Adinfa has a blog post asking the question What planet are DCIM Vendors on? The world is different.
And that is a big part of the problem, I think. Too many DCIM products are over-hyped, over-priced and over-complicated. Lots of Powerpoints, lots of conference presentations but little that is tangible and deliverable particularly when it comes down to the reality of retro-fitting DCIM into a multi-vendor data centre. If you need to run Flash, if you need high-power graphics cards in the server, if you need permanent contractors, if you need week long training courses for users, if you try to position your DCIM product as comparable to ERP or CRM of old then you are probably missing the point.
When I think of the way vendors sell DCIM, I think of a world that is defined by the vendor sales team. A Sales World where you will pay all this expense and time to reach the nirvana promised in the ppt.
The Adfina post continues with what is the alternative to DCMI Sales World.
People who want to use DCIM want tools that take their pain away and make their life easier. In this era of instant gratification, asking someone to make a case to their board for something that will take months to deploy and years to achieve RoI (based on more tangible measures than notional savings derived from those oft-quoted cost of downtime studies) is about as palatable to them as asking them to make a case for building their very own “Curiosity”. What most data centre managers really want from DCIM is a practical software tool that is straightforward to implement, simple to navigate, intuitive to work with, browser-based (with no add-ins needed), flexible in nature and priced reasonably. They don’t need to go to Mars for that.
