| Here's the incumbent experience for proper servers: 1. You're a small company. None of the big companies will talk to you. You're a waste of their time. 2. You're a medium company. Maybe the worst sales person on the team is desperate enough to talk to you. 3. You're a big company. They will be only too happy to talk to you. You want to buy a rack of servers. They will not sell you a rack of servers. No, no, no. You need to talk about how their SAN is much better than your current SAN. Also they just bought a virtualisation company so maybe you should replace your virtualisation stack with theirs. And have you considered how helpful their outsourcing service could be for running your datacentre? They'll undercut your current team of staff as long as you commit to replacing all your servers with theirs. Also they hear you're making use of REST services, have you considered one of their REST security appliances? They'll throw them in free. None of these conversations happen with the person trying to buy a rack of servers, they'll happen with a vice president or procument or your finance team. Your rack of servers comes with a bunch of "free" stuff that you didn't want and don't have time to implement. Eighteen months later you're being told to drop all your work that your customers care about, because whoever inked the deal with the free REST appliances looks stupid if they don't get used, so you have to implement them Supermicro are just selling you a rack of servers. |