Over a weekend of electrical storms which at one stage left the two of us in the dark and at least one of us without connectivity back into EMC at any one time I and one of our Microsoft brains worked on an early version of RecoverPoint to get it to do something (Which back then was) brand spanking new with MS: Exchange.
It was so new the code only existed as pre-GA code which was going through QA and there wasn't any real documentation. Now timings in sales engagements can be weird, let me explain.
"We'll support feature Z in the next release. That's scheduled for late next quarter"
"Great. We wouldn't be deploying until well after that anyway. I'm interested in this but I couldn't sign off on anything until I've see that feature work, and we'd like to get this done now while we have the money.."
And before you know it you have a sales person asking you to build a time machine so you can take them to the future to show their customer something due late next quarter, because the customer is interested in buying in the middle of this quarter.
I hammered on the inbox of the group's VP, rattled staff in two of his software divisions and took conf calls at all hours from people on the east and west coasts of the US as well as in Israel to get information which was only in the process of being committed to paper.
From Thursday on it was non-stop work as we had a SAN, some switches, some distance simulators, some servers and some RecoverPoint appliances. Nothing connected to any of them and not a piece of software installed anywhere besides on the array controllers.
The Monday morning after the stormy weekend before when the customer was due to arrive to see this Proof of Concept work it was golden. Our Microsoft brain went in and away they went into Exchange land. The POC ended and I find out that everything went off without a hitch. "Brilliant.." I thought to myself "..all we need is the sales person to close and it was time well spent."
That didn't happen.
I found out two weeks later that we lost the deal to NetApp sight unseen because they gave ReplicatorX (or whatever they were calling the Topio stuff at the time) away for free. It was a wall to wall NetApp account and RecoverPoint would have opened the door for EMC, free was a price the customer couldn't argue with and neither could EMC Sales. No contest.
I was incandescent.
It's bad enough that my voice expands to fill the available space as it is but when I'm that angry I can be heard on the floors above and below where I'm standing. It's like Wagner but with Irish accents and a lot of swearing.
We had the better product, it had the application level integration Topio didn't (And never would) but the competitor denied us the deal on that occasion.
Bravo!
I don't do free, that was never an option as I'm in the business of getting paid. Instead I made sure that situation never happened again if I was involved.
The moment Topio came up in conversation by the time I was done the NetApp team were re-positioning SnapMirror. They'd start talking about one, I get in a room with the customer for 45 minutes, then they'd start talking about the other.
Well, I have that POC customer's name written down somewhere and now that Replicator/SnapMirror for whatchamaface is dead if they're not already a RecoverPoint customer I'm going to have to make that happen.
This isn't over, it's just attempt number two. Wait until they see what we can do with SQL Server stretch clusters via RecoverPoint/Cluster Enabler.