Recently a friend called my attention to Truth in Analysis: Is UCS Really a Money Saver? by Dan Busby. I'm sorry that I didn't find this sooner. It is clear that readers need to closely examine customer case studies as they would any other marketing piece offered by a supplier.
Dan analyzed the customer profile and came to a different conclusion - that the cost reduction came from moving from physical systems to virtual servers running on fewer, but faster systems. He identified the primary reduction in costs came from reducing the cost of support rather than anything Cisco had done.
He went so far as to suggest that this really should have been used to demonstrate savings that could be achieved through the use of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtual machine software.
- Is this case study relevant to them or can they simply ignore it as interesting, but not useful?
- Are the real causes discussed or is the sponsor of the profile taking credit for what others have done?