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Page 1 of 2 By Michael Neubarth
The Hydra was a nine-headed serpent in Greek mythology that was slain by Hercules. Any time one of the Hydra's heads was cut off, two heads replaced it. The persistent assault of vendor hype that CIOs must contend with is like a Hydra, with the hype constantly sprouting new shades and shapes as new technologies and trends emerge and morph. A devoted corps of marketing and sales specialists is at work to entice, mesmerize, manipulate, delude, and denude you of your dollars. Following are the classic spin maneuvers and core ploys that, like Hydra heads, crop up again and again in new guises. To defeat them, a CIO must be ever vigilant.
Selling the Vision. Also called "selling futures." The vendor paints a rosy picture of wonderful functionality and benefits meant to enrapture you and lure you aboard. The technology will solve all your problems, cure all your ills, and enable you to reap a bounty of riches. Like a magician, the vendor draws your attention to the beauty of the vision, while concealing the sleight of hand (and emptiness) at the heart of the trick. Many a company has fallen prey to the promise of a banquet that turned out to be a bag of dry bones.
Over the course of my 20+ years in the industry, I've heard myriad tales of technology deployments that failed to live up to their hype, including enterprise-wide, multi-million-dollar systems that were ripped out and replaced by new enterprise-wide, multi-million-dollar systems.
FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The opposite side of the vision coin. When a promising and powerful new technology appears for which a vendor has no product or play, the vendor seeks to gain time to develop an offering by paralyzing the customer and stunting the competition. To effect this, the vendor musters up as credible a story as possible and announces its plan to provide the new technology. Like a stun gun, FUD neutralizes the customer with a chilling fear of embracing the wrong technology prematurely. This is also known as "freezing the market." Many a market has been frozen by FUD.
Smoke and Mirrors. Similar to selling the vision, the vendor entices you with a glittering façade that hides a hollow interior. Because technology products are complex and difficult to compare and evaluate, vendors are able to minimize, hide, or otherwise obscure their products' weaknesses, while emphasizing, exaggerating, or inventing their strengths. A vendor may focus attention on features and benefits that are partial or nonexistent. There are notorious tales in the smoke-and-mirrors archives, including demos of empty boxes with blinking lights. In the alchemy of spin, "smoke and mirrors" may be combined effectively with "FUD" and "selling the vision."
Cosmetic Treatment. It should come as no surprise that marketers and salespeople sometimes put the best spin they can on products they know are less than sterling. Instead of fielding a set of bright shiny new products, they invent bright shiny new reasons for you to buy their clunkers and lemons. They call this "perfuming the pig," "putting lipstick on the pig," and "selling what's on the truck." New trends and the passage of time provide good cover for spinning and "repositioning" clunkers and lemons.
Examples abound. A solution that is complex, expensive, and performs poorly may be recast as one that provides incredible availability, while its deficiencies are obscured and masked.
Similarly, a product that has been found to scale poorly may undergo an image makeover via a PR and marketing campaign that touts its remarkable scalability, perhaps with extravagant scalability events staged to prove it.
A vendor whose products have terrible security may seek to mold perceptions by asserting that its security is world class; pledge its commitment to security; launch a new security initiative with fanfare; offer security testimonials from satisfied customers; and dismiss or downplay all documented breaches and flaws by arguing that the reports are exaggerated and that other vendors have a similar security record. To back its story, the vendor may provide testimony from "unbiased experts."
The series of new trends that consistently arise enable vendors to re-jigger their product spin and position themselves as market leaders and "thought leaders." Any product attributes that can be made to appear to jibe with the trend de jure are brought to the fore and highlighted, while the vendor's overall portfolio is represented as most able to fulfill the vision.
Low Cost. An alluring smoke-and-mirrors play can be concocted around the concept of low cost. In one such play, the vendor touts its solution as providing the benefits of higher-priced products at a fraction of the cost. The vendor creates an aura of low cost by highlighting the price of a single base component, while neglecting to inform the customer that additional components are required at significant further cost.
For example, a vendor may fix the customer's attention on the low cost of a single application server while omitting to inform the customer that a viable solution will require multiple such application servers, plus database servers, connectors, a backup system, and a slew of expensive client licenses. Even when presented with the full tally, customers believe they are getting a bargain because their perception has been skewed by the price of the low-cost component with which they have become enamored.
Using a similar smoke-and-mirrors technique, a vendor can create a faux sense of cost savings by separating the cost of server and client licenses, as well as by distributing the client cost throughout separate pockets of an organization. In this way, customers harbor a false impression of a vendor as being low cost, based on the price of individual components, while at the same time remain unaware of the aggregate cost of client licenses that have proliferated across the enterprise.
Openness. Smoke-and-mirrors ploys may be used to create an impression of a vendor being open and open-source friendly. For example, a vendor may promote a technology as "open source" when in reality only pieces have been made available, and within limited licensing parameters.
Development. A gnarly development environment may be obscured by product spin. For example, a vendor may claim to fully support a standard such as Java, when in reality it only partially supports the standard with a Java cover or façade over a patchwork of proprietary code. While development is described as quick and easy, in reality it is complicated by requiring two, three, or more toolkits, as does maintenance and upgrades. Moreover, performance may be degraded by the layers of translation and "wrappers" used to tie together the different components.
Integration and Interoperability. A product may be positioned as highly interoperable that is only partially or minimally so. Likewise, integration of a vendor's product with its own or other vendors' products may be presented as tight, when in reality it is superficial or nonexistent and its integration will require immense effort.
Seductive spin may be woven around buzzwords like "agility" and "flexibility," in which easy development and integration promises to yield faster time to market and ultimately a competitive edge. However, when actually deployed, the platform is found to be complex, kludgy, and work-intensive.
Product Roadmap. A vendor may provide an impressive roadmap that shows a well-planned path to a future of dazzling capabilities and functionality. However, when taken, the road proves to be a series of painful migrations fraught with discontinuities and application rewrites. To reach the Promised Land, customers find they must buy and replace a series of products that are incompatible with previous versions, with each new set of products introducing dependencies that increase the complexity and cost of the solution.
Checklists. Vendors often must be able to match the offerings of competitors who have raised the bar through innovation. In the selection process, customers may eliminate vendors from consideration based on whether their products have the requisite features and functions. While a vendor's checklist items and descriptions may seem impressive, their implementation and functionality may be superficial, minimal, and weak.
Benchmarks. Because benchmarks are perceived as demonstrating a vendor's technical prowess, vendors pour a lot of effort into winning them, and are constantly leapfrogging one another. While vendors tout benchmarks as proof of their products' superiority, the extreme and expensive systems that typically win tpc.org benchmarks are, like funny cars, engineering feats that do not represent practical real-world configurations. Customers generally do not have the millions of dollars or technical skills required to buy, assemble, tune, deploy, and maintain these types of systems. Benchmarks also can be manipulated or selectively staged to favor a vendor's offerings while disfavoring those of its competitors.
Pilot tests and proof of concepts. A pilot may be tweaked to wow the customer, then fail to scale or otherwise function when ramped up in production. A pilot may use only a subset of information or perform only a fraction of the operations that are required in the more demanding operations of the customer's business. Similarly, a pilot deployed in isolation may not integrate well with the customer's installed business systems.
Key Influencers. This is the realm of "media communications" and "analyst relations." Clever marketers plant their product messaging in stories, testimonials, executive interviews, and research reports of key influencers-mainly journalists and analysts. Vendors also may hire analysts to write seemingly objective reviews and ratings of their products. Vendors may influence analysts' coverage by buying their services, with an expectation of quid pro quo favoritism, as well as by threatening to withdraw their business. Similar influence may be exerted by vendors that request, or demand, editorial coverage in exchange for buying advertisements in publications, and by threatening to withdraw advertising.
The influence of key influencers can be profound. I've heard stories in which a company CEO read a magazine article on a plane, or heard about a technology while playing golf, and came back and told the CIO he would like his company to implement the wonderful solution he had just learned about. The CIO did not want to challenge the wisdom of the CEO, and before long, voila, the company's business operations were sputtering and stalling because of the promising system it had installed.
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