What a great film. Clint Eastwood as the man with no name. Sparse dialog. Risk and reward. A hero that keeps a low profile, and without the hype.
It’s not the greatest analogy for this industry. Hype and hyperbole have taken the place of delivering predictive results and a slick pitch can prove positive for more than car dealers. New-entrant, off-shore suppliers can undercut pricing and promise full-featured functionality for a fraction of the price, right?
Sometimes.
It depends on what you’ve got and what you want. At risk of stating the obvious, a company that sells only Layer-2 switches will not extol the virtues of a routing switch that serves up specialized content from Layer 2-3 switches, regardless of what you really need. You owe it to yourself to conduct a shoot-out to see whose solution will maximize that variables of your network to meet your mission. Sometimes the existing infrastructure can negatively impact performance, for example.
Some companies know exactly what they need. The rest (hopefully) conduct a thorough research regimen with maximum emphasis on independent, third-party analysis. While much can be gleaned from the reports of the top analyst houses in this industry, they are not likely to be specific enough to your mission and topology to provide more than a guidepost.
The guidepost serves a purpose. Having been in this industry for nearly 30 years, I can tell you that nearly all of our customers come to us again and again because the guidepost is okay, but a roadmap is what they need.
We do it all, from audit, inspection, element analysis, testing of all stripes (either in the customer network or more frequently, in our test network), maximize conditions for wireless and application delivery, video and other key infrastructure imperatives.
Sometimes, the answer isn’t in wholesale network upgrades. Maybe it’s marginal upgrades to make your network Cloud ready. Maybe it’s shucking an antiquated data center and going full-on into the Cloud.
Either way, we’ve taken a different path. It’s not about pushing boxes and flogging code. It’s about your mission. It’s about how you get from here to maximum success, as enabled by your infrastructure.
It’s about choice. Your choice.
I mentioned my appreciation of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. For too many in this industry, it’s all about Fist Full of Dollars – and that’s just bad and ugly.
