T. Bova Note: This is the second guest post from Dave Russell as his continued participation in our Future of Sales research.
In the last few years, when I look at customers’ RFP spreadsheets, they might have 50 or more rows of features and maybe 4 to 6 vendors columns. Guess what? Every vendor has checked off every feature! Are all products the same? No, but it’s getting harder to see the differences.
For a few year now I’ve been using the term “Compressed Differentiation” to describe the state of the storage vendors. This term applies equally to storage software (e.g. backup application) as well as storage hardware (e.g. storage arrays).
So what does “Compressed Differentiation” mean? Essentially it means that products and vendors actually have uniqueness, but that the differences are much narrower than ever before – hence there are differences, but they are compressed. In a recent Gartner Research Circle poll, 359 respondents answered the question “How effective do you think most IT providers are in differentiating themselves from their competition?” 52% said that they think it is difficult to see competitive advantages of one vendor over another. Only 24% said that they think that most IT providers are effective in differentiating themselves from their competitors. This poll covered all of IT. If it had been storage specific, I think the results would have been even more skewed towards the “no to low differences” side.
For decades storage was sold on the “killer feature” sales motion. This was some capability that no other vendor had, or least no other major vendor had. If we think back a few years, thin provisioning was a killer feature. Vendors like 3PAR (then a startup) and NetApp (then a major vendor) used this feature with great success to sell their gear. Sometimes a few of these killer features could be stacked together to try to create a more compelling and differentiated product. NetApp had deduplication, thin provisioning, unified storage connectivity and non-invasive snapshots. That was a pretty unique feature set – some 5-6 years ago. Now it seems that every major storage array vendor, and a lot of startup players too, has all of these features.
What does this mean for you? It might very mean that non-product capabilities become more of a deciding factor than the product feature set alone. Example of this include: 1) vendor support services and 2) perceived ease of use and ongoing management.
In today’s market, there are a number of vendors, both established and upstarts, with a plethora of products. Increasingly in speaking with clients, there are easily 2 to 3 or more products that look like they would be a good fit for addressing the requirements. Support, packaging (software, appliance, integrated system, etc.) ease of use and cost of maintenance are now becoming major deciding factors.
Gartner recommends that you continue to make a list of product requirements. Maybe instead of check boxes, you score vendors on a 1 to 5 scale on how complete or appropriate that product’s feature is for your needs. Next, make a list of non-product capabilities, such as some of the ones above, and I believe you’ll start to see the contrast become more visible.