Welcome

I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read my very first ever blog post. It’s something I have considered doing many times but realized that I needed a topic that I felt passionately about so that I could continuously produce quality content on a regular basis.

I have had the privilege of entering into the IT consulting industry very early in my career and consequently been lucky enough to work with many different people who have a huge range of opinions and methods for approaching very similar problems. I have over the course of the last eight years so far used this experience to pick the best of those methods and repeat them with my customers, but for this blog I wanted to try something a bit different than just being a fountain of best practices.

I travel around to different customers advising them on infrastructure projects they intend to undertake using products from vendors such as Cisco, VMware, IBM and NetApp. Ultimately there is usually a component of the engagement where I have to help those customers to see the value of the individual products and the overall solution so that they buy it.

All the vendors arm you with competitive battle cards telling you specifically why their product is better than their direct competitor and why. They give you extensive datasheets and product brochures that attempt to convince the customer that this latest and greatest and will solve all their problems promising huge ROI and lower TCO.

I have found that in many cases, that a more critical eye will find that actually the picture painted is a little fluffy and that the benefits touted are not necessarily all going to be realized from day one because the real world that the customer lives in sometimes requires that vendor products and recommended ‘best practices’ must be tweaked or re-evaluated somewhat.

In this blog I intend to examine the value that products bring from a business perspective. The focus will not be on particular features necessarily but on what can you actually get out of them as a business.

I’ll also be looking at some ways you can look at IT from a more business oriented angle. I have found that it is very easy for even high caliber IT professionals to get over-excited by a particular technology or process that they have been told is the ‘best practice’ way to carry out a particular task. I’ll be suggesting new ways to approach problems in some of my postings with no reference to specific products in the hope that I can make the readers of this blog more useful to the business and start to help bridge the gap between the business and technology.

Most of what I will write is subjective and I fully encourage comment and further discussion. There are no right or wrong opinions. These are just mine that have developed based on seeing the same problems solved well and badly over and over again.

I hope you enjoy.

DISCLAIMER:
The opinions expressed in this article are mine and mine alone. They do not represent the opinions of my employer, Vicom Computer Services, its affiliates, subsidiaries or any of its partners.