One of my favorite TV commercials (You have those, too. Right?) is a car commercial where a couple asks the salesman if the vehicle includes a particular feature, and the salesman answers with, “No, you’d need to upgrade to our Cubic Zirconia Package.” The couple responds, “Sounds expensive.” Salesman answers, “Yeah, it is.” Their next question yields a response of, “That’ll be an upgrade to our Titanic Perfection Package.” The ad ends with the couple walking away, presumably to buy a vehicle that includes all the features they want in the base package.
In the TV commercial, the couple felt like they were being taken advantage of when the features they wanted were being sold as extra cost options; particularly when other manufacturers were including those same features in their base package. It is this emotional connection that still brings this ad to mind six months after it last aired.
Unfortunately, this commercial has been called to mind many times as we have been preparing the DCIG 2014 Enterprise Midrange Buyer’s Guide because fewer than half of the arrays included in this Buyer’s Guide come with all of the features enterprises are likely to want fully licensed. In particular, I am talking especially about snapshots, replication, and thin provisioning.
This is more than just an emotional issue. Vendors that sell their arrays with all software features already licensed as part of the standard array package create extra business value for purchasers by reducing the number of decision points in the purchasing process, and by smoothing the path to full utilization of the array’s capabilities.
As a former IT director over a span on more than twenty years, I have a plea to put in the ears of all storage vendors:
You’ve already done the software development needed to add these features to your arrays. Please make life easier for your customers–and enable them to get the most value from their array purchases–by shipping your arrays with these features enabled.
IT leaders can only go to the proverbial well so many times. When business requirements change, having to go back and ask for more money in order to turn on a newly required capability makes the purchaser look stupid. In my experience, these situations also turn what could have been part of a capital budget into an unexpected hit on the IT operating budget.
Worse, the a-la-carte approach to licensing reduces the agility of the IT department in responding to changing business requirements because the purchase approval and ordering process may take weeks. If implementation services are required, that may add more weeks to the process. As the weeks pass, business process owners become more and more frustrated with the inability of their internal IT department to meet their business needs.
Separate licensing fees also have an impact on the overall cost of ownership for a storage array and on the balance of capital versus operating budgets. Therefore, the annual cost of software licenses and associated support contracts should be incorporated into TCO (total cost of ownership) and ROI (return on investment) calculations, as well as capital versus operating budget planning.
As noted earlier in this article, there are vendors who sell their arrays with these features enabled by default. In the forthcoming DCIG 2014 Enterprise Midrange Array Buyer’s Guide these vendors include Aberdeen, Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, Overland Storage, Scale Computing, and Starboard Storage. Whether these vendors are responding to customer concerns like those expressed above, or if the full set of features are inherent to the architecture, the arrays from these vendors are more attractive to those who want to keep their purchase overhead low and their ability to quickly respond to changing business requirements high.
Although I believe many business decision-makers share my viewpoint that an array that ships “Standard” with all options enabled is most appealing, I recognize that there may actually be significant differences in client requirements. An alternative approach that recognizes those differences is to bring the most commonly “bought together” options together with hardware in a single “Advanced” SKU.
My experience and the reading I have done leads me to believe that a “Standard”, “Advanced”, and “All Options Enabled” licensing approach can still reduce cost, frustration and friction from the purchase and ownership process compared to a-la-carte approaches. I believe this simplified bundling approach also inclines people like me to strongly consider the “All Options Enabled” purchase if the incremental cost difference is not large.
Vendors that ship their arrays with all features enabled–or that offer a short list of customer-focused bundles–drive complexity and cost out of the purchase decision and increase the potential for post-purchase customer satisfaction. In future Buyer’s Guides, DCIG will very likely acknowledge the business value of included licenses by awarding a significant number of points to products that ship with features already licensed.