Interlude - Index of

Customers | 143
was that Oracle won’t work with NAS, but the reality was that
the programmers developing Oracle’s software used NetApp
NAS every day. I chatted recently with the CTO of VMware,
a company much younger than NetApp, and he sees the same
pattern: many software vendors publicly state that their application
doesn’t work with VMware, even though their programmers
use it all the time.
Eventually, Oracle marketing gave in and asked us to
sponsor a cost-of-ownership study against our large competitor
EMC. They told us which research firm to use and told
us to pay for the study. (When the large vendor in a potential
partnership asks the small vendor to jump, the correct answer
is, “How high, Sir!”) The study found that NetApp NAS cost
only a quarter as much to buy and operate as SAN storage
from EMC, and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Here’s how Oracle viewed the world: every customer
has a certain amount of money to spend on information technology—some
on Oracle and the rest on everything else. If
Oracle could help customers save money on “everything else,”
then hopefully they’d spend more with Oracle. Of course, it
was after the dot-com crash that saving money really became
important.
A few years ago, Oracle built a data center—one of the
largest in the world—to run Oracle applications for their customers,
and they chose NetApp NAS for all the storage. Our
journey with Oracle symbolizes our entire history with enterprise
customers. They went from not trusting us at all to using
us internally, and from there to depending on us to provide
critical services for their customers.