CRNtech Live: Disasters And Indestructible Laptops

Vendors, solution providers and CRN editors gathered to kick the tires of new products and chat about evolving business areas, like the growing market for disaster recovery and business continuity services.

CRNtech Live, held Wednesday in Manhattan, featured an array of presentations from vendors highlighting channel-friendly wares.

Emphasizing the "continuity" angle is key to sales, Prevalent Networks Director Brian Okun said during a panel discussion. Statistics show that almost half of businesses that experience a disaster and have no advance plans in place don't recover from the calamity and fold -- but those dire numbers still don't prompt many potential customers into action. What works is touting the benefits of broad planning for preventing business interruptions.

"Most solution providers are not talking about disaster recovery in and of itself, we're talking about business continuity in the event of a problem, no matter what causes that problem," Okun said.

He told the story of one of his company's clients, an unnamed "professional football team in Miami," that had excellent plans drawn up for dealing with a hurricane. But if a truck drove through the front door of their operations center and destroyed equipment, the company had no recovery road map.

Even businesses with low risk profiles for natural disasters or calamities like terrorist attacks face a growing threat from their own IT infrastructure, CRN Test Center Director Frank Ohlhorst pointed out.

"Virus and worms and such -- those are disasters that are waiting at every corner to strike at a business," Ohlhorst said.

The discussion about selling disaster recovery services continued among attendees after the panel discussion. Finding the right products at the right price point is critical, Setauket Computer Technology Vice President Abe Fisher remarked.

"It's no good to walk in with fancy things the customer can't afford to buy," Fisher said. Starting small with inexpensive solutions at least gets you in the door for a conversation, he noted.

CRNTech Live featured presentations from an assortment of vendors highlighting channel-friendly wares. Among others, Autotask demonstrated its hosted service-management and billing software, Extricom showed off its wireless LAN system, and Panasonic flung around laptops to show off the ruggedness of its Toughbooks.

Attendees circulating the demo floor probed in more detail the technologies that caught their eye. Adtran drew a crowd to investigate its NetVanta 1355 Multiservice Access Gateway, an all-in-one system for hosted VoIP PBX voice services and data access.

"That looks like something a small business could really use," said Leon Kaliski, director of Kaliski Speaks Solutions, a New York services firm.

Future CRNTech Live events will be held this year in the City of Industry, Calif., Santa Clara, Calif., and Dallas.