VMware vs Nut-Mix : FUDs (and then some...)

Ahh… the constant stream of nonsense and FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubts) that floods my inbox every week for the past 3 years. Before I go posting this round, I’d like to make it doubly clear that while I work for VMware, all my opinions/rants are my own and is not a reflection of my employer.

If you are looking for a tech debate, you can stop reading now because today’s post isn’t one.

A couple of years back, I had a customer I’ve been working with for a while. We were at the tail end of the design cycle, when he called me in urgently for an important discussion. I rocked up thinking, probably just another roadblock with some guys internally that he needed help convincing. He sat down, plugged in his laptop, projected to monitor and out came this hideous looking PPT. Then he just said, “I know much of this is probably shade thrown by your competitor, so can you help explain this to us because it is disrupting and I’ve been tasked to look at it”.

This deck have obviously been cut and pasted numerous times by various authors because the formatting and colours were completely off, mix of high resolution, low resolution images, and repeated content. One thing was consistent though, every page detailed how VMware vSAN is bad because (fill in the blanks), this Reddit post said vSAN is bad because (fill in the blanks) and this Twitter screenshot says vSAN is bad because (fill in the blanks).

Don’t get me wrong, I get competitor FUD’s all the time. At least there is significant effort and thought process put in those arguments, but this was outrageously bad (not to mention unprofessional). Some of the comments were from users that only ever had 1 or 2 posts on the forum, some from 4 years ago, some were blatant, outright lies. As if the slide deck of 40 odd pages weren’t good enough, the competitors account team sent another word document compiling a whole list of additional Reddit and Twitter links.

For all my career, this is the first time I’ve ever come up against a competitor that goes so low as to shame your competition, and proud of it. As an IT professional, I’ve always been taught to sell my solution based on the value it brings, customer needs and on its merit. The buyer will hopefully make a sound judgement with information at hand. Never have I competed with anyone that starts a conversation, continuously throwing shade on the other. Imagine going to a Honda car dealership, the conversation starts off by saying, do you know that the Toyota’s can’t do A, B and C? And hear say, Toyota’s have crappy windscreen wipers?

Which brings me to my next point.

At VMware, we believe strongly in the VMware Cloud Foundation offering because it provides a  best-of-breed combination of what’s required to build your software defined data centre. Each component, be it compute, storage or network are full-fledged products on their own accord and put together in a simplified bundle, bla bla bla. I’m not going to dive into the offering, because this isn’t what this post is about. That’s for another day…

Features, speeds and feeds are no doubt important when it comes to point solutions. For example, I need a toothbrush. I will go out to find one that fits my needs (an ultra-fine, soft bristles with a rubberized grip, don’t judge). However, if you wanna put on some braces or get some cosmetics done on your teeth, you are surely not going to a doctor, just because he uses some fancy braces but have limited knowledge of everything else. You want someone that knows what they are doing, so you will have a pleasant end-to-end experience. More importantly, hopefully beautiful teeth at the end of it. Translate this to IT terms, nobody decides on moving their entire data centre to AWS or Azure purely comparing Amazon S3 Storage vs Azure Blob Storage. Any customer considering a cloud provider will be looking at the entire ecosystem, services, roadmaps, cost and support before making this decision. It’s not about one feature…

Why? It is the business outcome and the end result that businesses are after.

Where am I going with this?

While I’d like to think that I’m spend my time helping my customers towards a long-term goal and outcome, my competitor is busy writing a 10-part series (maybe could be 20) of a technical manual comparing vSAN against their Nut-mix, one feature at a time. A blog post long enough for customers to ask me “TLDR, can you summarise this for me?”. And as always, Nut-mixers shamelessly sends this off to every single customer on their database thinking that’s what everyone is interested in.

Here’s what’s odd. It’s one thing to write about your own tech, because ultimately you built it and know it best, but to write about others and say how inefficient it is without completely knowing everything there is to know? Also, why just compare the flagship solution? What about the rest?

I speak for myself when I say this. Call me naïve. Maybe where I work, we have better culture, or maybe it’s just an individual. I always believe that the other person is a lot smarter than what we give them credit for. They know as well as anyone, that nothing is perfect. Focus on doing what’s right by the customer or another human being, even if you don’t always win.  

While FUD means fear, uncertainty and doubt, surely it isn’t lying. Have some integrity.