What’s old is new again. Tariffs are in the news and in the public eye again, especially as they threaten to destabilize international trade.
Tariffs have long been viewed as a key part of international trade – influencing the flow of trade by lowering or raising the price of targeted goods to create what amounts to an artificial competitive advantage. They address the country’s and the competitors’ economic health in terms of maximizing or minimizing revenue flow rather than in terms of the ability to generate and maintain a competitive advantage.
The IT industry has its own form of tariffs which tend to stifle innovation and provide some companies with an artificial competitive advantage. Consider platform virtualization software (which allows a single host computer to create and run one or more virtual servers). Many organizations are reaping the benefits that greater agility and virtual machine density can provide. But there’s a flip side to this record – and the song certainly isn’t the same. Certain virtualization software vendors attach a fee for use on each socket in a physical server and/or on the amount of memory allocated per virtual machine. Some industry experts consider these software licensing fees and restrictions to be a form of tariff or tax. These taxes can have the effect of making an organization so dependent on a vendor (locked-in) for product and services that the customer cannot move to another vendor without substantial switching costs.
We compete on the basis of attributes (and there are many) that truly distinguish us in our customers’ eyes. And not on artificial barriers created by a form of tariff.
We’ve built an autonomous, fully redundant, highly available virtual server platform that can survive most any single hardware failure without interruption. It’s the evolution of high availability (we call it Intelligent Availability®) and it closes all the gaps in traditional systems to ensure that your infrastructure is configured for optimal performance in mission critical IT environments. We call our platform the Anvil! and it’s totally open. There’s no software licensing fees or other restrictions. Anyone can download, install, run or even audit the source code. Our software is tightly integrated with a fully redundant hardware architecture which is also open. We’ve validated our software against many brands of COTS hardware, so the choice is wide open.
We’ve built up our reputation by using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing availability solutions.
As a connective hub in a network of enterprises, partners, and communities, open source developers help create relevant, innovative technologies that drive growth and prepare customers for the future of IT.
There’s a cost to locking yourself into a vendor and paying a tariff like cost. You can’t always walk away from the price you pay. But it can pay to be open to alternatives.