Commentary

Terry Sweeney
 

Total Cost Of Lead Generation

I know at least four vendors who'd be more than willing to help you calculate it, but does anyone really know the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their storage? Too often, these calculations have about the same gravitas as when someone starts describing what they're worth "on paper."

I know at least four vendors who'd be more than willing to help you calculate it, but does anyone really know the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their storage? Too often, these calculations have about the same gravitas as when someone starts describing what they're worth "on paper."Still, Compellent jogged my feeble memory that vendors still offer these things with a new TCO tool. In its basic version it asks users six questions about usable capacity, annual storage growth rate, percentages of active/inactive data, kilowatt hour charges, annual salary for a storage admin, and average cost of downtime.

Click, click, click, and what do you know? The Compellent SAN is cheaper than the garden variety out there. Uh-huh. Apparently a more advanced tool is available for free if you give them name, address, phone number, e-mail, etc. My hope is it's like that car insurance commercial where the best quote may be from a competitor. My worst fear is that tools like these are little more than lead-generation factories.


More Storage Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

Dell, EMC, IBM, Oracle, and VMware all offer some flavor of TCO tool, and they're all pretty much the same. The issue of how much vendors stack the deck in their own favor we can leave for another time. I'm more curious to know what else goes into your calculations that vendors don't consider, or purposely overlook. Add a comment below, or if you want more privacy, hit the "E-Mail" button at the top of this page and write me directly.

We'll see if these vendor promises are worth the paper they'd be printed on.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links