I don’t know about you but to me it’s kind of odd. It’s not something I would expect to be such a regular occurrence. Maybe it’s just the region, or maybe it’s broader.
I’m talking about vendor sales reps and engineers jumping from one company directly to the competition. I mean just from my own experience, I know people who have
- Moved from Extreme networks to Juniper
- Moved from Foundry networks to Extreme
- Moved from HP networking to Extreme
- Moved from Foundry networks to A10 networks
- Moved from F5 networks to A10 networks
- Moved from EMC to 3PAR
- Moved from NetApp to 3PAR
- Moved from Equallogic to 3PAR
- And recently saw someone I hadn’t seen in more than a year and a half moved from Hitachi to Xiotech
Maybe it’s just the line of work, but to me at least it seems like an amazing amount of cross pollination to the point where it’s hard to tell on occasion what the person really believes, I mean one minute they are pitching product X from you and bashing product Y then the next their doing the opposite.
Then there are other less direct migrations of course going from a manufacturer to a VAR or a distributor, but I’ve been more fascinated by those making the leap from one manufacturer to another.
I suppose it’s just a job at the end of the day.
Well I think what is says about the storage people that you mentioned is that people from all over the industry can see who has the strongest product and want to be part of that success.
Comment by StorageGuy — June 18, 2010 @ 10:57 am
Well…. realistically you should follow the first cardinal rule of dealing with sales people: 1. If their lips are moving their lying.
While i’ve found some sales people who do really believe what their selling is the greatest thing from sliced bread, you can also find that the technology their most excited to sell is the one that fills their pocket the best.
Sales Engineers initially aren’t as similar to sales people in that the first job they have is normally because they love the product their selling… but then they to get compensation tied to specific products and they transition into sales folks.
So while I used to think that vendors hopping all over the place was weird… I’ve come to not be so surprised by it, and just do my own analysis of a product before blindly drinking the vendor koolaid.
Comment by Justin Brodley — June 22, 2010 @ 2:20 pm