* Doing business with big players
Once upon a time, it was thought that what America really needed was a good five-cent cigar.
Being a non-smoker I am just a bit skeptical that this was ever a particularly good idea, and I am almost certain that even if we had such an item, most IT workers – and most of the vendors who supply them – wouldn’t see a whole lot of advantage in it. I suppose it is possible however, that FDR may have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek when he proposed this.
On the other hand, there probably are some other things we could get some pretty good value from, and I fully expect the need for these things to drive a lot of decision-making over the next several quarters.
Consider the case of the poor storage hardware vendor, for example. Margins are frequently eroding, time-to-market requirements are increasingly stringent, and the whole product development cycle has become so foreshortened that what once might have taken a few years to develop will often be way behind on the technology curve if it takes even half that long.
That is why so many hardware developers are learning to do what bicycle manufacturers have done for a long while now: assemble key pieces of technology from a few outstanding vendors and focus on making their own contributions, such as specific pieces of intellectual property or perhaps having an aggressive sales channel, as the differentiator for their final product.
Large companies often work with a much smaller company that has a new approach to a basic problem in order to get a product out the door faster, or that can provide a more cost-efficient part of the development process, or for myriad other reasons.
Because of the highly competitive nature of their business, vendors always have to keep their eye open for useful new technologies as they start to come down the road. Often such technologies come from small companies that bank on the success of a single idea or a single product. In our business if such a “one-trick pony” has an idea that is good enough, that is all they will need to be successful.
There will always be certain rules of the road of course, and any new technology company with the next great idea must follow if it wants to do business with the big players. Such rules will of course vary from company to company, but there will be some common requirements across all vendors.
For example, I recently came across a company that offers a new and fundamental technology to storage vendors: an IP-based storage solution that will cost less for vendors to build than existing iSCSI- or Fibre Channel-based network storage devices. The company does this by, among other things, giving each storage device its own communications channel to the network (eliminating the need for controllers) and by offering RAID capability without the need for additional specialized hardware.
This is new technology, aimed at potential OEM partners.
I believe in partnering arrangements like these, but I also believe that however cheap a company’s solution might be, it will be of limited value to vendors if it doesn’t conform to existing, standards-based engineering approaches. Being in a sharing mood, I let the company’s spokesperson know this.
I have to admit the company came back at me with a pretty good response.
Its point was that while its intellectual property was proprietary, the technology it delivers to its customers (the vendors) is all standards-based. It is based on the same internetworking protocol and switching technologies we have known for years. Users can choose any vendor’s switches, disk drives and so forth, even to the extent of mixing different drives in the same storage-area network.
The company already has some OEM customers, so it is a reasonable assumption that somebody has already gone to the effort of testing out many of the interoperability issues.
Using standards in a new and still conformant way seems to be a pretty reasonable way to keep technology’s wheels rolling in the right direction. It will be nice to see these folks at some of the larger interoperability testing sites, such as SNIA’s facility in Colorado Springs or the Interoperability Lab at Storage Networking World, but in the meanwhile at least it looks as if this company is doing something worthy of note.
(P.S. The company I interviewed is Zetera (http://www.zetera.com). If you are interested in how smaller companies position themselves as providers of key know-how to even the biggest vendors, or if you just want to be aware of some interesting new technology, you may want to give its Web site the once-over.)
