Presidio CTO Shares Best Practices

Economic downturns make consumers rethink purchases, whether personal or for business. Savvy VARs are positioning solutions that will not only provide good value for their cost, but will also help companies reduce overhead, eliminate redundancies and improve productivity. Storage and networking powerhouse Presidio Inc. (2008 VARBusiness 500 rank 69) attributes roughly two-thirds of its revenue to Cisco-centric solutions, with the remainder comprised of EMC, Sun, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp and Hewlett-Packard, among other vendors. Presidio employs a number of best practices with its partners that are integral to its success. Recently, Dave Hart, Presidio CTO, shared three of those practices.

Have The 'Right' Discussion

It's not simply a storage discussion the solution provider has with clients, it's a data center discussion, Hart said. "You don't want to build islands of storage. Storage is interdependent; you need a wholistic approach. You need to help the customer understand what the virtual strategy is, what your disaster requirements are and then architect a solution around that."

In addition, with emerging technologies, convergence plays a huge part of that data center discussion. With today's focus on green initiatives, virtualization, thin-provisioning concepts and de-duplication become imperative.

Focus On Core Competencies

Presidio sticks with its trusted partners and does not market itself as being all things to all people. "The storage space is very fragmented with a lot of good innovation from EMC and NetApp," Hart said. "But there are lots of early stage companies that are making impacts and being innovative. As a solution provider, you could get stretched really thin if you try to cover the entire market. So you line up with best innovators out there."

Hart noted that Presidio has been successful with larger players, such as EMC, Sun and NetApp, and by complementing that mix with small companies such as Data Domain.

"We believe the No. 1 driver of our NetApp business is primarily VMware, and also Citrix. There is a structured partnership between VMware and NetApp, where, when we sell them together, there are discounts involved. EMC will add 'select product' to feature niche players. It's a win-win situation," Hart said. "From the customer's perspective, it's one solution, through a select number of vendors." So, second-day support comes from Presidio and from EMC, rather than six different vendors, for example.

Invest In Your Company

Presidio invests in its employees through training as well as in labs and offers demo capabilities to provide proof of concept. This allows Presidio to take a new technology and put it to the test before it's dropped into a data center.

"The data center is the highest-risk environment from the customer's perspective: If you have a problem, you can cripple a whole enterprise," Hart said. "It's a very complex, fast-moving environment. There's not one blueprint to work from; no one manufacturer has an entire end-to-end solution. In any data center, there may be 10 major manufacturers. Each one is re-inventing product line once a year, so 10 months of the year, you are learning what's going on. It's expensive, but it's the only way to drive value for your company as you drive value for the customer."

Presidio has invested $2 million in its storage and systems lab. Customers can bring servers or virtual machines into the lab before they purchase any recovery product and experience end-to-end provisioning of the server network and storage, as well as scalability testing. "Virtualization remains a gigantic opportunity," Hart said. "Recent figures showed only 4 percent of North American servers had been virtualized. But there is an 80 percent projection by 2012. There is a steady march to virtualization in the data center."

Tweet

   

More Channel Programs