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back to article When to trust a startup: Does size count?

How big does a company have to be before we can trust them? Does company size or balance sheet even equate in any meaningful fashion to trustworthiness? What does trustworthiness mean in today's data center? I recently attended the SimpliVity Connect analyst shindig in Boston. Some grumpy analyst on the other end of the room …

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  1. Nick Kew

    Um, a company of any size can lose interest, stop supporting whatever they've flogged you. Whether it's a tech that's failed in the market like betamax, or just a winding down as with windows versions reaching a certain age.

    Open source offers some protection. Open source with a thriving and diverse development community is the gold standard for ensuring your investment won't prove a dead end. Invest in a startup delivering an Apache project and you have two layers of assurance beyond the company itself: the source to work with, and independent developers to give continuity if the startup itself dies.

    6 0 Reply
    1. JLV
      Reply Icon

      >Open source offers some protection

      Interesting point. At the developer end, open source is both a blessing and a curse. To name no names, I was looking at a Python GUI IDE some years back. One of the most promising ones was open source and it promised to do a lot of things. Looked great, lots of recommendations. This was back in the days when Python GUI tools were a dime a dozen and there was the sense that more choice was always good (thankfully the community has since realized that too much choice can be toxic to newcomers and veterans alike and the Python web app server space is way more focused these days than IDEs ever were).

      Look under the covers though and you could see that a) it seemed to be a solo dev job, b) lots and lots of features and c) many features did not in fact work very well. They worked for basic use cases, but step outside and things would fall apart. Quickly.

      Shiny? Yes. Robust. No.

      10 years ago I decided I'd be much better off not touching that thing, free or not. But over the years, I've seen ongoing recommendations for it, even as no new release ever came out. Seems truly dead now, but still downloadable. Wonder how many people utterly wasted their time and money hitching their work onto that horse.

      Another Python offering, this time an alternative to Django, also had that smell when you looked under its skirts. Whole branches of code not implemented, things that didn't work, over-promised feature set.

      Open source is great, yes. But some offerings can be ephemeral in nature and it behooves you to have your eyes wide open while picking components and evaluate your exposure. Leftpad style Javascript micro-module dependency are no big deal, they can be swapped out in a jiffy. Frameworks that your code is totally coupled to? Not so much.

      For example, if I needed to use one, I'd be especially leery of the coming shakedown between the various JS frameworks a la Ember/ReactJS/Angular. There's a new one every week and not all of those will retain mindset.

      0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As a small business, we've often been told: "We're not buying from you as you're too small". A self-fulfilling prophesy.

    Another favourite : "What if your key engineer gets knocked down by a bus?" Ignoring the fact that in any project, big or small, there are a couple of key people. In fact, large companies often move the engineering 'visionary' once the bid is complete and the contract signed and you're left with the average PMs.

    But its all smoke and mirrors, procurement people like to buy big from a name that makes them feel good. Its other peoples money after all!

    5 0 Reply
  3. goldcd

    As long as there's nothing too proprietary...

    Should a small company go pop and vanish, usually there's a scramble from related companies to seize their ex-customers - so maybe a packaged transformation solution, some introductory pricing to tempt you to them over the other sharks that smelt the blood in the water.

    5 0 Reply
  4. tony2heads
    Unhappy

    Even a big company can be totally untrustworthy

    I could mention names, but the list would be too long

    5 0 Reply
    1. Midnight
      Reply Icon

      Re: Even a big company can be totally untrustworthy

      ...Which is funny, because so many of the entries on it are only two or three letters long.

      4 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Even a big company can be totally untrustworthy

        >only two or three letters

        ???

        >>> len("Accenture")

        9

        0 0 Reply
  5. watt

    Not a trust problem

    Interesting to see the point of view from someone that helps startups focus on administrators. The biggest problem for any established and/or well disciplined IT org is risk, not trust. Most companies measure risk and attempt to understand the risks for every solution/purchase; even from large, well established vendors. Anyone that walks blindly into a purchase gets what they deserve; it may work or it may not. There are many large vendors that made quick decisions to get rid of products lines, and many hopeful startups that failed soon after launch. Administrators should look beyond the hype, the new shiny object placed in front of them, and understand the product, vendor, and the risk.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Someone_Somewhere
      Reply Icon

      Re: Not a trust problem

      Agreed.

      That word - 'trust' - I'm not sure he knows what it means.

      'Rely (on)' would be better, perhaps.

      1 0 Reply
  6. Nate Amsden

    don't bet on support

    Every situation is unique of course. I was a customer of Exanet several years ago, just one clustered system (with 3PAR back end storage, was not going to use Exanet back end storage).

    Exanet went bust, Dell acquired the assets and the key employees. Dell instructed the employees to NOT help any existing customers because of liability reasons. There was no support.

    We had an issue with our 3PAR a few months later, and needed Exanet help to get back online, there was no support. I ended up getting the situation resolved by working with a 3rd party (who hired the support person from Exanet who supported us). The hardware was IBM xSeries, and the 3rdparty had a copy of all the software, but it was quite a scramble to get it back and running again. At the end of the day took about 3 days to get the system back online and another 5 days to recover stuff after that.

    We later replaced the Exanet with a NetApp V-Series, I left the company before the solution got implemented. On paper the solution was faster than what we had with Exanet. What I heard the following year the company had major performance issues with V-series, and NetApp regional sales reps in that area were real assholes(my VAR at the time literally got yelled at by NetApp reps because he "only" sold us a V-series, and not a full NetApp Array - that rep is not with NetApp anymore, he made a KILLING at NetApp serving another company I used to work at(that had over 100 netapp arrays at one point) so he was more or less untouchable for a while). So the management at the company kicked NetApp out, and went with another solution. Not sure what happened after that.

    6 years later I wish I still had Exanet, every NAS solution I've tried since has not been as good, which is kind of depressing. Dell has Exanet as an offering of course (forgot the name of the product assuming they still have it), though they only support certain Dell storage. Our data set is so small(1-2TB depending on if dedupe and/or file system compression is available) it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy dedicated tier 1 NAS(front+back end), but maybe we will have to do it eventually.

    Personally I am more concerned about the technology than the stability of the business. Normally the quality of the technology will turn me off before I even get to consider the stability of the business these days.

    0 0 Reply
  7. Adam 1

    > I buy from startups all the time. Why? Am I being foolish in doing so?

    No, as long as it's all DevOps you should be fine! ;p

    3 0 Reply
  8. yasirimam

    it is better to be trusted by someone instead to trust someone.

    0 0 Reply

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