Backup & Beyond (mostly beyond)

Last week, I attended a Microsoft Azure event in Bangalore.

When I received the invitation to the event, I was surprised to see that Microsoft had arranged for a non Microsoft person, David Chappell, to speak at the event. I’d have thought that they would have arranged for someone from the Azure product team.

Now, David’s a well known speaker, and he’s really good at keeping things simple. And, he certainly helped make the event interesting.

But there was a larger reason behind getting someone from outside of Microsoft…

Neutrality!

More often than not, vendors ‘pretend’ to be neutral and clothe product propaganda in apparent neutrality (B is a great product BUT, guess what, our A is much better because…)

Not this time!

David was refreshingly honest in his assessment & comparisons. He even went so far as to say that competing cloud solutions would fit the bill very well for some of the use case scenarios described by the audience. And he was effusive in his praise for Amazon pioneering the whole ‘cloud thing’. Of course, in the process, he also gave us the whole nine yards on Azure.

I had a chat with David & Rajinish Menon (part of the Azure/DPE team at Microsoft India) and complimented them on what I saw was a pretty brave move. They said it was an extremely conscious decision to be absolutely honest with potential customers – and to ‘present’ Azure (and its competition) in a fair and unbiased manner.

Full marks to Microsoft on this one. The attendees also seemed to like this ‘no BS’ honesty, and were much more receptive to Azure than they’d have been otherwise! From an attendee perspective, they felt were served ‘information’ and not vendor kool-aid.

David & Rajnish have promised me some slides from the presentation; I’ll post them when I get them. You’ll then see what I mean by the fair comparisons.

UPDATE: On a (kinda) related note, check out our next post.

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

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