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January 24, 2012December 29, 2025

Should you feel sorry for revenue prevention departments

Does your organization have or do you work with a revenue prevention department or revenue prevention team?

For those not familiar, a revenue prevention team or department is an expression that refers to those who get in the way of selling, closing and generating revenue for an organization.

In a sales dominated organization, the revenue prevention team or department might be refereed to as those who do not do what sales wants when and how they want it. Anything other than what sales wants is seen as getting in the way of revenue. Sometimes sales will see marketing, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, human resources, finance and accounting or legal as revenue prevention departments. In other instances, the revenue prevention team or department of some sales organizations will refer to those in customer or prospects organizations that get in the way or slow down the process of closing the deal. Yet another example can be outsiders or third parties such as consultants, analysts, advisors or others who are brought into the sales process by a customer or prospect and seen by a sales organizations as a barrier to revenue prevention obstacle.

On the other hand, sales can also be seen as a revenue prevention department when as a whole or on a smaller or personal basis they get in the way of actually bringing in the deals. For example a sales based revenue prevention department, team or personal may be spending too much time selling however not enough actually closing or getting the real deal. This can be due to different reasons such as the sales rep trying to sell the wrong solution to a particular customer or prospect needs, or simply not being able to close the deal.

If you have never seen the movie Glengary Glen Ross take a few minutes and check at least the highlights out including the classic lines such as ABC: Always Be Closing or Coffee is for Closers.

Now let’s get back to revenue prevention in the context of this post which are some revenue prevention scenarios.

Should you feel sorry for the vendor or var who misses their revenue or sales forecast while they were busy trying to sell something new and forgetting to take the order on the existing items?

Should you feel sorry for the vendor or var whose disk or storage sales are down because their customers and prospects headed their advise from last couple of years to dedupe everything?

Well, if their dedupe sales are not making up for the shortfall, no, you should not feel sorry for them nor their investors.

Should you feel sorry for the vendor or var whose server sales and associated software including hyper visors and tools are down because their customers and prospects headed their advise from last couple of years to virtualize everything?

Well, if the corresponding increase in services, new tools, engagements for data protection and other modernization do not make up for it then no.

Should you feel sorry for the vendor or var whose laptop, desktop and workstation along with corresponding pull of other items has resulted in business going elsewhere while they have sold VDI?

How about should you feel sorry for the vendor or var whose customers or prospects are no longer buying as much hardware, software or services as they headed the advise and went to Goggle, Amazon or some other cloud?

Ok, do you get my point?

In the quest to increase opportunity, boost revenue, expand into adjacent markets and technologies there is a balancing act of generating awareness, moving customer and prospect into new areas while keeping the revenue prevention team on the bench to avoid disrupting annuities or current revenue streams.

In other words, embrace the new, avoid clinging to the old with a death grip, be careful with leading beading edge without a dual redundant blood bank (or at least a backup plan). Put another way, find a balance of taking orders for what your customers want while selling them on where you want them to go.

Ok, nuff said for now

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

November 12, 2009February 3, 2023

HP Buys one of the seven networking dwarfs and gets a bargain

Last week EMC and Cisco announced their VCE collation and Acadia.

The other day, HP continued its early holiday shopping by plucking down $2.7B USD and bought 3COM, one of the networking seven dwarfs (e.g. when compared to networking giant Cisco).

Some of the other so called networking dwarfs when compared to Cisco include Brocade, Ciena and Juniper among others.

Why is 3COM a bargain at $2.7B

Sure HP paid a slight multiplier premium on 3COM trailing revenues or a slight small multiplier on their market cap.

Sure HP gets to acquire one of the networking seven dwarfs at a time when Cisco is flexing its muscles to move into the server space.

Sure HP gets to extend their networking groups capabilities including additional offerings for HPs broad SMB and lower-end SOHO and even consumer markets not to mention enterprise ROBO or workgroups.

Sure HP gets to extend their security and Voice over IP (VoIP) via 3COM and their US Robotics brand perhaps to better compete with Cisco at the consumer, prosumer, SOHO or low-end of SMB markets.

Sure HP gets access to H3C as a means of further its reach into China and the growing Asian market, perhaps even getting closer to Huawei as a future possible partner.

Sure HP could have bought Brocade however IMHO that would have cost a few more deceased presidents (aka very large dollar bills) and assumed over a billion dollars in debt, however lets leave the Brocadians and that discussion on the back burner for a different discussion on another day.

Sure HP gets to signal to the world that they are alive, they have a ton of money in their war chest, and last I checked, actually more cash in the 11B range (minus about 2.7B being spent on 3COM) that exceeds the $5B USD cash position of Cisco.

Sure HP could have done and perhaps will still do some smaller networking related deals in couple of hundreds of million dollar type range to beef up product offerings such as a Riverbed or others, or, perhaps wait for some fire sales or price shop on those shopping themselves around.

ROI is the bargin IMHO, not to mention other pieces including H3C!

3COM was and is a bargain for all of the above, plus given the revenues of about 1.3B, HP CEO Mark Hurd stands to reap a better return on cash investment than having it sitting in a bank account earning a few points. Plus, HP still has around 8-9B in cash leaving room for some other opportunistic holiday shopping, who knows, maybe adopt yet another networking or storage or server related dwarf!

Stay tuned, this game is far from being over as there are plenty of days left in the 2009 holiday shopping season!

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

twitter @storageio

January 27, 2008December 29, 2025

The Many Faces of Solid State Devices/Disks (SSD)

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a recent article I wrote for Enterprise Storage Forum titled “Not a Flash in the PAN” providing a synopsis of the many faces, implementations and forms of SSD based technologies that includes several links to other related content.

A popular topic over the past year or so has been SSD with FLASH based storage for laptops, also sometimes referred to as hybrid disk drives along with announcements late last year by companies such as Texas Memory Systems (TMS) of a FLASH based storage system combining DRAM for high speed cache in their RAMSAN-500 and more recently EMC adding support for FLASH based SSD devices in their DMX4 systems as a tier-0 to co-exist with other tier-1 (fast FC) and tier-2 (SATA) drives.

Solid State Disks/Devices (SSD) or memory based storage mediums have been around for decades, they continue to evolve using different types of memory ranging from volatile dynamic random access (DRAM) memory to persistent or non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) and various derivatives of NAND FLASH among other users. Likewise, the capacity cost points, performance, reliability, packaging, interfaces and power consumption all continue to improve.

SSD in general, is a technology that has been miss-understood over the decades particularly when simply compared on a cost per capacity (e.g. dollar per GByte) basis which is an unfair comparison. The more approaches comparison is to look at how much work or amount of activity for example transactions per second, NFS operations per second, IOPS or email messages that can be processed in a given amount of time and then comparing the amount of power and number of devices to achieve a desired level of performance. Granted SSD and in particular DRAM based systems cost more on a GByte or TByte basis than magnetic hard disk drives however it also requires more HDDs and controllers to achieve the same level of performance not to mention requiring more power and cooling than compared to a typical SSD based device.

The many faces of SSD range from low cost consumer grade products based on consumer FLASH products to high performance DRAM based caches and devices for enterprise storage applications. Over the past year or so, SSD have re-emerged for those who are familiar with the technology, and emerged or appeared for those new to the various implementations and technologies leading to another up swinging in the historic up and down cycles of SSD adoption and technology evolution in the industry.

This time around, a few things are different and I believe that SSD in general, that is, the many difference faces of SSD will have staying power and not fade away into the shadows only to re-emerge a few years later as has been the case in the past.

The reason I have this opinion is based on two basic premises which are economics and ecological”. Given the focus on reducing or containing costs, doing more with what you have and environmental or ecological awareness in the race to green the data center and green storage, improving on the economics with more energy efficiency storage, that is, enabling your storage to do more work with less energy as opposed to avoiding energy consumption, has the by product of improved economics (cost savings and improved resource utilization and better service delivery) along with ecological (better use of energy or less use of energy).

Current implementations of SSD based solutions are addressing both the energy efficiency topics to enable better energy efficiency ranging from maximizing battery life to boosting performance while drawing less power. Consequently we are now seeing SSD in general are not only being used for boosting performance, also we are seeing it as one of many different tools to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental or green storage issues.

Here’s a link to a StorageIO industry trends and perspectives white paper at www.storageio.com/xreports.htm.

Here’s the bottom line, there are many faces to SSD. SSD (FLASH or DRAM) based solutions and devices have a place in a tiered storage environment as a Tier-0 or as an alternative in some laptop or other servers where appropriate. SSD compliments other technologies and SSD benefits from being paired with other technologies including high performance storage for tier-1 and near-line or tier-2 storage implementing intelligent power management (IPM).

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

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