Getting Started In Midmarket Blade Server Market

Jay Tipton, owner and vice president of business solutions at Fort Wayne, Ind.-based solution provider Technology Specialists, and a director on the board at the Computing Technology Industry Association, on getting into the midmarket blade server market:

DO THE TECH RESEARCH: Read! You should do a lot of research to see if this is something that fits into your company's philosophical view. You need to believe that this is something you think is going to be reliable and be of value to your customers.

DO CUSTOMER RESEARCH: You've got to know what your customer's business is, look at what they're doing now, take that and try to plan down the road. It's not easy to look into a crystal ball and plan for, say, three years out, but you can try to estimate what future issues might come up, such as the number of machines that might be necessary or storage issues.

TRY TO AVOID COMMON MISTAKES: A lot of companies go into this market without understanding everything involved the training, the certification and how to sell to the right clients. It's not as simple as taking a server and throwing it together. There are all kinds of little glitches that can happen, and when they do, they're looking to you to know what to do and what not to do.

GET UP TO SPEED ON THE TECHNOLOGY: Vendors can provide the necessary training and certification, and the cost is minimal. VARs need to have key knowledge around technology such as the blade-interconnect, storage access, etc. They should be certified as far as presales technical training and post-sales deployment.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF VENDOR PROGRAMS: You can make decent margins if you know what you're doing. We get a lot of back-end rebates. The funds are out there—you just have to pick a good partner. If you don't pick a vendor who will spend time working with you, if you don't fully understand what you're doing, you're going to spend a lot of time, energy and money to correct mistakes. If you end up having to reconfigure the technology, it's going to cost a lot in the back end.