Time for IT kit to show its true colours

I’ve been conducting detailed research into the storage hardware industry over the past few months, and I want to cry.

Not that I’m scared of hard work, just frustrated at vendors’ persistent reluctance to reveal the names of their original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners and other component suppliers.

We all know that it is impossible for every IT company to build every type of IT product. So there is no shame in a manufacturer re-badging the odd bit of somebody else’s kit with its own logo.

Plus, everybody under the sun already knows that it goes on anyway (particularly so in the storage industry, it seems). So why carry on being so coy about it?

I am only able to guess at the reasons behind their shyness, because the subject is taboo with the executives I talk to.

Anybody asking the question almost always gets either a curt “not our policy to reveal blah blah blah” response or, worse, the silent, tight-lipped death smile.

So, because nobody has ever given me a good explanation, I’ll offer my own theory: it is all about having big balls. And big balls only come from having big product lines.

In storage hardware, if a vendor cannot walk the walk, it must at least be seen talking the talk. Which means pretending it has something it does not while doing its best to cover up the deficiency at every turn.

For some reason, delivering big storage solutions made up of differently labelled equipment is deemed by some to be an unattractive prospect for the average enterprise customer.

Even though partnerships based on exactly this premise, backed by certification and interoperability programmes, have always survived and prospered in every sector of the IT industry.

Instead, the big storage vendor prefers to slap its logo on everything from the disk controller and the host bus adapter, to the disk array, the enclosure and even the hard disk. Just to make sure the buyer is in no doubt as to whom th ey are dealing with, and to push brand exposure to the max.

Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM (though I bet somebody, somewhere did, at least once; they are just keeping quiet about it). But are tech-savvy professionals manning corporate IT departments so universally fickle that they baulk at handling anything without a Fortune 500 badge stuck to it?

Personally, I think not. So please, storage vendors, do us all a favour – drop the charade and try a bit of honesty instead.