Running with the Elephants - Competing Against Mammoths

I am asked quite often how NorthSeas a small start up can compete against industry giants like EMC, Symantec, and IBM. I may sound naive when I say this (a criticism I willingly accept) but with every fibre of my being I believe that we can compete well in this crowded space and succeed, if only for the simple reason that today's IT Managers and CIOs no longer see products from Big Vendors as automatically superior.

I know it probably sounds like a cliche but hear me out: During the 90s, a decade epitomized by the Big Software Solution and the previous Big Iron decade of the 80s, Fear Uncertaintly and Doubt (FUD) ruled the IT planet. The prevailing logic was that if you wanted a career, choose one of the big vendors because "no one ever got fired..." well, you know how it went.

But today's CIO's are a different breed. They've seen the overspending and under-delivery of monolithic solutions like ERP, CRM, client-server, etc, and in many cases personally handled the messes they left behind. Today's IT leaders recognize that careers are no longer determined by the magnitude of their implementation projects but by their results. There's a new IT passion now - a passion for simple, effective, and managed solutions.

SMBs now represent 50% or more of IT spending and the vendors that thrived during the halycon days of the Big Software decade are struggling to force feed their solutions to a customer base that just isn't hungry for it. Despite their marketing spiels, the mammoths of the IT industry cannot easily alter the complexity and cost of their solutions that has made them inherently unpalatable to this critical segment of customers.

We will succeed at this by sticking to our knitting. We need to be the best at combining simplicity with effectiveness. We need to ensure that we never lock customers in - either to their messaging application or to us. We need to make e-mail archiving a part of the storage infrastructure. In short, we need provide SMBs and Enterprise customers what they want.

The number of partners sharing this passion with us is growing daily. We are a long way from our goal but with enough diligence and attention to detail, we will challenge the conventional wisdom that made bigger better and allowed FUD-marketing to succeed. In 1998 Google was three-guys in a garage. Innovation comes in small packages.

If you are looking for product information please go to http://www.northseasamt.com/