Secant Keeps Networks Healthy

Your network is like your body. At least that's what Chuck Warner, executive vice president and owner of Secant Technologies, tells his potential customers. If you're going to keep it healthy, he says, every once in a while it needs a checkup. And if it's not in optimal health, you won't be able to prosper until it's back in shape.

To help diagnose what's ailing customers' networks while generating healthy revenue for itself, the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based solution provider began selling network physicals, officially called Technology Assessment Profiles (TAPs).

In Secant's early days—when hardware margins alone were enough to make a reseller profitable—the company's engineers were spending hours doing presales work to create projects, and sometimes losing out on bids and precious man-hours that could have been spent profitably. But as margins fell, the company needed to find a way to turn those lost hours into dollars.

"Us and the competition, everybody was in the same boat. We were all killing each other and evolving at the same time. We started to think we really should charge for presales engineering. What kind of story do we wrap around that?" Warner said.

"There are different technology people and heads of technology departments within companies that come and go and have relationships with different vendors, different companies, and have different philosophies ... the networks grow and grow and grow and frequently are not well-documented," Warner said.

"It's sort of like being treated by different doctors with different backgrounds and different approaches to wellness. Frankly, our experience has been that the patient really gets messed up. They have disparate networks, and they don't function very well and they don't know why," he said.

That's where Secant and its engineers come in to take stock of the customer's IT environment from desktops, laptops, servers and cell phones to cables, ISPs and service contracts. After evaluating the situation, they make recommendations on how a company can improve its IT infrastructure.

Depending on the size and needs of the customer, Secant usually charges between $1,000 and $7,500 for a physical. Recently, the company signed its biggest assessment deal to date for $18,000. And that usually turns into more. "That $18,000 TAP could result in half a million dollars' worth of project work—easily," Warner said.

One customer, a Kalamazoo-based supplier of sanitary paper products with five locations throughout Michigan, came to Secant for a TAP. The company was founded 20 years ago, and as technology came on the scene, it had a part-time IT staff in the form of a college student building servers and making any necessary repairs. Cabling had been strung by the company's maintenance team.

"I looked up in a ceiling tile and a little router fell out," Warner said. "I said, 'You need somebody to document your network. How many computers do you have? Where are they? Let's get a map. What if you have a disaster? Where is your data?' To me, that's like Health 101. What is your stuff? Where is it? How much of it have you got?"

The TAP cost the customer $5,000, but after doing the evaluation, Secant generated $250,000 worth of project work with the customer, and Warner estimates that 90 percent of the TAPs Secant performs wind up bringing in more business. Software licenses are sometimes expired or companies are running older applications that aren't optimizing their businesses. Sometimes new cabling and a wireless network are in order or warranties have expired or hardware is past its prime.

"We make some money on doing TAPs, and it's a profitable engagement for us if that's all that we do, but the real gold that we're mining is the business that we earn the right to do," Warner said.

Engagements don't end with project work, and Secant is working to get more of its customers involved in maintenance and managed services.

"The follow-up to all of that is, 'Now that we've given you a physical and built your network, how do we provide you with preventive maintenance, ongoing care and feeding?' That, of course, is the whole managed services piece. We follow in right at the end of a project or a series of projects for a way they can take care of their network by implementing managed services," Warner said.

As a result of its innovative approach, Secant estimates its Cisco business will grow about 300 percent this year as it has already matched last year's numbers in the first two quarters of its fiscal year.

The key to Secant's continued growth, even during lean years in the Michigan market, is its focus on sustainability.

"More important than whether we grow our top-line numbers is, 'Have we built a sustainable model?' " Warner said. "There are a lot of resellers trying to make a living with far too much importance being put on product. We're way beyond that."