Unitrends Mission
What is Unitrends mission?
Our mission is to increase uptime and confidence in a world in which IT professionals must do more with less
In my last blog post I spoke about Unitrends’ vision: a world in which IT infrastructure is as reliable as the sunrise. Our mission is what we want to do about leading an industry in achieving our vision. A vision and mission express a point of view about the world as it is, as it could be, and what the purpose of a company is in changing the world. It’s how we make our “small dent in the universe.”
Let’s start at the heart of whom we serve: the IT professional. I have a bunch of friends who are IT professionals – from 25-year-old front-line workers to 60-year-old front-line workers and executives. These folks work in small and large business and have titles like network administrator, system administrator, virtualization administrator, IT manager, and even CFO, COO, and CEO. I’ve got friends who are running MSPs (Managed Service Providers) and friends who are running Global 1000 IT shops. As I talk to them about the “state of IT”, it’s clear that being an IT professional is a tough and demanding job that gets tougher all the time. I was out to dinner the other night with an old friend and IT professional who had a really tough day – and he brought up the old Office Space quote:
“Peter Gibbons: So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.
Dr. Swanson: What about today? Is today the worst day of your life?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Dr. Swanson: Wow, that’s messed up. ”[Office Space, 1999]
Each day of an IT professional’s life they are responsible for doing more with less. Protecting more “stuff” – and quite often the very nature of stuff changes. One day it’s an old Novell or AIX or iSeries physical server, the next day it’s Windows Server of VMware vSphere, and the day after that it’s trying to understand the impact of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Office 365, software defined storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, and containers. All the while budgets stay flat or shrink, it’s hard to hire IT people even when there is budget, and the expectation is that once an IT vendor sells some software or service that there’s no integration, monitoring, or management ever needed again.
One of the fundamental problems in IT comes from an “us and them” mentality between vendors of IT products and services and the IT professionals consuming those services. As barriers to entry have come down for IT vendors, there’s increasingly a mentality that you can together some software, slap it on Windows with an installer, and force the IT professional to shoulder the burden of integration. Another fundamental problem for IT professionals who must roll up their sleeves and do the real work of IT on a daily basis is that their management, seduced by marketing and advertising, falls prey to the concept of panaceas. These two forces come together in a “win/lose” relationship between IT vendors and IT professionals in which the IT vendors attempt to maximize profit through lowering their responsibility for what they sell while claiming to solve more problems than they actually do.
Our mission at Unitrends is to make every single day better than the day before it for IT professionals life who use our backup and continuity solutions. So that today is the best day of their life. Today they have more uptime than they’ve ever had, they have more free time than they’ve ever had, and they have more confidence than they’ve ever had.
This is the sole reason that we exist.
As always, would love to hear your questions and comments.
