One of the most interesting things I’ve seen while acting as WHIPTAIL’s CEO is when startup companies claim that they’re going to put large, established companies out of business. This approach creates distractions, potentially detrimental ones that set up everyone for disappointment. Hubris is never a good thing.

AT WHIPTAIL, we’ve remained focused on what customers try to deal with and the IT problems they face. We ask ourselves who we can partner with to solve these problems and better serve the customer. And some of the time, the answer we come up with may surprise people.

The computer industry for many, many years has thrived on partnerships between companies that in certain areas of their businesses compete with each other, while in other areas partner with strategic technologies to help satisfy a need. It’s been referred to as “co-opetition,” among many other names. The storage industry is really no different. At approximately $100 billion annually, it’s a very large business with a lot of complexities and components and it has survived and thrived off such partnerships.

We prefer to work with people and companies that others may believe to be our competition rather than positioning ourselves hard against them. We can do this successfully because we’re so specialized, as well as thoughtful of others. What we do solves specific types of problems that most other companies don’t solve with their technology portfolios. This tactic has increased our opportunities and allowed us to eliminate distractions.

We regularly hear that people spend time with us because they like the way we treat them, they like the way we conduct business and, most importantly, they like that our technology does what it says it does and our company does what we say we’re going to do. We’ve made a name for ourselves by being thoughtful and ethical without really trying to poke our seemingly direct competition in the eye because that behavior doesn’t help anybody and it doesn’t serve our purpose. Our goal is to solve problems, enhance user experiences and positively affect the industry. We look forward to partnering with pretty much anybody and everybody that shares these goals.