What do you think of Faction?
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At the end of all of that.... most of that stuff is probably ad copy from random web designers (we hope) but the bottom line is, it's fluff and pointless and I see no reason to consider engaging with them further. They don't seem to have anything to offer. Everything is very ambiguous at best. There is no solid product offering, no pricing, no reason to suspect that they even offer something we would want.
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I don't like the look of the website. Space is poorly used and badly designed. Navigation frame just looks weird like it's some 1990's Front Page website.
I didn't look a ton at the content because the design is bad, but what I saw was very little actual information and all marketing terms.
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Seeing pricing on the main page or only one click away is a near requirement for me. If you're not willing to show me your price, I'm probably not willing to contact you.
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I kind of understand that it is probably the kind of service where pricing is not really an option, but they need a whole lot more if the website is going to be a tool to do sales in any way.
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what do you mean, not an option?
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@Dashrender said:
what do you mean, not an option?
Not exactly not an option but complex and not the kind of thing that you could provide in a price list. Like just so many options and mostly including support and such that you can't just look up how much something will cost.
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I don't think that the site looks "bad" per se, but I agree that now that I have looked at it I know nothing more than before I had never heard of them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
what do you mean, not an option?
Not exactly not an option but complex and not the kind of thing that you could provide in a price list. Like just so many options and mostly including support and such that you can't just look up how much something will cost.
Sigh.. yeah, I sorta understand that... but give me a bone.. give me something so I at least have a starting point. Even if that starting point is completely wrong. The idea that I must make contact inorder to anything is highly undesirable and allows them to play pricing games.
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I agree, with zero information there is no incentive for me to continue at all. No idea if they are cheap, useful, have important features, etc. I literally know nothing at this point.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Carefully worded.... there is no guarantee of uptime or performance, only a guarantee of "100% SLA". That is, quite literally, gibberish. It has no meaning whatsoever.
This is so funny. I frequently read contracts with garbage like this for new clients to help get them on track. Just yesterday I had a client send me their Rackspace contract. They're paying 550/mo for what they thought was a dedicated server, but what they got was "Dedicated Account Management and Business Development Team". So basically they've been paying 550/mo for a VPS running Windows Server 2008 to host Quickbooks for two people. sigh.
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@drewlander marketing preys on that a lot. For some reason, many people (IT seems specifically subject to this) will read in a "good intent" into every bit of marketing, sales, contracts, etc. Even if the contract suggests nothing of the sort people feel like "they would definitely want to do X or Y" and so imagine that the contract says that. In this case they imagine that "uptime" is sensible and desirous so they just assume it is being guaranteed.
It is an incredibly unhealthy reaction. It's like the "fool yourself on the other person's behalf" behaviour. The vendor is not the con man here, they've suggested nothing like uptime at all. They've not hinted at it, implied it... nothing. People reading it want uptime, don't want to ask and just "fill in the blank" with whatever they want and then act shocked when it is pointed out that nothing of the sort was said.
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I am disappointed that they are not more red.
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Hi All.
Wow! Lots of dialog here, I'll do my best to address. First, I need you guys to keep in mind that I am in fact a sales guy. More specifically, I've always worked specifically with the channel and that continues today. I'll also call out that as a sales person, I am not a marketing person. From my perspective...the goal of the website, and marketing in general, is to deliver to the sales organization people that are looking to buy a product or service that we can deliver. Clearly to do that we also need to articulate people clearly what we do and how we can help folks. A lot of the things on the website are are 100% objective and we all have our own opinions. What I will say about the website is that it is not optimized to deliver leads to the sales group. We may see you coming to the website, and we may see you come back...but we don't really know who you are and we don't have many ways for you to raise your hand ask us to engage with you. In time I hope this changes.
So now you guys know that I'm in sales and more specially hand in hand with the channel. With that said, our ideal customer profile is not an end user but rather a managed service or SaaS provider. Faction delivers enterprise class Infrastructure as a service purpose built for service providers , we have cloud nodes world wide. We compete with AWS, Rackspace, etc. This is not an SMB play but rather mid-market & enterprise. The 100% uptime guarantee means is that if you go down...we put our money where our mouth is. We aren't perfect, and we don't guarantee perfection. What we do guarantee is that if we have an issue and a customer's environment is not available - we don't expect you to pay for that. I think that level of accountability is refreshing.
Essentially what we deliver to the customer is an on premise data center in cloud. More times than not, this includes a dedicated vCenter with API access giving the customer ability to deploy your own tools such as Veeam, Unitrends, Unidesk, Zerto, etc. Pretty significant differentiators depending on who we are talking about. Each Faction cloud instance begins with the following:
25GB RAM
5 Ghz CPU
1 TB of storage
1000 IOPs
10 Mbps of internetFrom this point, resources can be added with granularity as needed to meet the needs of the customer.
I hope this helps. I've shared this post with my engineer as well and he will be sending over some bullet points on your technical concerns. I'll get that inserted as soon as possible. Appreciate everyone taking a few moments from your day to look at the site and give feedback.Cheers,
Linc -
Thanks for the additional info. Looking forward to learning more about the service.
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@scottalanmiller we really can't ignore the growth of UCS. Its very impressive in short time, if only from a sales perspective. The UCS portion of our business is very small. I see it more as a channel play allowing guys like me to have a better story when engaging a large Cisco reseller.
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@scottalanmiller if you really want to geek out on Layer 2 take a look at this: http://www.google.com/patents/US20130188512?dq=20130188512A1+-+Multi-tenant+Datacenter+with+Layer+2+Cloud+Interconnection&hl=en&sa=X&ei=reUbUsOmKarqiwK10oHgBg&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA
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In practical terms, how is L2 site to site connectivity achieved? Are you installing a gateway VM or a hardware device at the client site, for example?
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@Lincoln said:
Essentially what we deliver to the customer is an on premise data center in cloud.
You lost me there. Isn't "on-premise" the opposite of "cloud"? Please explain?
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@art_of_shred said:
You lost me there. Isn't "on-premise" the opposite of "cloud"? Please explain?
Cloud does not imply public or private, hosted or on premises. Cloud is simply a computing architecture that can be closed, shared, local or remote or hyrbids of any of those approaches.
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Lots of companies are running cloud internally today. I've even heard that most cloud deployments are on site. VMware vCloud and OpenStack seem to be the most common.
