Pop Quiz: Should You be a Late Adopter or an Early Adopter?

Technology follows a predictable adoption life-cycle. First the innovators try a new technology. They are crazy and will try anything, just for the fun of it. Then come the early adopters. They typically have a problem so hard that they must take risks to solve it. Next are the early majority, the late majority, and finally the traditionalists – the “quill pen” folks, who avoid change if at all possible.

Startups are full of people who love new technology, and they assume that customers do as well. The reality is that many companies, especially large enterprises, would rather avoid change, and for good reason. Change is disruptive. Change upsets people. Change requires new expertise. Change might fail, and it often costs more than you expect.

There are lots of good reasons to be a late adopter, so I’ve come up with two questions to help customers figure out where they should be on the adoption curve:

Question #1: Can existing products do what I need?

If you have no problem, why change? High-tech companies always seem to have new problems. They want to simulate a bigger chip than ever before, or render more orcs on a battlefield, so they are comfortable being early adopters, and they have learned to do it well. Part of their business model is to manage the risks of early adoption.

Low-tech companies occasionally have problems that existing products can’t solve. For instance, people are considering disk-to-disk backup because tape-based backup isn’t keeping up with the growth in storage. The problem is, many companies are not used to being early adopters. It makes them uncomfortable, and they don’t have the skills to manage it well.

Question #2: Are IT costs too high?

If existing products do what you need, and IT costs are not too high, why on earth would you change? When considering IT costs, it often makes sense to ask what percentage of total costs are IT related.

Suppose you are an oil company, and you have spent $12 billion on an oil refinery. Now you are trying to figure out whether to spend one million dollars on the IT infrastructure to support it, or ten million. Without knowing anything else about the problem, I can tell you the answer. Spend ten million; spend twenty; who cares! That is such a low percentage of the overall budget that it doesn’t matter. Just don’t ever let that refinery go down. Or chip fab. Or battleship.

On the other hand, consider Oracle’s On Demand business. Instead of buying Oracle software and running it on their own equipment, customers outsource to Oracle. Oracle buys the servers, buys the storage, and manages the software. The Austin Data Center where Oracle does this is the largest installation in the world of Dell/Linux and NetApp storage. I don’t know what percentage of their overall costs are IT related, but I know it’s huge. Existing products could solve their problems, but the cost would be exorbitant, so Oracle has been very aggressive with technologies like NFS and Linux for enterprise applications. They have led the way in making these technologies safe for others.

What’s most important is that you make a conscious decision between early and late. Sometimes early is better, and sometimes late is better, but at least you should ask the question! Use my two questions to figure out what makes sense for your business, or your particular project.

A big part of NetApp’s strategy is to enable customers to change when it’s convenient for them. Unified storage is a great example. Our storage systems support Fibre Channel SAN along with NFS and iSCSI, which means that customers can start with traditional SAN for their database applications, if that’s what makes them comfortable, but they can change to Ethernet storage whenever it makes sense. (Ethernet storage often brings significant savings.) Alternately, they can start with NFS or iSCSI, secure in the knowledge that they can easily upgrade to Fibre Channel SAN if their requirements become more demanding.

By doing our innovation in a single, unified storage architecture, we create an environment that lets customers adopt new technology when they are ready. Early if that is appropriate, or late if that makes more sense. Either way, NetApp’s approach makes it easy, because the new technology is part of the same architecture that the customer has already installed.

In other words, NetApp enables change, but we don’t force change down our customers’ throats.