I wrote a blog post on the Facebook DCIM deal that got away from the DCIM vendors.
So let's hypothetically go through a way that a company could work with Facebook on a DCIM solution. Part of what I am going to describe as a method is knowing people inside Facebook and other of the big data center operators.
First, make a choice, are you going to try and sell what you have or work with Facebook to develop a solution. Most would try to sell what they have. I would try to put a proposal on the table to work with Facebook to create a DCIM solution that works for Facebook. This is NOT a customization of your solution for Facebook. It is an opportunity to get insight on what is of real value to Facebook for a DCIM solution.
An example of the concept of insight is Slate's article on Google's Jeff Dean.
The real Jeff Dean admits he isn’t a machine-learning expert but says he’s eager to help out with his skills in building scalable, high-performance systems.
Contrary to what the Jeff Dean facts imply, Dean says simply sitting down to write the perfect program is rarely the best way to tackle a problem. Instead, his process often begins with back-of-the-envelope calculations to find the optimal trade-off between quality and speed for a given process. “In a lot of these areas, from machine translation to search quality, you’re always trying to balance what you can do computationally with each query,” he says. “Maybe you can’t afford the ideal [solution], but if we can approximate it in a certain way, you can get 98 percent of the benefit with 1 percent of the computation.”
Another choice is are you building your solution on a Microsoft stack or on open source. Most don't know that companies like Facebook have many people who have a preference which favors open source. Down this path is whether you have built on top of NoSQL. Why NoSQL as described below - simplicity, scaling and availability are easier with NoSQL and it can be a platform for big data and real-time web applications.
A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that uses looser consistency models than traditional relational databases. Motivations for this approach include simplicity of design, horizontal scaling and finer control over availability. NoSQL databases are often highly optimized key–value stores intended for simple retrieval and appending operations, with the goal being significant performance benefits in terms oflatency and throughput. NoSQL databases are finding significant and growing industry use in big data and real-time web applications. NoSQL systems are also referred to as "Not only SQL" to emphasize that they do in fact allow SQL-like query languages to be used.
When I run a Google search of "NoSQL DCIM" most of the results I see are pages with one word in an article and advertisements with the other.
By this point it is easy to stand out vs. other DCIM vendors and you can start a dialog with Facebook on what DCIM should do.
I could go on and on, but it gets more esoteric. You get the basic ideas. Once you get past the partnership the really hard part comes up to create something that Facebook wants to buy.