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One of the things that's probably one the hardest thing for a customer to get past when
they're adopting, especially PureApplication System, is organizational inertia of the way
that they do things now and realizing that you can let go of some of the old processes
and some of the old ways of doing things because you have been freed from these by the high
levels of automation that's available in PureApplication System.
One simple instance of this is, a lot of our customers have existing processes in which
they build up their own stacks of software, starting with their own OS builds and then
they install the middleware on top of that and then they many install any special configuration
of software on top of that. We have customers that do this and we had one customer actually
talk about this this week and how it used to take them six months to get to the point
of updating the new version of WebSphere. And that's six months after they received
it from IBM before they could begin releasing it into their own internal customers.
Now, IBM themselves releases this as a coherent unit. That is the notion of a pattern in PureApplication
System is, it contains the operating system, it contains the middleware, and it contains
script packages that allow you to do your own configuration on it, all coming in one
piece so that you don't have to spend the time to build this up. You can just add any
special customizations you may need to, for instance, make sure that the operating system
contains some specific security patches that may be unique to your environment, or maybe
updates that have happened since the pattern was released less than a couple of months
ago.
And getting people to realize that they need to move from a mode of being able to build
things up from scratch to a mode of being able to start with something that's already
ninety percent of the way there and add just the additional ten percent is a major change
to processes, because they have to give up the ownership of some assets, and change from
a sort of active mode of owning something to more of a consultative mode of being able
to advise on something, or being able to make changes to something, and that's a big change
for a lot of our customers to do especially in the operations arena.