IT Poll: How Much Do You Consider a Vendor’s Road Map When Making a Purchasing Decision?

Last week as part of the HP ISS Tech Day I had a chance to talk to Bill Haggard, director of enterprise infrastructure for the Dallas Cowboys Football Club about why the Cowboys chose HP to power its data centers. It may not seem like a professional football team would need a data center, but consider this: in addition to powering all of the 665 point-of-sales (POS) terminals for concession stands and the 82 POS terminals for retail merchandise shops within the Dallas Cowboys Stadium, the Cowboys’ data center must support all the merchandise shops across the country. The company owns several other subsidiary businesses as well, and the data center at the Cowboys Stadium is the primary location for all the businesses’ IT infrastructure.

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Haggard says the Cowboys chose HP because the company shared its hardware roadmap and had a consistent plan for the next 10 years. Haggard and his team wanted to makes sure it wouldn’t have to rip and replace its multi-million dollar infrastructure investments a few years down the road if its vendor made some sudden changes.

I thought this was interesting, as the rate of change is accelerating and technologies evolve quickly it seems like it’s increasingly difficult to make that sort of long-term plan. Certainly, it’s a good idea – but who knows what the market for solid-state hard drives will look like five years from now? Ten years ago, HP hadn’t even started offering its first private cloud bundle.

How do you plan infrastructure in a rapidly changing technology environment, and how much does a vendor’s roadmap play into your plans?

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