I had a call yesterday with a guy (I’ll call him Julio, because that isn’t his name) that is responsible for storage decisions at a very big company (I’ll call the company Acme, because that isn’t the company’s name).  I can’t name the company or the guy for reasons that are obvious to anyone who works in a large public company.   But I can share the gist of our conversation.  The part that is interesting to startups is the conversation we had around supplier management, environment complexity, and supplier support.

Julio’s at the end of a purchase decision cycle, and he told me which way he was going.  “We’re going with Sun, at least for now,” he said, “because they provide great service, we’ve worked with them for years, they understand our environment, and quite frankly, I don’t want to add another supplier.” 

The technology that Julio is going with to address his current need is largely untested in environments of Acme’s size, but, I can assure you, Julio will test it out, and so will the Sun team. And I’m sure Julio will be fine with his decision.   What’s interesting in this particular decision is that Sun didn’t develop and doesn’t own the underlying technology that makes this solution the right fit for Julio.  Sun gets it from someone else – an independent software supplier that is arms merchant to at least two of Sun’s biggest competitors in the storage space.

Interestingly on another purchasing decision within the last year or so, one of the things that Julio openly told me was that he had decided to go with Onaro for change control management, and that he “couldn’t live without it.”  Onaro was just purchased by NetApp, and at least in a small way, NetApp’s decision to purchase Onaro may have been influenced by what Julio said to a senior executive at NetApp within the past year.  Turns out the executive asked Julio what products he had acquired in the last year from startups, and Julio mentioned Onaro.  Actually, he raved about Onaro.

To some, it may sound as if Julio’s got a double standard:

  1. On the first problem, pick Onaro because they have the best solution
  2. On the second problem, pick Sun because he doesn’t want to add another supplier

In fact, I suspect it is not a double standard, but rather an issue of support.  A software-only solution that runs on one of his standard server or storage systems presents a simpler support model than one in which the software solution is bundled and sold as an appliance.  Then he’s got to worry about hardware and software support from a startup.  The fact that Onaro was certified on his hardware platforms was undoubtedly a pre-requisite to the sale.  But had Onaro come as an appliance that would sit in his network and be supported by Onaro’s software and hardware engineers, the sale would have been more difficult, as it was for Sun’s competitor in the other deal.

By the way, Julio’s been been somewhat intrigued by XIV as a repository for Acme’s growing pile of semi-static data, but XIV might have had the same issue winning deals at the account.  I guess IBM solved that one for them.