technical comparisons, the my blade is bigger than yours, focus on two things:

• Listening and understanding your existing customer base
• Spending your existing advertising dollars on a mixture of support and end user fulfilment

What does this mean in English?

The reason the Bladewatch team use a mixture of D430s and D630s which we bought from the Dell factory outlet?

• I can get the parts from Dell / Ebay / Reseller easily and quickly
• They are industry standard – it just works, whack on the operating system, download the service pack, a few drivers and leave Windows Update to do the rest
• It comes with the cds, there’s no nonsense stuff installed, the closest PC I can get to a MAC in terms of simplicity and ease of repair

In the server space, then how could we achieve the same thing for team MacLeod or team Bladewatch:

• Real world content and scenarios for configurations or support issues – I don’t speak server language at the low level, error 238 that my array controller memory cache is preventing the server to boot, is it accept or reject changes I want – that’s what I need
• Real world support – the ability to quickly and effortlessly ask a question without logging a call ‘Ask Mike’ – I have a brilliant interview with a server guy about this
• Community around the business and the technology – understand again what pain points, what issues your customers have and educate them, with the usual end user disclosure statements, to swap a disk follow this video, but if you aren’t sure call an engineer
• Make the support mechanism your identity – just look at what Apple did with their genius model – where’s IBM x3650 or Dell 1950 guy when I just want to know what option to press and how much would your organization save by me not logging a call?
• Look at how we charge for parts or make them accessible – this is always a difficult one, but I wonder how much loss of revenue we’re missing on because the official vendor price for that disk is £89.99 but I can get one from reseller7 for £39.99 – granted we might not be a component seller in business models, but this is what alienates customers at marginal cost.
• In essence less formal documentation and more issues based on fixes and get it back online scenarios – it says press F1 or F2, which is the right one to get it to boot and rebuild the drive, which one causes it to go on its holidays?

You could argue that as the virtual world takes over, as we switch to virtual data centers, running virtual applications on virtual machines using fewer physical servers, with virtualized networks and storage, the server becomes irrelevant. Whether it’s a Compaq DeskPro, an Oracle  industrial strength SPARC based server or a rackmount from a local guy, it’s easily replaceable. But there are two interesting elements to this. As I reduce my server estate from 1000 servers to a few hundred, even thirty if we see the latest announcements in terms of performance and scalability, do they not become even more core to my business. How they all act together, how I manage the system health, report on the inventory and identify what is running what, what the impact of a change might be, what diagnostic and support tools become even more important.

At the same time, it’s so easy to forget that every business, big and small is in this state of operational bliss where everything works, where everything is virtualized, with per cpu/GB billing, where we have no problems and the only consideration is the age of the hardware and reducing the support costs. There are still many businesses trying to cope in the BAU world (Business as Usual) the support, the here and now where, it really would be nice to talk about that, but we have 400 support calls and requests, we have 96 servers which need hardware components replaced or hardware diagnostics to be scheduled. Where we don’t get immediate budget to replace hardware, where I might take that DL380 G4 server and swap it with my DC which is a DL360 G1, because it’s newer.

I wonder therefore if we can adopt a policy where no one gets left behind in an IT sense. Where we share ideas and concepts in doing so earn revenue and create opportunities for end users as a community and the vendors at the same time.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.