Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
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Sales-force competence
In all of our previous surveys, we noted a direct correlation between a vendor's rating for sales-force competence and its overall rating. No vendor has won the Quality Award without placing first or second in the category. However, this year's enterprise tape award has proven to be the exception to that rule. Although Sun was the overall winner, it fell to fourth place in the sales-force competence category. Often, post-merger sales organizations are reorganized such that customers are assigned unfamiliar representatives. So falloff in this area isn't too surprising. Qualstar was top rated in this category with a score of 5.82, while Sun garnered a still-respectable 5.40. Quantum, which placed fifth overall, took second among enterprise products in the sales-force category with its second highest category score (5.47). It's perhaps a testament to Sun's product quality that its other category scores were strong enough to overcome this miscue (see the "
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Sales-force competence" graph within "Rankings of enterprise tape libraries").
Quantum's strength in this category may be attributable--at least in part--to aggressive pricing in the wake of its 2000 acquisition of ATL. "A lot of the driving point was cost and a lot of the other vendors seemed to be cost-prohibitive at the time," says Tad Martin, Unix systems administrator at Iridium Satellite LLC in Tempe, AZ. "I think that was Quantum trying to get ATL integrated with their whole product line, and that kind of played to my benefit."
This was first published in January 2007
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