Oracle Bested the Best in Quality

I have been an avid reader of SearchStorage Storage magazine for many years now and have been downloading their free PDF copy every month. Quietly snugged at the end of January 2012’s issue, there it was, the Storage magazine 6th annual Quality Awards for NAS.

I was pleasantly surprised with the results because in the previous annual awards, it would dominated by NetApp and EMC but this time around, a dark horse has emerged. It is Oracle who took top honours in both the Enterprise and the Mid-range categories.

The awards are the result of Storage Magazine’s survey and below is an excerpt about the survey:

In both categories covering the Enterprise and the Mid-Range, the overall ratings are shown below:

Surprised? You bet because I was.

The survey does not focus on speeds and feeds or comparing scalability or performance. Rather, the survey focuses on the qualitative aspects of the NAS products. There were many storage vendors who were part of the participation lists but many did not qualify to be make a dent of what the top 6 did. Here’s a list of the vendors surveyed:

The qualitative aspects of the survey focused on 5 main areas:

• Sales force competency
• Initial Quality
• Product Features
• Product Reliability
• Technical Support

In each of the 5 main areas, customers were asked a series of questions. Here is a breakdown of those questions of each area.

Sales Force Competency

1. Are the sales force knowledgeable about their products and their customer’s industries?
2. How flexible are their sales effort?
3. How good are they keeping the customer’s interest levels up?

Initial Product Quality

1. Does the product need little or no vendor intervention?
2. Ease of installation and ease of use
3. Good value for money
4. Reasonable requirement from Professional Service or needing little Professional Service
5. Installation without defects
6. Getting it right the first time

Product Features

1. Storage management features
2. Mirroring features
3. Capacity scaling features
4. Interoperable with other vendor’s products
5. Remote replication features
6. Snapshotting features

Product Reliability

1. Vendor provide comprehensive upgrading procedures
2. Ability to meet Service Level Agreement (SLA)
3. Experiences very little downtime
4. Patches applied non-disruptively

Technical Support

1. Taking ownership of the customer’s problem
2. Timely problem resolution and technical advice
3. Documentation
4. Vendor supplies support contractually as specified
5. Vendor’s 3rd party partners are knowledgeable
6. Vendor provide adequate training

These are some of the intangibles that customers are looking for when they qualify the NAS solutions from vendors. And the surprising was Oracle just became something to be reckoned with, backed by the strong legacy of customer-centric focus of Sun and StorageTek. If this is truly happening in the US, then kudos to Oracle for maximizing the Sun-Storagetek enterprise genes to put their NAS products to be best-of-breed.

However, on the local front, it seems to me that Oracle isn’t doing much justice to the human potential they have inherited from Sun. A little bird has told me that they got rid of some good customer service people in Malaysia and Singapore just last month and more could be on the way in 2012. All this for the sake of meeting some silly key performance indices (KPIs) of being measured by tasks per day.

The Sun people that I know here in Malaysia and Singapore are gurus who has gone through the fire and thrived and there is no substitute for quality. Unfortunately, in Oracle, it’s all about numbers, whether it is sales or tasks per day.

Well, back to the survey. And of course, the final question would be, “Is the product good enough that you would buy it again?” And the results are …

Good for Oracle in the US but the results do not fully reflect what’s on the ground here in Malaysia, which is more likely dominated by NetApp, HP, EMC and IBM.