I’m highly involved in provisioning tasks (we call all that “N1”) in the german market, and what I have been learning during the last 3-4 years from talking to customers and doing PoCs in different accounts can be summed up quickly as follows:

• Larger accounts tend to not decide, because a decision towards one single product puts them into the hands of a single vendor.
• Larger accounts also tend to not decide, because their organisations are larger, and deciding to do provisioning also might need to be prepared by internal organisational “adoptions” or “adaptations”.
• Larger accounts also tend to have a “dual-vendor” strategy, which prohibits a decision for a single vendor in the arena of datacenter provisioning. As long, as there are no real interchangable products (and I think, we all will wait long on these!), a change from one provisioning tool to another will always be a large re-implementation. The sad thing here is, that the companies still live the old, sneaker-net way, and will not benefit from the advantages of provisioning. Remember: Even doing it with one vendor will benefit in overall cost savings, and even a later change would not be as expensive as perceived, because the structural and organizational changes will be re-usable!

But: This only applies to companies, that want to start to provision the complete datacenter. With many large accounts we are doing provisioning, but this is for smaller pieces of their environment. And that works very well, if it is contained in the small “sandboxes”.

• Smaller companies on the other hand are normally more willing to go this route, as they can adopt quicker to changes, and so we see larger adoption here. And: These smaller companies are willing to go and also are going the complete way. Remember: although these companies are smaller, the amount of work needed to be done is not smaller, if we look at the configuration and setup of the tools.

What’s your feeling w.r.t. these topics?

Are you willing to start provisioning today?

Feedback welcome!

One Response to “Provisioning: Why customers have difficulties to really go that route…”

1. Mike Kirk says:

   June 5, 2006 at 05:07

   Do you have any examples of what a good “sandbox” is to first introduce provisioning into an account? (i.e. what things should a sales rep be looking for to get N1 in the door?)
   It sounds like development may be a good place to start, since once you have a tool like SPS that can deploy builds of an internal app in dev/test/qa environments… it’d be hard not to want to be just be able to drag-and-drop that tested+approved payload into production. What about customers that shy away from internal development?
   Just thinking aloud, thanks!
   Mike