Incipient Revisited

You will remember that I recently posted a comment about migration costs, specifically with relation to Incipient. My view was (and still is) that the majority of migration costs come from preparatory and remedial work rather than execution of the migration. Well, Incipient asked for the right of reply and I had a call last week with Robert Infantino, their Marketing and Alliances Sr VP.

The $5000/TB figure they were quoting was an average they had seen in the industry for certain vendors' professional services time to come in and perform the migration work on behalf of the customer. Incipient's take was that they could provide their appliance/software expertise to provide the same service but at a significantly reduced cost (I won't quote specific numbers here, but the number quoted was much lower than the equivalent cost from "a vendor"). So, I guess with clarification, it is more clear that Incipient were comparing the vendor costs versus their product costs and not including any internal customer costs (project management, preparation work etc) in the calculation. This seems a more appropriate comparison in my opinion.

Getting back to the vendor discussion, there's a real issue here. If vendor X wants to sell you their latest technology, they need to accept and take the hit on helping with migration to their new array. This should be even more so where the vendor doesn't change as this should be a "no brainer" and built into the technology.

In a world where hardware is becoming a commodity, one differentiator will be the vendor who can minimise the effort/cost and impact of migrating from one technology to another. Until then, products like SVC and those from Incipient will continue to have a market position - oh and humble consultants like yours truly!