Truth Denied?

A colleague forwarded me this link from Lustratus Research. Incredibly, the analyst makes the following claim:

"I say “appliances” in inverted commas because Intel’s product is wonderfully described as a software “appliance”. Surely the award for the most spin in a product category goes to Intel."


I was a bit taken aback by this. I hope the analyst was being provocative on purpose. I wrote the following reply (which was subsequently deleted), as a clarification:

"Hello There – It seems that this is a very provocative report, especially with respect to the statements made regarding the Intel product.
First, off I have to say that I am from Intel, so as you must, please take my comment with a grain of salt.

I hope, however, that the analyst does not confuse and equivocate a nuanced product available in multiple form factors for different usage models with “marketing spin.” The facts speak differently in this case.

In fact, the Intel(R) SOA Expressway product (like some of its competitors) is available in three form factors (hardware, software and virtual image) – each of which can be properly called an appliance.

“Appliance” here does not necessarily reflect a strict category of hardware only, but instead set of management and monitoring capabilities such as a real-time dashboard, self-healing capabilities, alarms, alerts, management clustering, and high availability with a familiar web-based interface and easy management.

It is these capabilities that primarily characterize a software appliance. In this case we can think of a hardware appliance and then subtract out the physical security features. It is only natural that we can take this same form factor and package it for a virtual machine and we will arrive a similar form factor designed for a virtual private cloud. Incidentally, this is something especially difficult for a product only available as a pure hardware appliance.

Finally, because the Intel product relies primarily on a software layer that performs machine language processing of XML, the addition of hardware adds only physical security prowess, and is not a necessary form factor for a high performance deployment. All in all, the product is truly available in all three form factors – no spin required. Perhaps some of these facts can “spin” the customer closer to the truth about this particular product.

Blake Dournaee"


Is truth denied? I just wanted to make sure that our customers know that our appliance form factors (software, hardware and vm) are not elements of spin!

Blake

Posted by Blake Dournaee on 9:11 AM

1 comments:

digital certificate said...

If a person write a blog and you say against his lines even if that is bare truth then also the blogger will not approve your comment that means that he doesn't want to accept the truth you are right that the truth is denied which happened in your case too

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About Me

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I have been working in the XML/SOA and security space for about 10 years. I currently work at Intel Corporation in their software group. I wrote the first book on XML Security and am a co-author of SOA Demystified from Intel Press. My interests are an eclectic mix of computing, security, business, technology and philosophy