Place Your Bets

Kevin Pierce

Place Your Bets

I spent a few days recently in Las Vegas, primarily to attend an industry conference, but I also took a few moments to partake in one of Vegas’ main attractions.

 

Guaranteed Success -  Sign me up!

I’m guessing many reading this blog have played roulette at some point, but for those who have not, it’s a fairly simple game.  Similar to other games of chance, one is able to place bets on colors (red or black) or numbers in the hope that your number, color, etc. will be realized and you will get a payout.  As you can probably guess, in the world of “chance” one has greater probability for success by placing multiple bets.  If you place chips on red, black and all numbers, you are guaranteed to win.  Sounds great, huh?  Guaranteed success – sign me up!  The only problem is that placing chips on all options cost more money than the realized payout when you win.  You will always be a winner, but you will lose all your money in the process.  Not a viable definition of “winning” for most people!

 

Minimize Hope and Chance.

This same principle applies to the world of IT.  When you provision your own infrastructure and applications, the goal is “guaranteed success” via 100% availability and a system that always performs as required.  Investments are made in redundancy, separate Internet backbones, disaster recovery, etc. to minimize “hope and chance” and increase probability of success.  There is always a point of diminishing returns on further investment, but you are in control of your bets.

 

How does this principle work when you work with a service provider?

You essentially transition the responsibility of your infrastructure and applications, or a portion of it, to a service provider.  Your service provider now makes investments to maximize the probability of success for you and all its customers.  All is well as long as the service provider executes and the solution is available and performs as required.  What if it doesn’t?  What if the service has frequent outages or does not meet expectations?  In an ideal world, you could simply switch to another provider and realize better service levels.  That sounds great, but there is generally a separate, non-technical element that hinders switching – your contract with the service provider.

 

More Bets, Higher Success, No Additional Cost.

Wouldn’t it be perfect if you could have access to multiple service providers and the ability to switch if a provider is not meeting requirements – all without added expense or contract limitations?  In essence, you get to place bets on all numbers, and your payout is always greater than the sum of bets -   Guaranteed success! 

I don’t want to sound like a commercial, but I think our product ANX Velocity^TM does just that.  The Multi-VAN capability that comes with ANX Velocity^TM  is delivering choice to ANX EDI customers today. 

Are you one of our customers who use ANX Velocity?  Are you looking into this kind of solution? We’d love to hear about both your experience with the products or things you are considering when choosing a service provider.