Hi Daud,

Thank you for bringing this question to our community. I am sure you will read the other response posted earlier, those are very valuable points.

The essence is that we need to explain to our customers that some competitors are promising that they can do same like DataMiner, and doing that in reality is a big difference, especially for software platform like “DataMiner”

• In general, we know there are some companies great in mimicking and mirroring our pitches and value proposition, but reality is that their solution is very far from what DataMiner effectively offers. Some of those companies have just few customer reference and that too for just for the specific network segment, not like DataMiner provides Guaranteed integration end to end across any technology or domain, across any vendor or protocol.

• We have successful customer references across 125+ countries for more than 1000s of happy customers who are extending DataMiner year on year.

• We have around 7000 different integrations from products and systems of close to 700 OEMs.

• The company behind DataMiner – “Skyline Communications” (more than 35 years old) is fully independent & focused towards innovating the DataMiner platform for more than 20 years now. The DataMiner platform has been recognized & awarded several times in the industry as can be seen on https://skyline.be/skyline/awards

• Skyline communications have 350+ DataMiner heroes (and growing year on year); the whole Skyline crew are focused towards ONE PLATFORM “DataMiner” with common mission & vision.  You will rarely find any company in the industry who are having with 350+ people working for monitoring and orchestration software.

• DataMiner is the investment not only for today but also for tomorrow. It’s not like that the customer can monitor 10-15 devices today using some cheap tools, and its done, later, they keeps piling up more and more smaller systems year on year, the drawback of same is explained in Ben’s post with a slide about TCO (total cost of ownership). Whatever the investment customer makes on specific connector, he can extend the same connector for other similar devices across today or tomorrow.

• The connectors are not limiting to  control or juts monitoring KPIs, or to specific number of ports. Moreover, these are standard open XML files, the end users of DataMiner can also develop their own connectors using Skyline’s DIS platform (it’s a bold step our company has taken to allow our customer to make their own connectors – one user seat is free for each DataMiner customer).

In any case, if your customer asks those other companies to set up a POC, high chances that they won’t able to show it completely, whereas DataMiner demo can accessed live here https://skyline.be/learn/demo

Believe me, some of those companies who commit and over promise that they will do all what DataMiner does, the will need to develop everything from scratch, and later they realize the cost of all those factors which Ben mentioned here in this response thread.

They sell cheap to try to get into the market. The cost of sustainable long-term software development is high, very high, a lot higher than what most of the people think, it is the biggest mistake that start-ups make, it is the number one reason why again and again companies disappear.  Later they realize that, some of those companies cannot fund the development, they disappear again and the customer is stuck with a legacy system. We have several DataMiner users that went through this pain and before they started happily with DataMiner.