Technology Agnostic

"Don't ever use that phrase in any piece of literature."

-- A client

One of my clients, a business strategy and IT consulting firm, recently asked me to banish the phrase technology agnostic from my vocabulary, at least with respect to the current assignment. The point -- and I think it's a good one -- is that agnostic means you don't believe in anything. And this client definitely believes in technology. Nor is the client technology neutral.

My writing project for this client is in fact largely devoted to explaining why one technology might be better than another in a given set of circumstances. The correct phase is technology independent -- meaning that technology decisions are not based on business relationships with technology providers. Instead, they are based on factors like which technology best fits the application, the market, or the surrounding IT infrastructure -- whatever criteria are most relevant.

The ability to, first, identify those key criteria and, second, to translate them into actionable recommendations is why you would hire this consulting firm in the first place. Not because it's technology agnostic.

A Fast Solution

"Randy … Looks great. Thanks a lot for your help. I really appreciate it. I look forward to working with you again."

-- Director Storage Product Marketing, SeaChange International

With customers like Verizon and Comcast, my client, SeaChange International is the largest provider of play-to-air and video-on-demand technology to broadcasters and cable operators worldwide. It sells the two things these customers need most — quality of service and efficient storage. Consumers today want a big selection of content and they want flawless picture and sound.

SeaChange International’s marketing problem is that other technology providers make similar claims -- and cite all kinds of benchmarks to back them up. Of course, SeaChange has its own benchmarks. But it has something going for it that its competitors don’t -- in addition to benchmarks; it has a better technology argument. If you can simply (and fast) say how the technology works, it pretty much sells itself.

A great example is this pair of solution briefs -- one for broadcasters and one for cable operators -- on its FAST architecture. FAST stands for flash assisted storage technology, an acronym I suggested.

The need was to explain a VOD-optimized storage architecture in four to six pages. The solution was showing how two features that often work in opposition to each other — speed and reliability — now build off the same technical insight.

A lot of technology companies have the same problem as SeaChange. They’ve got genuinely smarter technology. But customers don’t give them much time to explain why it’s smarter or why that even matters. When you assign a project like this to a writer, it’s not just the writer that needs to work faster. The words do too.