Hard and Soft Where?

I had an interesting day in New York City with Axcient, HP, and others at their roadshow. You can follow the link here to see what was going on. I highly recommend you go to one of their roadshows if the opportunity presents itself. 

One of the things I found most interesting was a thought that hit me while Meaghan Kelly with HP was speaking. Meaghan is the VP of Channel Development within the Solution Partner Organization (SPO) and yes, I did have to look that up.

The thought I had was, all hardware needs software and all software needs hardware, anyware, um… anywhere. I know, pass me the Nobel Prize now. So while it isn’t earth shattering, we rarely hear this message articulated by any vendor.  

Software vendors talk software and where you can run it, on premise, or cloud. Whether it was created as SaaS software, or Sassifyed as Justin Moore the CEO of Axcient stated in his keynote.  Hardware vendors talk speed, power, energy consumption, and other specs. Only one vendor really does both hardware and software and talks about the software and hardware as one thing, and that vendor is Apple. This is why I think Apple has done well in the consumer market. Apple can say, “here it is, buy it”, really works there in the consumer market.

Businesses and home users are going to the cloud. That is a given, like global warming. Now we can argue the reasons for both things, but while we are arguing, they are still happening. Hardware is needed to run the software anywhere. On their site, or in the cloud, or in Axcient’s case, both.

It was refreshing to hear two vendors articulate the symbiotic relationship they have and how important it is to their success.