What would happen if IDEO addressed the DCIM market?

The Economist has an article on how voluntary and public sector companies are reaching out to IDEO to design their services.

A growing proportion of IDEO’s work in re-engineering services is for NGOs and governments. Oxfam employed the firm to redesign its core product, gift-giving. Singapore asked it to revamp its system for handling applications for work permits. Often, it is not exactly rocket science: make forms easier to fill in, make each step in the process clearer and less prone to errors, and so on. But, as anyone who has ever applied for a United States visa (let alone an Indian one) will know, governments can be startlingly poor at designing their processes and serving their customers.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if DCIM companies used IDEO's approach?

A growing proportion of IDEO’s work in re-engineering services is for NGOs and governments. Oxfam employed the firm to redesign its core product, gift-giving. Singapore asked it to revamp its system for handling applications for work permits. Often, it is not exactly rocket science: make forms easier to fill in, make each step in the process clearer and less prone to errors, and so on. But, as anyone who has ever applied for a United States visa (let alone an Indian one) will know, governments can be startlingly poor at designing their processes and serving their customers.

But, part of the mind flip is the mind flip that users know better than the creators.

Rich countries’ welfare states were designed for a more homogeneous and deferential society in which most people accepted that the men in the ministry knew best. Now, the public rightly expect better, but governments constantly fail to live up to their demands. Since public agencies have generated so few good ideas of their own, a bit of outside help would appear to be worth trying.

How many DCIM vendors focus on you being right and they need to design the software to live up to your demands?

If you hear the words customization.  Run.  Run quickly.  As customization almost always leads you to more costs, more time, and more frustration.

How many of the users of DCIM were asking for a new management approach?

I saw this DCK article that goes to nowhere.

Using DCIM to create a common data center management approach Data Center Knowledge-by Bill Kleyman-6 hours agoShare The modern data center is beginning to be considered the data center of everything. This means that more platforms, services and users are ...

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Got me thinking.  How many DCIM users want to create a new management approach?  Wouldn't people want software that supports the way they work and not force a change in management approach? 

This is why I when I wrote this post on DCIM and made the point that maybe the M in DCIM should be dropped.

Data Center Infrastructure Management.  Sometimes I think the solution would be better solved if the M - Management was dropped.  What is needed in Data Center Infrastructure.

A different way for DCIM, drop the M - Data Center Infrastructure

It has been interesting watching the DCIM market develop.  I designed a DCIM solution 4 years ago and what I thought was obvious I find few people would do.

Given the popularity of my post on DCIM not living up to expectations. I'll write a bit more.

One good rule is to follow what is articulated and followed by Google's demi god of infrastructure Jeff Dean who reports to THE god of google's infrastructure Urs Hoelzle.

One of Jeff Dean's demi god powers is.

If Dean has a superhuman power, then, it’s not the ability to do things perfectly in an instant. It’s the power to prioritize and optimize and deal in orders of magnitude. Put another way, it’s the power to recognize an opportunity to do something pretty well in far less time than it would take to do it perfectly. In Silicon Valley, that’s much cooler than shooting cowboys with an Uzi.

DCIM. Data Center Infrastructure Management.  Sometimes I think the solution would be better solved if the M - Management was dropped.  What is needed in Data Center Infrastructure.

What are the real problems in the Infrastructure that need to be solved.  Jeff Dean's #1 rule is the necessity of solving a problem.

I think one of the things that have caused us to build infrastructure as we were often doing things out of necessity, so we would be running into problems where we needed some infrastructure that would solve that problem in a way that could make it so that it can scale to deal with larger amounts of data or larger amounts of requests volumes and all of these kinds of things. There’s nothing like necessity of needing to do something to cause you to come up with abstractions that help you break through the forms. So map reduce was born out of needing to scale our indexing system.

I think I have a new bar joke "What is the necessity of management in DCIM?"  DCIM solutions would be so much better if the decision on what DCIM is deployed was made by Operations Team and not the Management Team.

DCIM is not living up to expectations

2-3 years ago I used to write about DCIM, but stopped when I started to talk to more and more companies.  I would watch mostly silently and read the different press releases and new product announcements. 

The 451 group released on June 21, 2013 an analysis.

DCIM is becoming a necessity for a growing number of datacenter operators, but market penetration and sales cycles have taken longer than anticipated. Another issue is that full DCIM suite deployments are often phased in over time, resulting in staggered revenue for suppliers. Many investors did not foresee these factors, nor did they fully appreciate how adverse to change operators have historically been, among other inhibitors. We believe the overinvestment in the DCIM sector was brought about by a mix of herd behavior and inadequate due diligence (datacenter operators are characteristically guarded, and the market is not often well understood by outsiders). There has been a slowdown in VC, in general, and with too much investment chasing too few large DCIM deals, VCs have largely stepped back from the sector in 2013. If they haven't done so already, VCs and management should be reviewing their prospects. Many investors, but not all, will be disappointed in the next 12-18 months, if not already.

The winners were some of the ones most heavily funded with the prettiest powerpoint slides.

A less welcome fact is that the DCIM supplier sector is overcrowded, with more than 55 companies. More than 80% are privately held; many are venture-capital-backed (see our previous report Will the DCIM supplier bubble slowly deflate?). Although there are still new entrants into the market, enthusiasm in the venture community has cooled.

DCIM that is focused on operators using the software, Yeea! Digital Realty announces EnVision

I've been in Santa Clara for the past there days hosting our data center social, hanging with friends, and meeting new ones.  I was talking to a company who just bought a DCIM license and they asked what I think about DCIM. The problem with DCIM software is it is not designed for someone to say "I used DCIM every day to run my data center."  DCIM is most of the time positioned as a management reporting tool.  

I've been so busy meeting I haven't had a chance to read the press releases and other news this week.  One of the news I got a chance to discuss is the DCIM solution for Digital Realty with one of their executives, but I didn't get the PR stuff cleared, so let me just chat about the press release.

One of the people I have had the pleasure of having hours of conversations with is DRT's David Schirmacher who makes the following statement.

"Up until now, data has been collected, but it has not necessarily been easily accessed or arranged in an intuitive manner that is helpful to a data center operator," said David Schirmacher, senior vice president of portfolio operations at Digital Realty. "The goal in rolling out EnVision across our global portfolio is to give our customers a common database that is structured around the specific needs of data center operators and can therefore manage the millions of data points that are found in today's large-scale facilities.

I was making my point about problem of DCIM without knowing that David makes the same point with the EnVision solution.

There are some good people and I am looking forward to see and hear about Digital's progress.

The EnVision rollout will begin this month and take approximately 18 months to complete across Digital Realty's global data center portfolio, which consists of 122 properties in 32 markets as of April 26, 2013.

I was talking to one of my friends and he said I should write a critique on DCIM SW on what works and what doesn't.  Not.  It takes too much time and there are too many analysts making money telling others how great a variety of DCIM sw is.  

My other issue with the analysts writing about DCIM are they not operations people, so they are basing their analysis on what someone tells them. They don't know what good operations SW is.  I would talk to people who actually use the DCIM sw and hear what they say.  The prettier it is the more suspicious you should be.  Don't talk to the executives who made the original purchasing decision as they will tell you their perceived expectations of DCIM.  The realty is a totally different world that few know about.  And it is not pretty.

I have my opinions of what I would buy.  And, there are different rules on what to look for then is it pretty.  Like does it scale and what are the performance limits.  How is the DCIM SW designed for high availability?  You can always make something with good internal design look pretty.  But ugly internal designs will just worse over time and use.