It’s all fine….

Last week, I sat in a vendor update session with a vendor who wants to sell more into our company; we've a couple of deployments of their stuff and it's fine but there's no real appetite for putting any more footprint on the floor. So we get to the end of the update and the vendor looks up with enthusiasm and pride in their hearts and ask me what I think.

'It looks fine; it ticks all the boxes but I really can't see why I'd buy your product over anyone else's!'

But the roadmap, they say, the roadmap looks good doesn't it?

'It looks fine; certainly doing the right things but it's no different to anyone else's really!'

So what would make you interested? 

'Four to five year costs breakdown? TCO model? ROI model?'

We've got industry leading TCO and ROI figures; we've got customers who save millions using our kit!

'Care to share those figures, what base-line are they starting from? For all I know they might have been the worst managed storage division in history? What industry? I mean if you look at some my proposed metrics for our environment, a large number of storage managers and administrators could be looking to have me shot but my use-case is very different.'

And then the conversation peters out because they can't give me the figures I need. It's going to get harder to sell storage on features, you've all got them or at least they are road-mapped. 

I'm not going to tell you which vendor it was but it could have been pretty much any one of them. Perhaps one of the upcoming announcements will regain my enthusiasm for storage technology but until then, 'It's all fine….'