Venture Adventure

While commenting on the The Future of Storage blog post Does Anyone Care About Efficiency Of Storage?, I starting thinking about all of the different customers involved in a single sale. Since the impetus (and my company) surround storage, we’ll focus on this product and market.

The Setup

Generic product

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) Solution with 10 TB of storage.

Generic Customer

A small enterprise – 1500 employees, a corporate data center, corporate IT staff

The Customer List

IT Staff

The IT staff has specific technical requirements for the product, the management of the product, and the integration of the product into their production environment. Quite often, they have relationships with other storage vendors that have to be broken in order to make the sale.

CIO

The CIO has to ensure that the generic solution (NAS) as well as the specific solution (us as a vendor) meet with all the strategic goals of the company – long term, financial, number/size/type of vendors, etc.

COO

The COO has to ensure business continuity, and has to be convinced that installing and integrating a new storage system will not cause any interruptions to the corporation’s work.

CEO & Board of Directors

Depending on the storage vendor and the type of customer, 10TB NAS solutions can cross the border from discretionary and departmental budget spending to corporate capital asset purchases. In this case, the CEO & BoD have their own set of objectives and objections that have to be met.

End Users

The end users may often have different requirements from IT for storage. For most end users, storage is a commodity on with the same value as pens and paper. As long as it’s there, we can get our job done. If we run out, then the work quickly grinds to a halt and there are a lot of very unhappy end users. Also, like pens and paper, end users perceive storage to be infinitely cheap, and therefore in complete abundance. Rationing of storage is not appreciated nor tolerated very well.

While end users are almost never included in the purchase process, if the end user expectations are not met, negative brand associations may result. For example, if, during the transition of files from the old storage system to the new storage system results in lost or corrupt files, the end users are very quick to blame the new stuff, as the old stuff was perceived to “just work”.

It is important for a new storage player to ensure that they meet with all the customers and determine their expectations for the system. Failure to meet expectations, even with a “successful” engagement, will quickly drive the Customer Lifetime Value to Zero.