Sometimes we lose focus on what matters to the buyer – or the buyer’s boss’s boss – when we’re trying to sell things. It’s a good idea every now and again to take a step back and make sure you are cognisant of the motivations and reasons those buyers (and their boss’s boss) are doing what they do.

I know that we like to get all fired up around infrastructure issues like disk arrays and servers, but we need to remember that by the time we’re engaged in those dog fghts, the real money decisions have already been made.

If you want to affect the outcome of those decisions, you need to intersect the process at a higher (sooner) level of the value chain process. If you wait until all the good decisions have been made, you end up in the basement arguing ftzer valve specifcations with someone who can’t talk to women without getting hives. Bad place to be.

The real cost hierarchy for any business application over its life is as follows:

1.Licensing – this is why Oracle is king of the world.
2.People – developing, implementing, and supporting – opex.
3.Energy – the cost of powering and cooling the crap that runs the app.
4.The crap – capex.

Crap is a big business, no doubt but it’s the lowest overall cost in the life of the app, and rightfully gets the lowest amount of attention from the business.

It costs more to power and cool the crap than to buy the crap. Therefore, instead of arguing “my nanospaz is bigger than yours” or “my nanospaz is 16% cheaper than yours”, you should be saying “my nanospaz technology will consume 43% less energy over its lifetime, which will equate to a savings of one billion dollars.”

Why? Because the higher you go on the true cost hierarchy the more senior business people are likely to be involved – and the business is more likely to be affected by the decisions.“Business people” does NOT necessarily mean senior IT people. Might mean the people that actually are the true decision makers – the marketing dude buys CRM and Business Intelligence stuff, not IT. The facilities dude cares about power and energy, not necessarily the IT folk. Legal buys e-discovery stuff, not IT normally. IT makes it work – often after the higher level decisions are made. I am not saying it’s right, only that it’s true.

Further, the higher up the stack my IT friends can learn to intersect these discussions internally, the better for all concerned. Since IT will inherit the “make it work” aspect of the decisions anyway, you might as well try to prevent the outrageously silly aspects of those decisions from happening early rather than later. In this way, you won’t get the mandate sent down that one of the core requirements of this new application is “interplanetary replication.” Nipping that one in the bud early will beneft all concerned.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Steve Duplessie is the founder of and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Recognised worldwide as the leading independent authority on enterprise storage, Steve has also consistently been ranked as one of the most infuential IT analysts. You can track Steve’s blog at http://www.thebiggertruth.com