End Of Year Thoughts

I constantly wonder at hype and how it takes hold; Storage seems to be especially vulnerable to this at present, we are under constant bombardment that this technology or that technology will make our lives easier, our businesses more profitable and the world a better place. From the use of SSDs to the deployment of big data analytics for marketing; it is a barrage not seen in IT since the claims that 4GL languages were going to make every programmer in the world redundant.

Every year is going to be the year of the Cloud, Big Data, BYOD, VDI; every year it seems to be the year of something new but also the year of last year’s product; Product Will Eat Itself, every meme perpetuating another meme.

Analysts struggle to make sense and come up with meaningless tools to demonstrate that they know even less about the real world than you could possibly have thought; Magic Quadrants, Points of Proof, Hype-Cycles and Fluffy Clouds are used to try to influence people and con the influencers.

More and more products come to the market and vanish to all intents and purposes. Some find homes in niches allowing the vendor to claim some kind of success. Just don’t prod and poke too hard. There are simply too many start-ups in storage at the moment to make much sense of the market; many with the same USP.

Yet how many of us make time to talk properly to the vendors and give them some honest feedback? And how often is that feedback well received? Unfortunately we are all too nice in general and possibly afraid of upsetting someone. This will probably surprise many of the vendors out there but many of us do hold back (there are some grumpy exceptions).

Some vendors are very good at getting out and talking at the C-level; I’d like to see more vendors getting out and talking with the levels below. I’d like 2013 to be the year that you solve some of my problems and not just the CIO’s…because if you do, you might just find that I have time to implement this year’s product and may be buy some more product instead of bitching about the maintenance costs of last year’s product.