Sales and marketing presentations are awash with value propositions before a sale. But after the sale, how does the buyer show his organization quickly and easily that the claimed value propositions were achieved? And if they were not achieved, how does the seller know and correct the product?
A number of features lower power consumption on storage arrays, including virtualization, thin provisioning, thin copying, and various types of MAID. How do you show that thin provisioning is improving utilization of the disks, that the disks have been slowed or stopped, and how much power has been saved?
After reviewing dozens of products in detail at the Wikibon Energy Lab, I have found very few that provide effective hero reports the buyer can use to show his organization what has been achieved. These have almost always been an afterthought, a special script that has to be developed and run, a special program that has to be installed or that requires a services engagement to analyze and display a complex set of data.
Take thin provisioning as an example. The full information on a storage volume comes from data that can be obtained from the storage controller and data that is known by the server operating or file system. To provide an effective thin provisioning hero report needs a combination of both sets of data. This is easy to do early in the product cycle but very difficult to achieve after the product has been installed and run.
If you then collect and analyze that meta-data from numbers of customers, powerful information can be developed. An example discussed on the March 17 Peer Incite was the case study on the virtualization and thin provisioning benefits achieved by customers. The figure in the case study shows the probability of an organization achieving improved levels of efficiency. For example, it shows that the expected increase in storage capacity from virtualization and thin provisioning is 150%.
Action Item: Early in the design cycle reviewers should ask two key questions:
- “What are the value propositions of the product?”
- “How can the buyer know (and show others) those values were achieved?”
Early in the sales cycle the buyer should ask one key question:
- “How can I (on my own) show my organization quickly and easily that we have achieved your claims, without special programming or a services contract”
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