Along my career, I was fortunate enough
to get to meet several people that clearly helped shape the world we
live in. Of course, most of them wouldn't recognize me if we crossed
in the street but, their views on the world, on IT and on what we, as
a class, should be doing in this world left a lasting impression with
me
But, if I could ask for one person to
listen for 5 minutes what I had to say, it would be to Mr. Yamamoto.
Masami Yamamoto is the President of
Fujitsu, a man that, when combines his age with what he already
accomplished in Life, would swat me to the side but, yes, given a
chance, I would go to him and tell him:
Mr. Yamamoto, we need more from you.
When I first started working with some
of your machines, buying Fujitsu was like cursing someone. The
machines were bad, would fail more than my home PC, Fujitsu's support
was non existent and, buying something more complex than a simple
machine from Fujitsu was a task worthy of all the 12 tasks of
Hercules.
Then, … things got worst and we had
all the Fujitsu's to handle. A time of competing proposals from
several Fujitsu's, of high prices, of “we'll give you the proposal
next week, ok?” Not such good times, specially when no one actually
understood in what exactly was Fujitsu Services different from
Fujitsu-Siemens (I'm sure the differences were plenty but, no one was
interested in getting a PHD in Fujitsu's board).
Recently, I had some encounters with
Fujitsu technology and, every time, I jumped back thinking, hell, no
way but, after having my hands tied, I really had to take a
professional look at what Fujitsu was proposing.
Started with the Primergy line, right,
who cares about X86 hardware, right? Well, at least until I opened
it. Yes, it's still a crappy Intel processor but, holy that actually
seems like a real machine, … It has remote console, good Electrical
Isolation, pretty sound engineering in terms of reliability and it
performed amazingly well in our benchmarks, where I expected it to be
the same crap as the other machine we had there, it rocked and blew
other X86 vendors.
Then, I saw your work in Sparc. I left
the Sun reseller world more or less at the same time as the APL came
out so, I became suspicious of the I/O capabilities of Sun (now
Fujitsu's tech) high end machines. Hell, I was so wrong it actually
hurts. The M series (I tested the M5000) seriously kicks some bad
behinds. In most workloads I tested, it seriously kicked IBM's Power
line and, when you start from a clean state (dedicated Storage,
Dedicated backups, Q&A, etc) I could build a complete solution
for less than half of IBM's offer (list prices but, then again, I'm
not disclosing the details of the deal and the tests so, I see this
info is not all that relevant to anyone but myself).
I was amazed with this “new”
Fujitsu. And, so I started talking with people, reading papers, and
studying Fujitsu's offer, from Grids to Big machines, from disk to
cables and, in a word, … WOW.
But, I must say all this was dwarfed by
actually working with Fujitsu.
In a project, things went south, really
bad. It was one of those case study scenarios where everything that
could go wrong, did go wrong right after production launch and, it
was Fujitsu that showed up and offered to help us.
Having spent most of my working life in
a reseller, I do know that what happened to us was part luck but,
experience shows that luck usually happens to the hard working and
better prepared. Fujitsu's behavior, as a benchmark of the company
structure in terms of support, presales and willing to commit with
the customer was nothing short of brilliant.
So, I have to ask, why isn't Fujitsu
head and shoulders above the competition as an IT supplier?
IBM moved from “no one was ever fired
for buying IBM” to “buy IBM and risk your job moving into IGS”.
They are still selling but every reasonable customers with an actual
IT staff should be looking for ways to get out of IBM's rule.
HP's offer ranged from okey-ish X86
hardware to a pretty awful offer based on the crappiest processor the
industry put up for sale since Cyrix. Every proposal from HP has to
be double (and tripled) checked for errors
Oracle is recognized as the hardest
company to make business with, they are lost with their offer
(specially in terms off hardware) and their bet on what they call
integrated solutions is just diverting their sales force from
technology sales into marketing driven sales with crappy technology.
I guess Dell is an OK bet but, you know
what you're getting into. They're the entrance level of the server
market and have no engineering to enable them to move into the high
end.
The Storage will start inverting
tendencies soon enough. People who didn't move into real clouds will
soon learn again that disk is the ultimate bottleneck of their
systems and, Eternus has the possibility to amaze (extra bonus, it's
the best Storage one could dream for a Solaris zones consolidation
environment).
And, it's in this scenario we have
Fujitsu. A company that has the technology, has the services
infrastructure, has the know how and the manpower to start building
what everybody else should be doing if they weren't so focused on
their own belly. A company that understands the market and is willing
to partner with customers in order to make things happen but, from
some reason, isn't moving, at least not as fast as one could hope and
would expect.
Mr. Yamamoto, you are the one in the
best position to validate an entire generation worth of work in IT.
The principles of IT acting as a business enabler, as a value added
provider, as a problem solver can be regained by what we could do
with your help. Please, just give the order to go, grow.We, the world need more from you and I'm sure you want more from us also.
No comments:
Post a Comment