I love talking to people who get it.
I was talking with a guy from Cornell today about AppZero's server virtualization technology and he mentioned that they have a consultant talking to them about ITIL, and the challenge that all the information being put into their ITIL compliant CMDB would be out of date the second it was entered. Sorry Greg, but the conversation turned from AppZero to Actional's end-to-end visibility in less time than it took me to shift so I was standing between this guy and the door.
I commiserated and mentioned that it's one of the really interesting things about Actional - that we track that message flows automatically and therefore provide two key benefits:
- Accuracy
- Low cost of ownership (due to non-manual discovery)
We started talking about one of our oldest customers, University of Phoenix. They're the largest online university and they use our products to track the flow of messages as they flow through the network. Our conversation was a breath of fresh air. Not that many people get it so quickly:
I laughed, because that's one of the oldest case studies I talk about. An early customer of ours had a similar problem and it would cost them two weeks every time they decommissioned a system. It was nice to hear someone else pitching my story to me.
Here was a guy who understood the difficulties of the anonymous consumer, as well as the futility of manual discovery when his own internal processes were not robust enough to keep up with the changes in his environment.
I'm sure I'll be talking to him again soon.