Xsigo vs. Cisco: A scandalous disclosure

Last week, I touched on the challenges in getting the straight story from storage resellers. In the post, I talked about the internal competitive analysis papers that storage vendors use to teach their sales teams to position their products against the competition. These competitive analysis papers are usually distributed within the company, but as a potential customer, you would generally never see one.

No sooner than that entry posted, I received an email blast from Jon Toor, marketing VP for Xsigo Systems, publicizing a blog entry in which Xsigo dissected a Cisco-authored analysis of Xsigo’s business and product line.

If you haven’t seen a competitive analysis before, here’s your chance. As I mentioned last week, they’re generally filled with a bunch of selected facts mixed up with some misleading and, in certain cases, false statements. This is important to know. Your salesperson uses a playbook like that.

In this scenario, you not only get to see Cisco’s take on Xsigo’s corporate stability and a critique of Xsigo’s line of converged networking equipment, but you get a view of Xsigo’s point-by-point reaction. This is a fun-to-watch, David-vs.-Goliath battle. The mere fact that Cisco authored this hit piece is a huge validation for a relatively young company like Xsigo.

Regardless, this is the first time I’ve seen a clearly marked internal corporate document picked apart by a competitor in such a public forum. Certainly it’s not unusual to see NDAs broken — that happens all the time. But the parallels to the WikiLeaks debacle are striking. In fact, Xsigo’s blog entry opens by saying, “In this era of WikiLeaks, it should be no surprise that information gets out eventually.” Truer words have never been spoken.

Is Xsigo breaking the law? I’m not a lawyer, but NDAs usually apply only to the people who signed them. If I receive something under NDA and give it to someone who isn’t covered, I could be held accountable in civil court. But the person I gave it to is under no such restriction. That’s why you see Bradley Manning cooling his jets in a military prison in Quantico and Julian Assange is gallivanting around Europe a free man (other tawdry legal issues notwithstanding).

Xsigo has upset a tradition of mutual restraint. Large IT vendors see each other’s dirty laundry all the time. Through various means, they know exactly how the competition is attacking them — and use that information to tune their marketing messages.

Picking it apart publicly throws down the gauntlet in a way I haven’t witnessed before. Just as nations play nice in the open and bring out the long knives behind closed doors, vendors keep the public at large from hearing all the mean and partially untrue things they say about each other. After all, a tit-for-tat on the world stage is going to tarnish both parties. But as more startups with good ideas and nothing to lose emerge, and as the culture at large seems more and more convinced that privacy and secrecy are archaic concepts, this sort of thing may become much more commonplace.

I wouldn’t mind seeing more vendor slapfights. It’s a great way to expose misconceptions. More important, it would discourage companies from including as much FUD in internal documents, which should benefit everyone.

So go grab some popcorn and see what happens. Make sure you check out Xsigo’s post of Cisco’s document soon, though — in case one of Goliath’s lawyers convinces David it would be in his own best interest to put away that slingshot.

This article, “Xsigo vs. Cisco: A scandalous disclosure,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.