Selling Business Continuity, One VAR's Approach

For solution provider Mike Semel, the road to the stage at Ingram Micro's VentureTech Network Invitational in Nashville, Tenn., this week began at a VTN conference four years ago in Baltimore.

After watching a fellow VTN member give a presentation on HIPAA, Semel decided that he would pursue certification on HIPAA compliance. And once his company began marketing his new skills, he was offered a job as CIO of a local hospital.

Semel, vice president of business continuity and compliances services at Las Vegas-based Connecting Point Technology Center, turned down the CIO job, but he did wind up turning the offer into a multiyear managed-services engagement. The deal brought Connecting Point a lot of project revenue and recurring revenue -- and helped the hospital cut its IT budget by 32 percent.

"During the time I was there, I reduced their downtime to zero," Semel told an audience of solution providers at this week's VTN event, during a presentation on selling business continuity solutions.

Last year, Connecting Point created a business continuity offering for small and midsize businesses, Semel said. The solution employs remote data centers in two locations to back up customer data in the event of a disaster.

"Business continuity is not disaster recovery," Semel noted. "Disaster recovery is your ability to restore the business to pre-disaster levels. Business continuity is what you're doing in the meantime."

For such situations as a natural disaster or a flu pandemic, in which workers may not be able to travel to their offices, businesses still need to operate, which creates opportunities for VARs to pitch and sell remote access solutions, according to Semel.

"Remote access is a huge opportunity for all of us to be selling to businesses," he said.

Another business-continuity opportunity for VARs is redundant Internet service, in which a customer has two providers load-balanced through a firewall, Semel added.

"You need to be able to recognize risks when you're in this business," and then follow up with solutions like proactive maintenance, managed services, remote monitoring and patching, and off-site backup, he said.