Stop Guessing and Put Some “Reality” Into Your Decision Making Process

I am struck by all the reality TV we have seen ever since “Survivor” came on the scene. What was once a novelty has become the genre of choice. With contestants showcasing their skills and competing around athletic prowess, survival skills, singing, modeling, cooking, dancing, and just about anything else imaginable, I contemplated my reality; what if there was a reality show around CEP vendors?

With the growing adoption of CEP technology and multiple vendors promoting similar products one would almost think they are playing the 1950’s game show “To Tell The Truth”.  Where each CEP vendor would get up and say… “I am the real leader of the CEP Market.”   However, the premise of “To Tell The Truth” is to see who is the best fabricator and we all know no CEP vendor would EVER be misleading in their capabilities.  Still, with no relevant benchmarking and few use case studies, customers do play somewhat of a guessing game when it comes to selecting the right CEP vendor.  However, I don’t think that needs to be the case.  What if instead you looked at each vendor from a reality show point of view? 

So, what would be the criteria for “winning”?  Would it be the vendor with the best “looks”, the “Next Top Model” of the CEP world so to speak?  Or, would it be the vendor with the most endurance and strength, the “Survivor” if you will? 

CEP’s Next Top Model?

In today’s style conscience society, one might argue that the look and feel of the CEP solution should play a big role in the selection process. If that’s the case then an end-user might focus on how “pretty” the interface is, the ease of use and the ease of installation.

As we all well know, outward appearances can make a good first impression.  One that can help or hinder getting your foot in the door, be it a person looking for a job or a product looking for a customer.  But should pretty looks and eye catching accessories have high priority when it comes to taking on the jungle of incoming data and complex analytics? 

CEP Survivor Style

If the style and glitz constitute the CEP version of “Next Top Model”, then the substantive issues around performance, reliability, failover and industrial strength considerations, security considerations, extended functionality, scalability, and application flexibility would all be in the “Survivor” series. I see “Survivor” as looking past glitz where success depends on substance.  What is the technology made of?  How will its performance hold up to the ever increasing streams of data?  In “Survivor”, looks are not valued as much as strength, speed, the ability to work together on a team, and the support they provide each other. Winners are strong. Winners have stamina. Winners are reliable. Winners hang in there when things are tough.

So, if I were directing this reality show I would envision it more along the lines of “Survivor”.  I believe Aleri has all the attributes of a “Survivor”.  However, the reality is that I’m not the one producing the show.  In some cases, Aleri is competing against the “Next Top Model.” That’s not good or bad, it’s just reality, no pun intended.

Not to say that Aleri can’t be aesthetically pleasing, but our focus has always been our core strength - power and performance.  I believe we did the hard part first.  We designed our platform from the ground up to provide the most robust architecture available for the rapid development of mission critical applications within the most demanding environments. If we had focused everything on glitz first, we may have put our fundamental “body” in place where the conditioning required for the survivor series becomes unrealistic. Said differently, unless the underlying architecture originally contemplated things like changing data types, full state recovery via a storage manager  purpose-built for CEP, ad-hoc query support, superior failover characteristics, etc, then getting to this “condition” may require a fundamental re-architecture, which seems unlikely at best.  Yet, as some reality shows reveal, it’s easy to add the glitz and change your looks.  In fact, one of Aleri’s goals for 2008 is to update our look and feel, add some eye catching accessories if you will.   

The Final Reality

Of course in the end everyone wants the best of both worlds. However, when speed and strength are the difference between your success and failure, the lipstick seems less important.  And that’s reality.