Comments on: Are the new unions promoting vendor lock-in?

By: Pit Silas

Pit Silas — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:55:02 +0000

Great article. There’s a lot of good information here, though I did want to let you know something – I am running Redhat with the circulating beta of Firefox, and the layout of your blog is kind of bizarre for me. I can read the articles, but the navigation doesn’t function so great.

By: Rachel Eiple

Rachel Eiple — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:42:59 +0000

I discovered your site when I was searching for something else, but this page showed up at the top of Google your web site must be so popular! Continue the good work!

By: Susie Minturn

Susie Minturn — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:55:11 +0000

bookmarked this at Connectedy (not sure what it is? you should know that Lets you establish a personal link directory online. As you surf the web, you collect links, categorize them in a way that makes sense to you.

By: Tom MacKay

Tom MacKay — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:48:36 +0000

Good observation as always Dave! I think that many of these new “alliances” are going to try to tout the TCO/ROI they can bring (regardless of how they actually calculate the numbers:) as the “wash” benefit of the cost to switch from a competing platform/architecture. They will also often “throw-in” training to ease the pain of a vendor switch if necessary…BTW, good seeing you again last week! Enjoy the weather! I have a strange urge to order some Vytorin right now for some odd reason…:)

By: Etherealmind

Etherealmind — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:25:04 +0000

Possibly but unlikely. Companies like HP and IBM have a mentality to sell anything to anybody. For example, it is not uncommon for them to sell Dell computers if that is what the customer wants.

This is just a deal to make sure the they can lflog anything that the customer asks for (whether they need it or not).

By: Richard Caldwell

Richard Caldwell — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:25:56 +0000

I absolutely agree. Virtualization has enabled us to create solutions from interchangeable building blocks that give us the flexibility to change one component for another with much less time and effort than was once required. Moving towards vendor specific stacks is moving in the wrong direction as far as I’m concerned.

Of course this started as a tactic for Cisco to use their network footprint to wedge their way into the compute space. Other vendors are forced to compete against that by providing their own end-to-end stack. But the side benefit I think they all see in this tactic is that it makes a customer much more locked into their solution and it enhances their professional services offerings by giving them an end-to-end stack that their engineers can focus on.

By: Vaughn Stewart

Vaughn Stewart — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:13:26 +0000

Dave,

You’re spot on. We are moving away from best of breed solutions to multi-vendor stacks (ala like the days of mainframes).

I see this movement as being in the best interest of the vendors and not the consumers as it results in tech lock-in and as we know advances in technology can come at any time and from any where.

By: ThatFridgeGuy

ThatFridgeGuy — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:11:43 +0000

I don’t really see this as a problem. Keep in mind that these solutions are geared towards only a portion of the market. There will be plenty of people that will still be mixing and matching solutions as they always have. Therefore if you decide to buy a vBlock and later replace the storage with NetApp, you will be in the same boat as the guy down the street who bought UCS, VMware and NetApp storage to start with.
Rod