As a Solutions Architect, part of my job is to work with new prospects who are quite often bombarded by messaging from a wide variety of sources. By the time they get to me, usually ultra-niche players, or platform focused players have tried to convince them that what they need is a tool to solve their needs in a narrow or short sighted manner.
An example of a platform focused player are the tools the have a specific focus, say Windows for instance. Although tools like this appear to be broad, with a solid framework, they fall flat on their face when your organization brings in other platforms. This need will eventually arise in your organization at one point or another because of expansion, a need for new technologies to drive the business or even more importantly when your company has success and buys another company. The contrast, of course, is a tool that can give you a single point of visibility into all hardware/software stack combos commonly found in the data center – including virtualization stacks.
The question to ask yourself is, what is the cost of going with a niche player? What will the time investment loss be when you are forced to adopt new technologies?
An example of an Ultra-Niche player would be the virtualization-only focused players in the market. Any vendor that focuses specifically and only on VMWare capabilities and visibility would be a great example. One such vendor focuses narrowly on consolidation and migration products. These products have such a narrow scope of focus, and can only be used as such a limited part of the IT systems life cycle. They end up being thrown out after the consolidation and migration process is complete. More broad tools (like <here is my plug> up.time) in contrast, has the capability to aid you over the entire life cycle of your virtualization project AND most importantly ensure you have visibility over this infrastructure and the application and services that run on them – in the context of the whole data center.
The above two points often act as a point of illumination into the true capability of our product. It is very hard to find a product that incorporates the real useful features of those niche tools, that maintains a broad spectrum of platform support for heterogenous views, and lastly does all of that in an easy to roll out manner. It’s easy to see, that of the 300 to 400 vendors you can find on google that say they do systems and server monitoring, there are only a handful that can say they have the mandate and mission that uptime has set forth to accomplish.
“Ease of use” is a point that cannot be overstressed. In my role, we have displaced many products from much larger competitors, simply because our product focuses squarely on quick roll out and measurable results. We focus on ensuring that a minimum amount of administrative overhead is required to start collecting data that is immediately useful to your organization and then ensuring that that data can be used for a wide variety of uses. All the while the focus is to ensure that the client is able to do “what they need to do”, “when they need it”. Our clients realize that you need a tool that will guide you from simply monitoring infrastructure in a way that encourages adoption and pro-active action from “day 1″, while also allowing your organization to grow into sustainable capacity planning, virtualization planning, and SLA monitoring, reporting, and management.
It’s also very important that clients remember, that it’s the little things that matter. Many products emphasize alot of hype around their latest GUI features. Don’t get me wrong, uptime is no ugly duckling, we have one of the cleanest and most professional UI’s out there. What I am saying is, that clients quickly get caught up in needless or useless visualizations to impress people, not realizing that they are focusing on the features that really matter to the big picture. If your chosen system has a fantastic 3D rotating flaming logo, that’s amazing! I am sure it will likely impress alot of people initially and likely easily get you budget when you present it internally. But if the chosen system doesn’t have the features to laser guide notifications, escalate problems effectively and ensure that your staff don’t get unintelligible or spurious alerts at 3AM – you can bet that flaming logo visualization will be ignored soon and the product will be considered a bad investment down the line, putting you and your team at risk.
By focusing on the ideas behind the examples above, one can see how quickly you can cut through the hype, avoid tool soup, and ensure that your organization ends up with a toolset that’s going to “get you there today” and “take you there tomorrow”.
I encourage you to join one of our public webinars to see for yourself how different and refreshing it can be to see a product demonstration that focuses on real client challenges…and no you won’t be left at the end of the presentation asking yourself if you should get some of that hype with your management tool soup.
