The days of appliances for software distribution are numbered. I have held suspicions about the long-term viability of appliances, which for the uninitiated are servers shipped to customers with software suites pre-installed. As servers became commodities and thus a minor part of the total cost of deploying a solution, many bright vendors realized that they could make customers happier (less deployment work) and reduce tech support expense (fewer customer deployment mistakes) by bundling everything on a box that could be racked, powered-up and added to the local network.  This also generated a great deal of customer good will through rapid success with the product, which in turn generated good buzz, more recognition, more sales, etc. Appliances however predated mass acceptance of virtualization and clouds, which have removed much of the value add of appliances. Even small organization rack all new servers with virtualization installed. The reasons for doing so are … Continue reading →