When Jeff Browning was at NetApp we always paid close attention to what he said. Now he is at EMC, which is interesting. When Jeff speaks, it is still a good idea to pay attention:
Jeff has recently started a blog which is worth reading and it sheds some light on why things seem so confusing for NetApp’s customers lately.
And he continues…
This is really interesting.
As I have said before many times ” you can’t make this stuff up!”
Fun with transportation
You might think from watching the FED EX and UPS commercials on TV, or from reading their brochures that transportation and shipping is easy and once everything is in the system it goes perfectly. With GPS in the trucks, and online databases what could possible go wrong?
Occasionally things just seem to be jinxed. No matter how many checklists we have, once things get in the hands of the freight business there is no certainty at all about where a shipment will end up or when it will arrive.
A few weeks ago FED EX delivered an overnight package destined for us to a woman two blocks away with Alzheimer’s disease. Why they delivered a package to a residential street two blocks away I can’t fathom. FED EX emailed us the signature and printed name and I looked in the phone book and got the lady’s home care provider to hold the package until one of our staff drove over to get the package. It was important legal documents. When a person from FedEx finally called me to say they couldn’t figure out where the package was they were stunned that I had called the name in the phone book, and we already had the package. High Tech solutions can’t replace a simple phone call and common sense.
Dealing with large shipments and airfreight can be frightening. A few years ago Eagle airfreight lost 6 cabinets with NetApp filers. How they could lose 6 refrigerator-sized cabinets still astounds me. But they lost them, and after months of wrangling gave us a check for $50.00 as insurance. Our insurance company had to cover the loss. We don’t use Eagle freight anymore.
International freight and transportation can get even more convoluted. Whenever you stick customs into the mix everything gets twice as hard. Using FedEx and UPS helps a lot. However, when shipping to England we have found that it makes no difference if you ship overnight on Thursday or Friday. Equipment arrives on Monday anyway.
You can spend hours on the phone with people who are all very nice, but getting a definite answer sometimes is impossible. Yesterday, I was helping a truck driver load up a shipment, and we were talking for a few minutes about the crazy job he has and the bizarre environment of transportation and freight. Before he left he said, “ If I did not laugh I would go crazy” He was right, but sometimes I need a beer to loosen up my sense of humor after dealing with these folks in the strange world of freight.
NetApp Costs Spiraling out of control? Zerowait has the answers, at a cost you can afford!
Earlier this week one of our oldest customers was telling me how tired he was of his NetApp sales & engineering team constantly trying to sell his company newer and more expensive storage and software. No matter how many times he tells them that he is happy with his current Filers, they turn the conversation toward the impending End of Availability of his equipment. Next they quote him draconian prices for his legacy maintenance and support. What he likes about Zerowait is that we are an independent company that helps him evaluate his actual costs of maintaining and managing his current storage infrastructure. With Zerowait service and support his storage planning is back in his hands instead of the pushy NetApp sales team’s. We allow him to concentrate on storage growth and management rather than on his vendor’s product release cycles and End of Life (EOL) announcements.
Successful NetApp system monitoring, maintenance & management can mean the difference between an efficiently run operation and one that’s grid-locked by vendor dictated equipment upgrades. With Zerowait on your side preventive maintenance and upgrade schedules can be based on usage thresholds defined by real world experience, and not by the manufacturer’s product release cycle, or the vendor’s sales quota.
Zerowait provides a simple, integrated set of services that can be tailored to your needs by department, by project, or by machine. Our flexible alert hierarchy allows you to automate preventive maintenance schedules based on thresholds you define. Zerowait offers a way to control your costs for acquisitions, upgrades and maintenance. Our customers told us they wanted a solution to out-of-control Network Appliance costs — and we delivered.
Creating a global strategy one customer at a time.
Over the last few years it has become clear that our business grows mostly by reference and referral. NetApp customers, like all technology consumers, need to get all the value out of their equipment that they can over the long run. NetApp’s sales force and technical sales engineers are evangelizing their new products to customers to sell product and make their quarterly numbers. Zerowait provides an independent, long term view which helps customers evaluate their current and future storage purchases strategically. Since Zerowait is an independent service and support business we can help customers evaluate their storage growth in light of their equipments specifications and work with hem to tweak their systems to get the most out of them.
Sometimes we speak to NetApp customers and they don’t understand what we do. Imagine that! 😉 Zerowait provides independent monitoring, maintenance and system management to customers of NetApp equipment. Through our monitoring services we can provide insights on how to maximize your storage systems usage, and we also provide advanced parts replacement at a price much lower than the OEM. Our maintenance services include system upgrades, drive swaps and storage migrations and tuning. Our management services include everything from helping customers specify their new equipment to managing our customers storage infrastructures.
Zerowait provides the complete range of services to NetApp customers who are looking for an independent view on managing their storage investment. NetApp makes great hardware and software, Zerowait helps you get the most out of your IT investment over the long term.
Many years ago when we were a succesful reseller and RSP for NetApp we introduced a large brokerage firm and mutual fund company to NetApp’s technology. We made an appointment with the NetApp folks in Sunnyvale and the District Representative from the DC area met us in Sunnyvale at the new NetApp buildings & conference center. The CTO from the company we were introducing to the new technology wanted a strategic partner, and at the time NetApp was the new kid on the block. So after the meetings in California, it still took many months of missionary sales work to show the customer that NAS was a really good way to go for his storage, and Zerowait was going to be around for a long time supporting the equipment.
As time went by the customer was getting more interested in trying and buying the equipment and as it was a very big customer, we had a bunch of mutual meetings with the customer and our engineers and some NetApp folks.
As the deal got very close to closing, NetApp decided that we could not sell in that area anymore and took the customer direct. This customer is now one of NetApp’s largest eastern customers and NetApp gives them very good service and from what I understand astonishingly good price discounts.
Like so many other customers we introduced to the technology they fell in love with NetApp’s simplicity, but as time has gone by this cusotmer, like so many others, is wondering if there may be a way of extending their product life cycles beyond what the vendor sales force requires to keep their sales numbers up.
And so we are chatting with them again, 6 years isn’t so long in the life of a growing business.
NetApp’s former partner Dell is going to ‘Clobber pricey NetApp’
It looks like Dell is about to try to get even with NetApp for past transgressions.
Asthana said Dell will go after the big boys by reducing operational costs and making storage products that are customer installable and maintainable rather than services engagement needy. Dell certainly isn’t the only company gunning after SMBs with all-in-one, multi-protocol boxes, but Asthana feels Dell will set itself apart by crafting cheaper storage that doesn’t skimp on features.
“Some of our competitors are making cheaper storage devices, but they’re not more capable,” said Asthana. “They won’t do it because they don’t want to cannibalize their upper tier storage.”
I wonder how long is a strategic timeframe in these companies’ minds? This is from 1998…
Has Looney Tunes moved to Java Drive in Silly Con Valley?
Yesterday evening I was discussing NetApp’s cartoon customer characterizations with a couple of our mutual customers. We provide monitoring, maintenance and management of these customers filers after they buy them from NetApp. What really pissed these folks off was the way NetApp is taking away Command Line Interface, and then boasting about it, as an idea concocted by their cartoon characters. I had missed this when I read the article yesterday, because I was laughing so hard, but the engineer pointed it our to me while we were drinking a beer at Iron Hill Brewery.
Personas have led to replacing of the command line interface for the products (which required programming skills) to a ‘drag-n-drop’ one, so even a user who does not understand the nuances of the products can use it, he says.
I wonder if the NetApp product manager that come up with this is named “bullwinkle’ and has a degree from ‘Whatsamtta U’ ?
I know that our engineers think that taking away NetApp’s CLI seems like a pretty boneheaded idea . We think our storage customers are pretty smart folks, which is why we talk to them and visit them as often as we can. Customers want the most value they can get for their storage dollar. Can a company as large as NetApp really be this out of touch with its customers?
Which cartoon character came up with the idea of handicapping their new FAS2020 with only 1TB of memory?
You just can’t make this stuff up!
NetApp – whatever happened to simple maintenance, management and cost control?
Many of our NetApp service and support customers come to us because they have heard from coworkers and peers that Zerowait can help them control their maintenance costs, and then they learn about our remote management and other services that can help them control their out of control maintenance and upgrade costs for their NetApp equipment.
Recently, I heard from a customer in NYC that their NetApp SE was strongly suggesting they upgrade to a newer system. As I asked some questions I found out that their current hardware was not maxed out in anyway and could easily handle more, users, disks, and shelves. The customer learned that the SE was truly a Sales Engineer. Sales is the first word in that title, and they are not looking out for the customer’s long term interest, but instead NetApp SE’s are trying to sell you more equipment to boost their personal bonuses.
Can a vendor’s Sales Engineer ever put the customer first? It is an interesting question that needs to be asked. I think the answer is that an independent maintenance organization is the only way for a NetApp customer to get the most value in performance and long term usage out of his equipment. NetApp sells boxes and software, not efficiency.
Instead of asking customers what is in the customers interest and building products for them, NetApp has embarked on building Avatars of their perfect customers, so that they can build perfect products for them.
So now NetApp has created cartoon characters to act as their perfect customers… You just can’t make this stuff up!
At Zerowait we listen to real customers, and their real problems, and provide real solutions. We invest our research and development funds in creating better ways to help our customers, while NetApp is investing in cartoon characters to help their customers.
Testimony in the Brocade options scandal brings to light a rather interesting perspective by Silicon Valley Corporate management.
On the third day of the trial that began this week, a witness told the jury that Reyes told her during a private conversation that the back-dating of stock options in order to increase their value was “not illegal if you don’t get caught,” according to reports.
That statement entirely contradicted Reyes’ defense lawyers’ opening argument that neither the ex-chief nor anybody else at the company knowingly committed securities fraud.
The witness who claimed that Reyes had told her that only those that get caught are guilty was June Weaver, who worked in Brocade’s HR department. Reyes’ lawyers first attempted to block her testimony by arguing that it had only been partially revealed to them during evidence discovery, and that Weaver could not remember exactly when Reyes made the statement.
But Weaver was allowed to testify, and told the court that she remembered what Reyes said “very well,” according to reports.
Our View
The US government must be admired for taking such a strong stand to protect the efficient and fair operation of the financial mechanisms that underpin the US economy.
But the anti-stock option fraud campaign is already facing the same sort of over-kill criticism than was generated by the Sarbanes-Oxley response to the WorldCom and Enron accounting scandals.
One Silicon Valley chief who has publicly condemned the DoJ’s campaign as a “witch hunt” is Network Appliance CEO Dan Warmenhoven, who last year said that is doing more to harm than good to investor confidence.
Nevertheless a conviction of Reyes may encourage the DoJ to make some more examples of Silicon Valley chiefs. At least a few will be watching this trial with more than a little concern.
It is worth reading the whole article, but clearly there was something funny going on. It certainly doesn’t look like the management had the long term interests of their customers, investors, or employees in mind. Are these statements representative of how the management was trying to build the company, or just on how they were trying to cash in quickly for themselves?
What happened to selling the ‘Magic’ of NetApp? It seems they are resorting to competing only on price now. Somehow – I don’t think NetApp can compete in the commodity storage business, they have a high cost support and maintenance model.Their sales strategy seems broken, it looks like they are fighting for the high margin business with EMC , and also fighting for the low margin business now with companies that are built to sell commodity priced equipment. Salesman go where the commission dollars are. Low margin typically means low commission. And saleman always work harder for a good commission.
Now NetApp is fighting back with bundles starting at about $28,000, Chalaka said. These bundles are based on the FAS250, FAS270C, and FAS3020 iSCSI arrays, and include the controller, expansion shelf, and minimum of 2 Tbytes of capacity on the hardware side, Chalaka said.
The bundles represent a list price drop for NetApp of between 16 percent and 47 percent from their original prices, bringing the bundle prices to 10 percent to 20 percent below the competition, Chalaka said.
Can a company used to high margin sales and expensive technical support compete in the commodity storage business? Most companies are not succesful when they try to drastically switch their sales model. Maybe CDW can sell a bunch of storevaults at a low margin and NetApp can make it up on volume? Companies have tried this tactic in the past.
Only time will tell.
