Jeff Bezos at Amazon has a relatively famous quote: “Your margin is my opportunity.”
In backup and data protection in general, I think that complexity is the best opportunity out there. Backup appliances are experiencing incredible growth due to their inherent simplicity when compared to other forms of
Gartner’s Dave Russell has spoken about the “3 C’s” that are fundamental as to why people are dissatisfied with their backup solution: cost, capability, and complexity. In a conversation one day, Dave remarked to me that capability and complexity were intertwined – that quite often with enterprise backup products that the capabilities were lost in the complexity such that users didn’t realize that the capability existed.
Every day, we hammer on the central user experience associated with Unitrends’ products. It’s incredibly tough – but insanely rewarding. It’s tough because Unitrends has chosen to support agile IT – to adapt to the customer’s IT infrastructure rather than forcing the customer to adapt to our backup and data protection software. This means that the underlying IT environment we support is more complex. And yet our products have to be able to handle that complexity as simply as possible. We don’t always do it – but we sure as heck always try.
The trouble in backup and data protection is that companies have for years now confused capability with complexity. In other words, they are striving to add more capability – which in most cases means more complexity. Because buyers want more capability, vendors believe that they therefore want more complexity. Of course, that’s not what vendors overtly say – but it’s what is driven into the ranks of their engineers who are actually the only ones doing things that buyers are spending money to purchase.
That’s the reason that in a correctly functioning company, UX (User Experience) always has the final say in terms of not just fit and finish – but function as well.
One of my favorite quotes of all time was Leonardo da Vinci’s “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” In my opinion, truer words have never been spoken.
Here’s to ultimately sophisticated data protection software – now and in the future.
Thanks to http://blog.unitrends.com/
