As one of the big boys (that used to be [I]really [/I]small at one point), I get exactly what you mean.

More frequently, a lot of what I see is the fear that a small vendor will not stay in business, or may get acquired for certain aspects of the technology and then discarded, or acquired simply to be eliminated as competition.

There’s also the fact that small single-product companies rarely survive a bad engineering event (say, a latent bug that causes corruption at the controller level).

Typically, the smaller vendors can innovate well but it’s also a very focused innovation – witness compellent’s auto-tiering, or your own ISE technology.

A complete storage solution quickly expands to several other realms, and those realms demand engineering time typically well beyond the resources of smaller companies.

It’s all a very delicate balancing act, regardless of company size.

Take support for instance – initially a smaller company will have fewer support people, then, as it gets bigger, it needs to hire more support personnel WELL BEFORE there’s need for them – otherwise there will be the risk of insufficient support resources, which leads to customer dissatisfaction, which leads to lost sales, which can lead to the demise of the company.

And, finally, there’s the undisputable fact that today’s small vendor that doesn’t “stifle innovation”, will indeed have to be more controlled and careful with the rate of changes as they get bigger. You see, you start with a blank sheet of paper once, and you better make the foundation flexible yet solid, in order to not stifle innovation in the future.

So, the message I think really is:

If you think that a small vendor is viable and has a certain technology that nobody else does that is [I]crucial to your business[/I], absolutely look at them, with the understanding that they may or may not be able to develop much beyond that certain niche technology.

Maybe this will prove useful:

http://bit.ly/akF3J9

Thx

D