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The need for wholesale change in how companies view, purchase, deploy and maintain their networks is now greater than ever, with nothing less than core corporate productivity at stake. While incumbent vendors seem to agree with this philosophically, and give it great lip service in their marketing, they continue, functionally, to rapidly tack pieces (sometimes small, sometimes large) to their customers’ networks, make land-grabs at their partners’ core business and promote “rip and replace” of themselves with, well, themselves. Given this behavior, are they really focused on their customers’ productivity, or their own sequential growth? “Doing more with less,” “thinking creatively,” “extending existing resources” – any way you put it, businesses these days are hyper-focused on maintaining and even increasing productivity in the face of overwhelming economic and technical challenges. And it’s no wonder that it’s happening now. The last time networks were near-wholly re-architected, – in 1998 and 1999, everybody was worried about Y2K – the tile was going to turn over and everybody’s network would crash and no PCs would boot up and so they made a wholesale change in their infrastructure. Times were good and money was flowing and more was more and things were just entirely different. This phase of network development, while massive in scale and undoubtedly great for the vendors selling network gear, including Brocade, wasn’t necessarily predicated on application demand, throughput and user growth and storage demand.
Today’s network is different. Now we’re seeing these things increasingly exponentially, not incrementally. Nevertheless, IT departments are making incremental purchases, at the suggestion of their networking vendors, who really benefit the most. This means businesses are constantly playing catch up to their own needs while lining the pockets of their existing vendors and paving the way for more of the same. The addition of layer upon layer of network technology complicates the user experience, increases the management overhead, ramps the capex and greatly increases the need for widely varied services, which you see increase as a percentage of revenue while gear sales fall at companies who have essentially played their innovations out.
Brocade is leading the charge in a different direction. With its customers focusing on the architectural and actual physical removal of many of these layers, consolidating them into far fewer, much more high-performance and infinitely more manageable constructs, they are saving money, increasing productivity and building a more stable and solid foundation for their core business processes.
The real question for businesses today is this: To ensure that your business processes are maximized, your workers productive and your customers satisfied, do you want to work with a vendor who is open to working closely with you and other best-of-breed vendors coming in with their solutions as part of an optimal whole solution? Or, and explicitly alternately, do you want to work with a vendor that, while listing many others as “partners” (more on the true definition of “partner” in a future post) will give you their products end-to-end, tying you to not only their roadmap, but their support, their business terms and THEIR future – a future that depends on your spending an average of 30 percent more to add layer after layer of piecemeal technologies that rarely seem to enjoy or be motivated to develop shared knowledge of one another?
Choose carefully, Y3K’s a long way off.
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