DataExpress – today’s needs are complex; the simple answer is partnerships!

There is a reason why many conglomerates fail over time. No matter how mighty they look on paper they often create organizational nightmares long after the chief initiator has left the corporation. Remember the mighty conglomerate Harold Geneen created at ITT? During the middle decades of the last century, Geneen created a conglomerate out of a medium-sized business with $765 million sales in 1961. It became an international conglomerate with $17 billion sales in 1970 (the company growing through a series of approximately 350 acquisitions and mergers in 80 countries). More recently, Jack Welch when at the helm of GE, grew it into a mighty conglomerate as well. Unfortunately, there were few capable managers around who could steer these conglomerates to where they could grow even bigger and today, they have declined considerably. To many, running independent business units with little cohesion or partnership aimed at turning the many parts into a unified whole ultimately contributed to their gradual unwinding.

It was ITT’s Geneen, however, who left behind a wealth of quotes now famous throughout management schools. “If your desk isn’t cluttered, you probably aren’t doing your job,” Geneen once said and then, much later, he expanded on it with the observation that, “You can know a person by the kind of desk he keeps; if the president of a company has a clean desk then it must be the executive vice president who is doing all the work.” Based on these observations there are many within the NonStop community that must be geniuses, judging by the cluttered desks they keep. However, it was Geneen at his best when he said, “We must not be hampered by yesterday’s myths in concentrating on today’s needs.”

In former times, it was routinely suggested by software vendors that sales may land the initial deal but it is the support team that keeps the deal going and will lead to deals being renewed. Perhaps a little too glib but it does highlight a basic truth. Whenever successful software vendors sell a solution, a bond or partnership quickly forms between the team of users and the vendor. Whether it’s a simple phone inquiry or a request for a full roadmap disclosure, the relationship that develops over time becomes more a partnership than anything close to the adversarial role that permeated much of IT when computing first appeared as a tool for business. Today, these partnerships can be seen at work whenever there are gathering of the NonStop community at Regional User Group (RUG) meetings or at HPE sponsored big tent events like HPE Discover and the NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC).

With the focus of HPE on the core and the edge, new language has appeared and IT folks are oftentimes left to guess what it all means for them and their business. Many times, this new language is more of a mask behind which some vendors hide. At other times, this new language can be almost prophetic as its arrival proves to be a tipping point for everyone in the industry. This was particularly the case when cloud computing first surfaced and in little time, the significance of clouds blossomed to where everyone wanted to be sure that they had a cloud option in their own IT toolkit. Being new and very different, it soon became a case of learning something entirely new and as the industry began to embrace clouds, it also became clear that “we must not be hampered by yesterday’s myths in concentrating on today’s needs.” Once again, it became just as clear that to accelerate the understanding of the benefits of cloud computing for any business, it was going to take partnerships with those who had experience in the technology.

In the feature published in the February, 2019, issue of NonStop Insider DataExpress – it will always be about where the data is! we wrote that even as we consider all that the NonStop team has been divulging of late and the focus that NonStop team is bringing to partnerships and vendor private cloud offerings, the NonStop vendor community is giving serious consideration to where it stands on this topic and how best it could leverage this to its own advantage. In so stating, we acknowledged the work NonStop was doing to educate the NonStop, and perhaps the broader IT user community in general, about cloud computing even as it continues to shine the spotlight on partnerships. In this context, the partners are the NonStop vendors you know well and this includes DataExpress whose products focus on moving data. What will be the main use of clouds? In all likelihood, their deployments will focus on holding the vast amounts of data and whether the need is to move whole files into the cloud or the exact opposite, following consolidation of the movement of data to agencies and authorities who mandate the delivery of data they need – yes, Data Express is concentrating on today’s needs.

“DataExpress is a believer in the partnership model as we have seen it develop,” said DataExpress CEO Billy Whittington. “Ultimately, with the customer access we provide to DataExpress engineers and support personnel, there is always a partnership with the customer that develops and yes, we see this as a critical component of the overall business relationship that develops with that customer. With this model, there is no charge for our time.” Ignoring the potential for individual DataExpress customers to potentially become a drag on the business, DataExpress recognizes that their expertise in moving data and files is unique in these times and as such, is another “added benefit to working with DataExpress.” On the other hand, noted Whittington, “The bigger goal is that if our technicians are working with the in-house team on our products, then our visibility is high and that has solidified our products even further into the mainstream of our customer’s mission critical processes because who better to show them how to get additional value out of the products they have already invested in”

There is no question that complexity continues to grow and that the much talked about transformation to Hybrid IT, where the core with clouds and the edge with intelligence require deft hands at the helm to effectively navigate a course, keeps everyone focused on the business needs of today and what’s on the immediate horizon. We move files and as simple as that may sound, when it comes to the topology associated with Hybrid IT as is being discussed, there is nothing simple at all when it comes to assuring the files the business needs are where they are meant to be when they need to be there. That is our forte; that is our product set and that is the goal we promote and it happens a lot quicker and in a more sustainable manner when we partner with you!

Should you be interested in finding out more about the value to be found with DataExpress as you partner in data, email or call us; we would be only too happy to discuss how DataExpress best meets the business needs you may have today!

sales@dataexpress.com | +1.972.899.3476
http://www.dataexpress.com