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Since it was announced Broadcom was going to acquire VMware, we've heard quite a bit about how users and partners are "very concerned" about what Broadcom might do with VMware.  Would they continue to invest in innovation (sorry, but VMware hasn't done that for quite some time), will they refocus the company, etc..

Here's a different take:

You should be happy Broadcom is buying VMWare.  They're doing you and your organization a huge favor.  By announcing this acquisition, they've forced you to THINK.  

You're now forced to think about why you're paying so much money for what are features, not products.  ESX/ESXi was at one time an innovative product, but has now become only a feature.  And as such, you shouldn't be paying anything for it.

Nutanix and all of the Public Cloud vendors provide both virtualization and management functions for free as part of their offerings.  Specifically, Nutanix provides their virtualization feature, AHV, with every node, at no additional charge.  Nutanix users who use AHV avoid large VMware bills.  So can you.

 The same goes for vCenter.  Nutanix's Prism management tool comes free with every node.  It's got everything you're using vCenter for.  Why pay for vCenter?

So rather than lamenting that Broadcom is acquiring VMware, be glad.  Because they've forced to you to realize you no longer need to pay for VMware.

It's no secret everything seems to be getting more expensive these days.  Fuel, food, rent, interest costs, clothing, and pretty much all other expense categories.

If you're in Information Technology, you've been experiencing long lead times for new technology due to issues with the supply chain, particularly in China.  Network equipment and servers have been especially hard hit.  Cisco and HPE seem to have pretty long lead times on most products right now.  Nutanix doesn't really have problems delivering their technology however.  Just an FYI.

What I really wanted to talk about it the cost of running your IT.  For the past few years, many IT executives ran headfirst towards the Public Cloud, as if it was some sort of Holy Grail.  Now, the reality of what Public Cloud really costs is about to hit home...HARD.

You see, when things are going well and companies are making lots of money, budgets are pretty easy.  Everyone hires, and no layoffs occur.  No one really questioned "moving to the Public Cloud" as a strategy, because it SEEMED to make sense.  But now that things aren't quite as flush, businesses are going to look to cut costs.  You know where they should look?  DIRECTLY AT WHAT THEY'RE PAYING FOR THE PUBLIC CLOUD.

Let me say that I'm not "anti-Public Cloud".  What I am, however, is anti-not doing your homework.  Especially when you can create a Private Cloud at about half the cost of the Public Cloud.  You know that not every workload/application is the same, and where it should run is not necessarily the same.  You have to look at each workload individually and make the determination of which type of IT deployment serves your business best BY WORKLOAD.

What's going to happen when the CEO and CFO come to you and ask for some money out of your budget?  Will they be surprised at how much you're spending with the Public Cloud?  What if they found out the cost could be about half using Nutanix?  What if they ask to see the rationale you used?

Something to think about.  Let us help you avoid that uncomfortable situation.  Call us at 925-217-1177 or email tim@roundstonesolutions.com.

Roundstone Solutions is hiring for two (2) Sales Development Reps/Account Managers.  

We're experiencing significant growth in our business, and we anticipate this growth to continue into the future.  A bit about our business:
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• We're a Value Added Reseller (VAR) in the IT Infrastructure business
• We focus on four (4) areas; hyper-converged infrastructure, modern backup and recovery, security, and unified communications/contact center.  
• We're about helping our Clients get more for their IT dollar
• We spend time understanding our Clients' needs before we recommend a solution; an intelligent approach appreciated by our Clients
• We're profitable
• We focus on the Northern CA and New York/New Jersey markets (these positions are Northern CA focused)
• Our Clients and Vendor Partners like working with us

We're looking for a couple of people who have at least 2 years of IT sales, in a customer facing position.  What we mean by that is we want you to have already learned the basics of what it takes to generate new prospects for business.  While some of you have been the beneficiary of having inbound leads, we're all about finding the leads ourselves.  If you're afraid of the phone or talking to strangers, this isn't for you.  

The role is to take the Northern CA territory and generate new business.  You'll work closely with our Vendor Partners, and you'll learn all about their solutions.  Our CEO will mentor you so that in a reasonable period of time you'll be an Outside Account Manager...based on your efforts and success.

Your success and income will be dependent on a few things, including how hard you work, how organized you are, your personality and acumen for sales, and how many qualified opportunities you're able to develop into sales.

We're offering a salary and bonus/commission plan, along with benefits.  

As stated above, we're a VAR in the IT infrastructure business.  We're in a market that's already developed, so we're not selling products that no one yet understands.  You don't have to convince prospects about the products areas we sell...they already understand, unlike in a lot of startups.  

If this sounds like something you might enjoy, reach out via email to us at tim@roundstonesolutions.com (no phone calls).  Thanks.

Like many things in the US these days, intelligent discourse is pretty hard to find.  Politics aside, if someone holds a different opinion than another, they tend to be either minimized or just ignored.  That's not a smart way to be...it's from differing opinions that we learn.

I find discussions about the Public Cloud follow the same pattern.  If you have any opinion other than the Public Cloud is the ONLY place to run your workloads, you're branded 1) a dinosaur, 2) someone who clearly doesn't get it, or 3) an idiot.  

I beg to disagree.  Having an educated opinion used to be valued, and in my world, it still is.  I remember the line my Mom (and probably everyone's Mom) would say, "If everybody jumped off the roof, would you jump too?"  In other words, don't just do what everyone else is doing, because there's no guarantee that all the others are right.  Another way to think of this is "don't be a lemming".  Think for yourself.

Which brings us to the Public Cloud.  Let me start by saying that the Public Cloud appears to be an excellent option FOR SOME WORKOADS.  The operative point in that statement is the "for some workloads" part.  Not all workloads are suited for the Public Cloud, for a variety of reasons.  Maybe the Cloud is actually fog. ​

I think organizations should  evaluate where your workloads should run based on three types of factors; operational, organization, and financial.  Clearly, just looking at the financial facts don't seem to be preventing many from moving workloads to the Public Cloud, despite the significant difference in cost.  I don't know about you, but if someone came to me with an offer for me to pay double in the Public Cloud than what I could do with my own infrastructure on-premises, I'd definitely say no.  

It's worth realizing that business moves in cycles.  What seems like a great idea today might not be a great idea in a few years.  Especially when you've doubled your cost.

Gartner Group and other thought leader groups are out there touting the Public Cloud as the savior to all that ails your IT organization.  Did you ever stop and think who pays Gartner Group and others like them for such glowing recommendations?  It's two groups...users who think Gartner Group is smarter than they are and the other are the vendors who benefit.  To be so bold...maybe things are a bit slanted?

Again, I'm not saying Public Cloud is bad...it's not.  But neither is on-premises.  Here's a check for you...since Public Cloud held the promise of eliminating the "hassle" of managing your own IT infrastructure, how many jobs have been eliminated in your organization by the Public Cloud?  How many infrastructure guys are doing higher level tasks?  Probably none, because you need someone to manage an additional infrastructure now.

I think overall you have to be smart.  Do the homework.  Do an evaluation of ALL of the options using all of the factors.  Only then will you really know that you made the right decision.  If it comes up Public Cloud, great..do Public Cloud.  If it comes up on-premises, run the workload on-premises.

Feel free to comment.  All intelligent discourse welcome here...

Today is the last business day of 2021.  While we always look forward to the New Year, we're kind of sorry to see this one go.  It's been a very good year for Roundstone Solutions.

It looks like we will finish 2021 with our business having doubled.  That's at a time when it's been hard to do much business in person.  Almost all of our Clients have remained remote, and in-person meetings have consisted of lunches, golf games, coffee meetings, etc.  No in-office meetings.  For a company that favors doing business in-person, it's been a big change for us.  But, we all adapted and things went well.

Our decision to focus on a small number of innovative companies has been paying off for us.  We remain dedicated to Nutanix, Cohesity, RingCentral, and Arctic Wolf.  This allows us to cover data center infrastructure, backup and recovery, unified communications as a service, and security.  Not surprisingly, these are the immediate focus areas for many of our Clients.  We're well positioned to continue our success into 2022.

Most of all, we want to thank our Clients and Partners for their continued interest in working with Roundstone.  While we're certainly not the biggest IT solutions provider in the market, we'd like to think we're one of the best.  The continued trust our Clients and Partners place in Roundstone is very gratifying, and what keeps us going.  Thank you for that.

For those who haven't yet worked with us, what are you waiting for?  Let us help you in 2022 and beyond.  Find out how much easier doing business can be.

Happy New Year to you and yours.  Thank you again for a great 2021!

I've posted in the past about how end users rarely do much evaluating of alternatives before they decide where to run their applications.  Instead, it's pretty much "let's keep buying 3-tier from our current vendor (HPE, Dell, etc.)" or it's "the Public Cloud holds magical benefits for all and we should put everything there".

Hey, I'm not saying the end result of your evaluation shouldn't be either of those two options, but if that's the sum total of your "evaluation", you'll be looking for work soon.  There are really 4 platforms to run your IT infrastructure; 3-Tier on-prem, HCI on-prem, Private Cloud/SaaS, or Public Cloud.

We're almost at the end of 2021, meaning we've been in the new century for 22 years now.  But most companies still decide what infrastructure to use for its applications like it was the 1980s or, at best, the 1990s.  The new millennium requires a new way to evaluate things.  You don't evaluate a Tesla car based on how many miles per gallon it gets, nor do you buy a TV based on how many VHF/UHF stations it gets (IYKYK).

I've spoken with many CIOs about this, and I'm blown away that there's not an intelligent evaluation of every infrastructure decision made.  But, these are smart people, so I figure there's gotta be a reason.  Well, I think I've figured it out...no one is looking at all of the alternatives because THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT.

Fair enough...I spent some time putting together a new way to evaluate things.  Check it out...

No one really buys into vendors doing financial analyses of alternatives, because the result is always "buy our stuff, and lots of it".  Not a lot of objectivity there.

But if it was all about financials, why would anyone put their workloads into the Public Cloud at twice the cost of other options?  That tells me it's not about cost, apparently, although if my IT guy ever came to me with a proposal to double my cost, he wouldn't be my IT guy for long.

Nope, the right way to do things is by looking at 1) operational factors, 2) organizational factors, and 3) financial factors.  We've created a very easy way for YOU to do the evaluation using your own factors, so the evaluation is not biased.

Contact us about the Evaluation tool.  We'll be happy to provide it and show you have to use it for your own benefit.  Unless you still want to be stuck in the 1990s...

I've got a reputation in our industry of being someone who knows the IT infrastructure business very well, and also as one who  isn't afraid to speak the truth about how the business works.  Sometimes, that means pointing out how some vendors take advantage of customers, in hopes of educating our prospects so they can get the best value for their money spent.

Lately, though, I've been speaking plainly about how many end users are just blindly migrating to "the Public Cloud" as if it's some magic formula that all the smart guys are using.  

It isn't.  And it's time you guys started doing your homework.

Amazon makes most of its profit from Amazon Web Services.  AWS makes BIG profits off its customers...much bigger than most other computer companies.  It's not because they're smarter than others; it's because they've got customers that aren't doing their homework.

As I've said before...what if you, an IT manager, had to explain to your management why you doubled your cost of IT infrastructure by moving to the Public Cloud?  If your manager was smart, they'd drill into the evaluation you did before you decided on the Public Cloud.  And most times, they'd see you didn't do any!  How do you think that's going to end for you?

I've discussed this with at least 5 CIOs over the past few months.  Not one of them said their guys do much of an evaluation on IT infrastructure decisions.  They all felt that the Public Cloud made sense, mostly because their guys told them so, or they read about how all the smart guys were going to the cloud.  I asked them how they could possibly know that if they didn't even do an evaluation?  My pointing this out to them was interesting...they quickly realized their guys didn't do the work...and that going forward they were going to have to.

Understand I am not against the Public Cloud.  I AM against being lazy and not doing the hard work of looking at all of your options.   Public Cloud is ideal for some workloads, but not most.  And it's almost always about twice as expensive as doing it yourself.  Why would you EVER spend twice as much as you had to?

C'mon...be smart!  we can help.  Just ask!

We're at the end of the fiscal year for two of our top partners, Nutanix and Cohesity.  FY21 has been good for our vendors and for Roundstone Solutions.  For that, we thank our Clients, who've trusted us with helping them with their IT infrastructure decisions.  To a Client, they are happy with the recommendations we've made; I've asked them.

This post is directed to those we'd like to do business with; companies and organizations we refer to as Prospects/Future Clients.  I'm hoping you'll consider what I've got to say.  It's intended in a positive vein, but I've turned it around a bit so you can see it a bit differently than perhaps you have in the past.

To begin, our Clients are:

1. Paying about half the cost you are for your IT infrastructure.  The use of Nutanix Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) allows users to cut the cost of their IT infrastructure (compute/storage/virtualization/storage networking) by half.  Fact.
   
2. Finding their IT infrastructures to be so much more simple to operate and manage than yours.  Fewer components means far less complexity.  They do their upgrades during the day, while you still do yours over a weekend, where you have to pay your teams extra to give up their days off.
3. Can scale when they want/need to, not when the manufacturers' product increments tell them to.  They also had a lower entry cost than you because they didn't have to buy 3 or 5 years worth of capacity upfront like you did.
4. Able to do more with their infrastructure because HCI is inherently faster than 3-tier or Public Cloud.

Nutanix has been delivering products for 10 years...their stuff works and about 20,000 organizations know it.  These 20,000 organizations took a greater risk than you have to, because they were the ones who tried out a newer platform and found that it worked.  Because of their risk taking, you don't have to take any risk at all.  In fact, the bigger risk you've got is that you're getting left behind compared to our Clients.

One final thought...since our Clients are paying half of what you are for their infrastructure, another way to look at it is that your current vendors are charging you double for what they're selling you.  Why would you let someone charge you double for an older, outdated infrastructure?  You shouldn't.

 Get in touch with us...we'll show you how easy it can be.  Our contact info is on our site, and we look forward to working with you!

I've posted about this topic in the past, but I think it bears repeating.  Simply stated, we find most users do either no financial analysis when considering the Public Cloud, or do a nominal (read poor) analysis.  It makes no sense for an organization not to understand the expected costs of any decision they make in their business.  So why is the Public Cloud any different?

In your personal life, would you ever agree to something where you didn't know what expected costs were going to be?  I'm guessing that you wouldn't.  So why do people do it in business?  I was alway taught that you spend your company's money the same way you would spend your own...carefully, and with your eyes open to total cost.

Show me a company that has spent LESS money in the Public Cloud than they initially expected.  That would be like finding a unicorn...it doesn't exist.  But, in most transactions for on-premises equipment, we get squeezed on the price almost every time.  I wish organizations purchased on-premises IT equipment and software like they do Public Cloud.  I'd be very rich.

I'm not against the Public Cloud.  In some cases, they provide a good value to an organization when the use case is right for it.  For most cases, it's more expensive, but unless you do the math, you're bound to overpay with the Public Cloud.

I'm pretty good at math, and when you compare the total costs of the Public Cloud to on-premises, it's not even close.  

Here are the facts:

• The Public Cloud's architecture utilizes hyper-converged infrastructure as its base, allowing for the use of commodity hardware coupled with HCI software
• If you're looking for the perceived "flexibility" of the Public Cloud, you can do it in your own datacenter through the use of Nutanix's HCI.  Nutanix pioneered this platform for use on-prem.  They're really, really good at it.
• Nutanix allows you the benefits of the Public Cloud in your own datacenter at a cost that is typically more than 40% less expensive.​

​Don't just take my word for it.  Do the financial analysis!  At some point, if you don't do a fair financial analysis, it's going to be found out, and the mantra of "Cloud first" isn't really going to mean much when you're asked to explain why you spent so much more for the same result.

Think about it.  And then DO THE MATH!

Every day, I speak with customers and prospects for our business.  The business we created, Roundstone Solutions, is all about helping organizations and their IT staff simplify things, modernize infrastructures, and reduce cost.  It's gratifying when we're able to do so, which is often.  But our toughest job is to get It folks to realize there's usually a better way than they're doing it.

Despite what you may think, you don't get extra credit for continuing to do it the "old way", or "the way we've always done things".  In fact, over time, that approach becomes a very risky place to be.  If your senior management knew you could simplify things for your team and business, you could deliver better service, and do so at a much lower cost than you're currently doing it, do you think they'd be happy?  Does your company reward those who "keep on keeping on" or do they promote those who look for the path forward?  You know the answer.

If you're still using a 3-tier IT infrastructure to run your applications, and the vast majority of you still are, my question to you is "Why?"  Why would you deliberately avoid moving forward?  Why would you limit your personal and professional upside?  

Look, we get it.  If no one is forcing you to be innovative, you're happy to just keep things running the way you always have.  We can assure you, those of our customers who have looked forward and decided to improve their infrastructure are very happy to have done so.  They have more time, have happier employees, and a heck of a lot less stress.  Plus, they've got budget money to finally get those additional projects going.

We can help.  We have lots of experience simplifying IT infrastructures.  Our website talks about the 3 main areas we focus on.

Take us up on our genuine offer to help you see the path forward.  Don't keep pushing that boulder uphill.