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“It's a journey.  A journey for us as vendors and a journey for you as customers."  This is a quote from an IT vendor presentation given at a virtualization conference I recently attended.  The presentation was all about the "journey".  I was very impressed and equally amazed.   The journey was great - it brought me to a more reliable and completely dynamic data center.    I actually felt I was on the yellow brick road on my way to OZ!   But when direct questions were asked about getting to this destination, the audience was given vague answers about what was required and when they would get a released solution.   The message was "buy our standard, legacy stuff that we have available today, and we will be delivering some new, innovative stuff at some point in the future."

That is not going to work in today’s economic environment.  IT organizations, under sudden budget pressure, have changed how they acquire new technology.  CIOs are focused on their shops running smoothly, efficiently and reliably.  There are no longer deep pockets to buy ‘good enough’ or ‘legacy tie-over’ solutions until the real thing shows up.  Budget is, however, available for proven products that increase service levels while cutting costs and which build more agility and reliability into IT while better aligning with business goals.  The bottom line is that the ‘journey’ needs to support the business, today. Even in these tight times I’m seeing investments being made in proven products for infrastructure virtualization management, dynamic workload management, moving edge applications to cloud computing service providers and tools for power management - to name just a few.  The motivators are reduced operating expenses with improved service levels.  Companies realize that they need to be in position for when the economy rebounds, and that requires solutions that are future-ready today and leverage their existing IT investments.

The bottom-line is that solid due diligence never goes out of style or should be sacrificed for the allure of a journey. Buyers beware!