Tech Marketing: The Dr. Evil of the Tech Space
Tech marketing is the doctor evil of the tech space. Well, the first thing is is that it's just easier to swim downstream than it is to swim upstream. So as soon as something gets popularized popularized everybody coagulates around it. Everybody has to coagulate might even been probably not even the right word, but this is where my brain is at with this right now. And I'll tell you why I'll explain why.
Speaker 1:We're just about to record a note about Daz and what the heck is Daz? Well, it's something as a service and so now that SaaS has become really popular everything has to be something as a service even if it makes absolutely no sense to call it as a service or you know it has another name everything has been rebranded into this something as a service So we no longer talk about it in terms of, like, hosted PBX or VoIP systems or these sorts of platforms. It has to be unified communications as a service. And it's not contact center. It's contact centers of service or CCAS.
Speaker 1:And now, you know, people are trying to brand the, like, the secas security as a service or, you know, d r as a service or backup as a service or desktop as a service or this as a service or blah blah blah as a service. And and it reminds me really of 2 things. It reminds me of, like, you know, late nineties when the dotcoms are going like crazy, you know, we had the first iteration. Everything was something.com. And then when everything was becoming registered, then it had, you know, then there was a new trend that was started.
Speaker 1:The trend became e e something.com. Right? You know? And some of these still survive to this day like eharmony. Why is it called eharmony?
Speaker 1:Because it was just popular and name your startup something with an e in front of it. So eharmony.com became a thing. And then after the e ran out, then it became an I I something. I win was it was a big one of these things. But, you know, the the part that really affected me from a architecture engineering standpoint was clustering.
Speaker 1:And even to today, clustering is this really kind of nebulous term. Now, not many companies are dealing with clustering anymore because they just don't think about it. They run like, RDS or Aurora and AWS. They don't think about what's going on with their database servers anymore. You know, we would go through and have to deal with, you know, vendor evaluation and selections.
Speaker 1:And everybody was selling you clustering for your database server, but they weren't really defining what they were doing clustering wise and we had, 3 64 clusters which were these really cool quasi single instance clusters where the system had nodes and CPUs and RAM and memory and and and an interlink between them, but you could reboot individual nodes, within the cluster or you could as they boot it up, you could run processes on different ones dynamically. And you have this really probably the the truest sense of what a real cluster was in in terms of, like, what people thought it was of, like, you know, like, one box that you could just dynamically make bigger and bigger and bigger. Well, to a point back then is when we had, Beowulf just hit the market and and Beowulf clusters. It was kind of this idea of, like, a single set. You know, it wasn't a single system image.
Speaker 1:I mean, like, single operating system running across multiple different nodes, you know, interconnect with each other. It was a, it was more of an approach of, like, distributed work and distributed job scheduling. You know, you would say, okay. I I need to, you know, process this and you could break that, you know, break that those units have worked down in smaller pieces and distributed against the cluster. Most popular form of clustering at the time was Veritas VCS when it came to databases.
Speaker 1:And when I say most popular, I mean, it was like this just became a part of the acceptance stack. You ran Oracle. You probably ran VCS, and you were running on, Sun Solaris. And when VCS was, it was a failover cluster. And, you know, there was with an Oracle, you had, you know, different components of building blocks you needed in order for the database to actually run.
Speaker 1:Right? So you'd have to make sure the storage was mounted. It was connected to the storage. Then you would start the actual database process mounts. You would what's the word I'm looking for here to shares?
Speaker 1:You would actually start or, you know, have an IP address that was shared between them. So you would, you know, connect that to the host, and then you would start the Oracle listener so clients could connect to it. And so, you know, so they had this, like, built, you know, these blocks. Right? And so VCS could monitor each one of those blocks.
Speaker 1:So if something happened, you know, and or the harp, it was no longer working anymore. It would fail over to the 2nd node, and the 2nd node could go through the whole thing and start in theory, it would start everything up on the second on this on the second server. The reality was if you actually had a catastrophic failure on the primary server, it never started cleanly on the secondary server because it had you had to figure out how to recover what the catastrophic failure was in the primary in order for the secondary to start. But it did a lot of things for you, and it was automated. And, you know, the executive teams felt fantastic because now we had a cluster, and they could we could we could advertise, oh, you know, and answer all these nonsensical survey questions from from partners.
Speaker 1:Like, yes, we had a cluster. We had a database cluster. We have a you know, everything's redundant. Everything's redundant. But so when clustering got hot, you know, at that period of time, everybody that was related to anything doing in the database world was trying to figure out how to shoehorn was trying to figure out how to shoehorn their system into saying that, yeah, we are are we do we have are we a cluster?
Speaker 1:Bob, are we a cluster? Are we a cluster? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can wait. Wait. Can we? Yes.
Speaker 1:You're a cluster. Oh, wait. Yeah. We're a cluster. Tell everybody we're a cluster.
Speaker 1:Marketing teams go forth. Sales teams go forth. Tell everybody we're clusters. You know, so now it's, one of the popular ones. So everything got branded as as something as a service SD WAN.
Speaker 1:Everything's been branded SD WAN whether it's SD WAN or not. I mean, what is what is SD WAN actually do? Nobody really knows anymore because everything is SD WAN. That's happening with Sassy. You know, the great the funny thing about Sassy is definition of what Sassy actually is and everybody claiming they have a Sassy solution.
Speaker 1:Nobody actually meets the definition of Sassy by, you know, so, like, and it's and it's complete, like, what it has to include format. So, like, nothing's actually Sassy, but everybody's marketing Sassy and everybody wants to buy sassy because that's what they think they need. I mean the same nonsense is going on in the security space right now, you know, everything in security has to be something detection and response. So it was man MDR then became MTDR then it was EDR. Now everybody is like x d r.
Speaker 1:What the what the heck is x d r? Like, it's it's just marketing. None of these things have real definitions. You know, part of our onboarding, for people, for analysts, pricing analysts here, we have a we have this, I mean, for lack of a word, we have a dictionary where we try to explain you know commonalities of terms that are actually the same term just express different ways so simplistic example of that would be Internet oh we need a we need a Internet access you know, circuit. Somebody needs a connection to the Internet from an office from a location.
Speaker 1:So then we have to define what our broadband circuits, what our dedicated circuits, what is Fios? Well, Fios is just some it used to be a fiber optic, you know, designation. Now it's really just a marketing term for broadband or U verse did the same thing or, a lot of carriers call it dedicated Internet access for dedicated fiber, but then someone to call it fiber Internet access and someone to call it, you know, AIA and then you know it's like everybody, you know, it's like everything becomes these terminologies. And then at some point, you get a standards body, and the standard body comes in and comes in and then creates its own definitions. And then the standards body says it's not really Internet access or DIA or FIA or or AIA.
Speaker 1:It's really called e access. And then it defines e line and e LAN. But then when you're like e line versus e land, you're like, well, is that MPLS or VPLS or, you know, layer 2 transport or wave or alien wave or dark fire? I mean and and it's really no wonder why this like, the buying process for this stuff has gotten so insanely complicated because you can never really figure out what you're buying I've been doing this for 25 years So, you know the advantage I have is just I've been doing this for so long I've been buying IT and deploying and building into infrastructure for so long now that, you know, I've been through these pain cycles enough. But, you know, if if you if if you tag somebody, if you were going to do this yourself or if you have somebody on your team, you're like, go out and get us x y z tech.
Speaker 1:Like, you're here sitting in the lamb to slaughter. I mean, they have they have no shot of actually figuring out the difference between 1 or the other. I mean, trying to understand, like, what do we actually need for a phone system, and what is our SD WAN solution to prevent NAT Traverse, you know, NAT gateway transitions. So that's why I say for me You know the doctor evil and all of this is just what marketing does to this industry and and you know I understand it I get it I get why it happens I know why it happens it happens because you've got a product that you have to take the market that you have to traction for that you need to figure out how to get inbound on that you need to get you know revenue attached to that you need to show your MQLs on and It's infinitely easier to become you know the tech version of uber for x You know you're like of course we do xxy and z that everybody's out there looking at and talking about the analysts are interested in and our customers are already shopping because it is the path of least resistance it is swimming downstream it's it's just in the process has made things just so unnecessarily confusing and And it's just it's unfortunate.
Speaker 1:It's just unfortunate So read of the fine prints ask the questions, you know somebody tells you there's something to ask just just just be like oh, what does that mean explain it to me? Why why what what this what does that compare to I hate comparison based evaluations of like you know this versus that but sometimes it's it's helpful to say okay, you know you're you do X and this other vendor does X and what's the difference between you know you and them And if they can't, you know, there might be some cases where they can't actually answer that question and there's other cases where they can. I started off with Daz desktop as a service. Okay. Well, desktop as a service really came out of this idea of virtual desktop or virtual or VDI or terminal services.
Speaker 1:Right? Okay. Great. More terminology. When you start talking about a DAS solution, you know, the next thing you start talking about is are you doing are you doing dedicated desktops or virtualized desktops within that DAS solution?
Speaker 1:Are you doing, you know, an active, you know, host an active host server or, you know, like, how are you laying out and how these desktops are the one to one resources? Does it look like an easy two farm? Does it not? You know, like like yada yada yada. And there's really 2 major platforms for this.
Speaker 1:You know, it's VMware and Citrix. And they've you know, there's some of it that functions very similarly, and there's some of it that functions radically different. And if you're talking to a company and one company is is, you know, VMware based just ask them why, you know, now the answer of course is some of it that's technology and some of it's gonna be partnerships. And that's the other dirty secret and lie about this industry is when you find service providers partnering and, you know, or acquiring, it's it's you know, they're doing it to, plug holes in their service offering, like, you know, back to the sassy solution. Oh, you know, in order to be sassy, we have to be these things.
Speaker 1:So, okay, we're not this thing here. So let's go out and get a partnership with that thing. Some companies over the years have done a really good job of going out and finding the best and the strongest partner to fill that fill that hole. A lot of times, it's just who gives them the best deal as a reseller or a partnership has the best partner program. You know?
Speaker 1:Like, maybe the top 5 vendors in the space don't have partner programs they want to mess with because, you know, they're too small. They can't afford it. They can't make the commitments to it. They're already partnered with other people. They want to find something as diff you know, differentiated.
Speaker 1:And, and so they end up with with company 6 with logo 6. And maybe logo 6 isn't what you want to deal with. But now it's a sassy solution, so you don't know any different. Right? You know, so back to, you know, back to this VMware thing, you know, you know, VMware has vSphere, which is a finesse, you know, it's it's a fantastic and very common virtualization platform for enterprises.
Speaker 1:And then, VMware took v sphere and turned it into v cloud and when you look at a lot of the private cloud infrastructure as a service IS companies when you ask them what's underneath the hood you're gonna find out that it's the speed cloud and this isn't bad but I make that point because if you're dealing with a smaller shop that's running v cloud there have a lot of their a lot of their cost goes into just licensing for v cloud and what you're paying for in that situation is you're paying for their volume and their scale with VMware and where they actually sit within the v cloud licensing tier tier. And then you go to the next step. Right? Well, so in run of and instead of running v cloud, what could you run? Well, you could run proxmox or you could run on app or you could run, you know, what else would be popular there?
Speaker 1:It doesn't even actually matter. Let's just say proxmox and on app being the most calm. I mean cloud stack was there, right? You could run, OpenStack. My brain completely turned off on that one there for a moment.
Speaker 1:And I'm not saying that these are good or bad platforms. I'm just saying that there were decisions that went beyond the technical re, you know, selection process of why these platforms were picked and a lot of times it's financial. But then again you get back to the same situation which is oh we have this fill in the blank technology or fill in the blank infrastructure fill in the blank whatever it is and you know and is it what you want or is it what you know you know is it not Such a mess Anyways, ask questions dig under the hood compare 2 vendors compare 3 vendors talk to an expert somebody who's done this before done this a few times doesn't this does this a few dozen times does this a few dozen times a year? You know these sorts of things and, and you might be surprised you might be surprised because what you think you need is not what you actually need and what you actually need is something you never considered and You know and these these sorts of tweaks could make you know huge differences in your business and creating you know, leverage and value for your business.
Speaker 1:So just remember, you know, tech marketing, doctor evil, and be really careful. And just just pay attention and dig in and dig a little deeper as you're going out and and, you know, and buying these things. I'm Max Clark. It's 20 minutes max. A little bit more of a rant than usual this morning but, you know, hope it helps.
Speaker 1:See you.
