I was in Illinois last week visiting with several of our customers and while in Chicago I was parked next to the new Marilyn Monroe Statue. There certainly were a lot of admirers of the statue.
We do a lot of NetApp support business in and around Chicago, and I got to visit with a lot of customers in just a few days. Many of our customers are looking for alternatives to NetApp because they don’t have the budgets anymore to afford the upgrade path that NetApp’s sales folks are suggesting to them.
With budgets tight, many customers don’t want to upgrade to NetApp’s 64 bit storage solutions but want to maintain their 32 bit storage. Their storage equipment is highly reliable and with Zerowait’s support it remains much more affordable to maintain their legacy NetApp systems than to upgrade and replace them.
I also had several good meetings with customers about our SimplStor storage products. I heard the same type of issues that I heard in Boston a couple of weeks ago about the costs of keeping LTO tape libraries running. Several of the customers I talked to like our SimplStor solutions and think it is the right answer for the times.