{"id":713,"date":"2010-11-04T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/?p=713"},"modified":"2010-11-04T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-04T15:00:00","slug":"competitors-and-peers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/2010\/11\/04\/competitors-and-peers\/","title":{"rendered":"Competitors and Peers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many of our customers like to differentiate between competitors and peers. When we look at all the different hardware, services and support  that <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_0\">Zerowait<\/span> provides our  customers around the world we find it hard to find any peers.  We are keenly aware of our competitors though, and there are a few competitors in each part of our  business.  But we are unaware of any single company that provides all of the services that <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_1\">Zerowait<\/span> does.<\/p>\n<p>Many folks would say that <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_2\">EMC<\/span>, <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_3\">NetApp<\/span> and IBM  are competitors, but they are not peers. They are very different companies and they each have many capabilities that their competition does not have. They are peers in some aspects of their businesses, and when there is a very similar offering from each of them a savvy customer will seek competitive bids.  For instance the IBM N series and <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_4\">NetApp<\/span> <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_5\">FAS<\/span> series are essentially the same product, with slightly different bezels, stickers, and  support models.<\/p>\n<p>IBM, <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_6\">EMC<\/span>, and <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_7\">NetApp<\/span> are all customers of <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_8\">Seagate<\/span> and Hitachi for disks.  I am pretty confident that <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_9\">Seagate<\/span> and Hitachi  treat the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">big three<\/span>  slightly differently based on sales and profitability factors.<\/p>\n<p>Our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simplstor.com\/\"><span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_10\">SimplStor<\/span><\/a> product also uses drives from <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_11\">Seagate<\/span> or Hitachi,  and components from many of the same manufacturers that the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">big three<\/span> use. However common the components we all use, we are not competitors.<\/p>\n<p>When <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_12\">Zerowait<\/span> was a <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_13\">NetApp<\/span> reseller in the late 1990&#8217;s  our focus was selling the  F740 and F760 into the departmental storage niche market. That market niche was not being targeted by either <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_14\">EMC<\/span> or IBM and so we were able to sell our customers <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_15\">NetApp<\/span> filers without much competition.<\/p>\n<p>In a similar way our <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_16\">SimplStor<\/span> is a targeted and unique product. It is targeted towards our customers who need the reliability of name brand components, but want to avoid high priced proprietary software features and support pricing. One of our customers recently mentioned  that our lease pricing  is lower than the price he was quoted by  a cloud service provider, and he did not have the security issues to deal with.  At the <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_17\">SEG<\/span> show in Denver a lot of folks were very interested in a Petabyte of storage that can fit in a single standard rack, and were surprised that we could offer it for $300,000.00 with a switch to provide a single <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_18\">Namespace<\/span>, and  support.<\/p>\n<p>The way we look at our <span class=\"blsp-spelling-error\" id=\"SPELLING_ERROR_19\">SimplStor<\/span> product it is not a competitive product, but a complementary product to the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">big three&#8217;s<\/span> offerings  that can work well in mixed  environments and reduce our customers&#8217; costs substantially.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/11084229-3876827453569299637?l=zerowait.blogspot.com' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of our customers like to differentiate between competitors and peers. When we look at all the different hardware, services and support that Zerowait provides our customers around the world we find it hard to find any peers. We are &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/2010\/11\/04\/competitors-and-peers\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zerowait.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}