I was visiting a prospect the other day and she asked me what our “Sweet Spot” is. Well, I could give a marketing answer, or say “We sell into every industry, every Tier of storage so we don’t have one,” but that refuses to answer the question. So I had to think about it. You can answer that by industry, vertical, revenue, price range, all kinds of cuts at the question. All are valid and interesting to different people.

Here is how I answered the question: mixed tier, multi-tenant environments where consolidation and flexibility are of paramount importance.  As a CEO and technologist I’m tempted to keep throwing in more and more good stuff like power efficiency, multiprotocol, scalability, and all sorts of attributes that are part of our design, but she wanted to know where we have the largest, sweetest, most obvious payoff.

Why? Because we don’t do purpose-built storage. We don’t design stuff that must be “stove piped.” Sure we have customers using the product that way – hell maybe they replaced one company’s specific solution for “an application” with Pillar, and that’s all they wanted. We love it when they start throwing more stuff at the Axiom array – ‘cause it works. Quality of service doesn’t mean as much if you’re not balancing between multiple applications, application owners, and performance and capacity requirements.

We have lots of universities and museums as customers (lots for Pillar by proportion, nothing for EMC). These type of environments are full of multiple requirements, varying degrees of funding (and thus affordability of a given solution), and tough staffing constraints. Ease of use really pays off when a customer doesn’t have big bucks to spend on professional services to configure and manage storage. 

If you have seven different platforms and you want to keep them (maintain, license, and stay knowledgeable and proficient in each), Pillar doesn’t offer that. But if you want a platform that can be deployed against multiple requirements, a platform that is scalable and flexible, we have it.  You can always build a single purpose solution, say a digital security surveillance system, a VTL solution, or the likes on an Axiom and lots of our Customers do it. While I am confident that it is sweet for them, there is lots more in the Axiom for them to parlay into even bigger payoff than single focus applications.