The spending smackups are upon us, the recession must be ending!

I'm not going to crow about our last quarter again, but the discussions around our decision to invest heavily in R&D has inspired Chuck Hollis at EMC to bring up how much EMC is spending developing V-Max.

I agree, if we had a product development spending contest, 3PAR would probably lose to EMC by a long shot.  But if we had a double elimination tournament we might outspend some of the other companies who we are starting to compete with, such as Compellent.  (Our smallest F Class systems sometimes compete with  Compellent's high end systems).   If your criteria is to buy from the company that spends the most or the least on product development, we're not going to win, because we are going to be in the middle somewhere. 

Its hard to imagine outspending IBM on storage, but if we were to compete with XIV, I think it would be a toss-up - I think it costs more to pay an engineer in the Bay Area than it does in Israel, but they are part of IBM after all.  Then there is Hitachi with its army of engineers in Odawara, Japan.  They might be the Sumo champion of this space.  C'mon Hitachi guys, show us your stuff!  With all the cuts going on at HP, they're probably not as competitive on the development spending as they once were and STORAGE TO STORAGE, I think 3PAR would have an advantage, just because Mark Hurd has been getting his teams to play a person short.  The one wildcard not mentioned yet is Netapp.  They definitely spend a lot on product development every year, but we'll wait a couple weeks to see their latest results before seeding them in this year's spending tournament.

If we're going to get this economy back on its feet, we all need to be spending as much as we can!  Some of us will develop expensive freaking doohickeys, others will develop things that never quite work correctly, others will develop Edsel-ish products that lack customer appeal, while others still will have mythical man-month disasters.  There should be a reality TV show on Versus: I can see the copy now:   "Stay tuned for Storage Spending Smackups following Extreme Cage Fighting "

"The sister show, Extreme Corporate Bloggers and Tweeters can be seen on the Home Shopping Network following the 2:00 AM airing of an infomercial for anti-aging cream and/or male enhancement products."

 

Comments

[John F.]

Maybe each storage vendor should invest in an infomercial. Let's flip a coin for the frontman... Heads you get Billy Mays of OrangeGlo fame, tails you get Vince Offer, the ShamWow guy...

[marc farley]

How can you forget about Bob Barefoot? (Coral Calcium)

[John F.]

Doh,

Didn't mean to leave anybody out.

[Chris Fricke]

I'd totally DVR that...

[John F.]

I think EMC had Bob at their booth during TechEd.