Grooming Relationships

Not many custom system builders can say they competed with Michael Dell back when Dell was still building his systems in his college dorm room. As Datel Systems President Larry Piland likes to put it: "He went direct; we went retail, and the rest is history."

While Dell may have built his business into a global PC brand, Piland is doing just fine as a custom systems solution provider in the San Diego area, with a focus on the education market.

Being in the business since January 1983 has enabled Datel to develop deep relationships with its clients, Piland said."We've managed to build a brand name regionally," he said. "Some customers are on their fifth generation of Datel systems."

With strong technology spending by schools in his region, Datel's business boomed last year. Datel built 19,845 units in 2006, up 39 percent over the prior year, the company said. Revenue was up 37 percent to about $26 million.

One of Datel's long-term customers, Mark Sotelo, manager of IT support services at National University in La Jolla, Calif., said his institution has been working with Datel since before he joined seven years ago. Sotelo said that longevity is important because the university sticks with a platform as long as possible due to the durability of its system images. "Datel recognizes this and tries to keep us on the same platform for a long time," he said.

Another key to keeping its relationship with the university all these years is customer service. "We've used other suppliers, including Dell and Gateway, for some projects," Sotelo said. "But we've stuck with Datel because they're responsive. It's hard to move a big ship like Dell."

Sami Belmonte, system support analyst at the San Marcos Unified School District, said she has worked with Datel for five years because of its stable platforms and is now depending on the system builder to help the district move away from the Macintosh platform to PCs. "If there's a significant change in hardware coming, Datel will advance ship us a unit to test with our operating system and applications," she said.

Datel has learned over the years the importance of being flexible with customers, Piland said. For instance, the company helps its customers manage asset tagging and custom loads. A customer might have three or four different loads, such as administration or student systems or labs. "We manage and do their custom loads and keep their lead time short," he said.

Because of the emphasis on educational customers, Datel mainly builds desktops. For notebooks, it turns to vendors such as Fujitsu, Lenovo and Toshiba. "We can sell them at about the same price as whitebooks," Piland said. "Whitebooks are something we are looking at. But it has to make sense for the customer."

Datel also mostly uses Intel motherboards for stability, reliablity, warranty processing and support. "We are able to fulfill a three-year or four-year contract with Intel," he said. "If you have 1,000 machines out there, your technicians need to be able to support them. Otherwise it's a tech nightmare."

In addition to building custom systems, Datel also supports its customers with wired and wireless networks, Microsoft Exchange and Cisco routers. The company also installs fibre and other heavy-duty cabling.

One way Datel reaches out to new and existing customers is through a weekly live call-in program Piland does every Saturday on KFMB, a local AM radio station. "We are open to technology partners to come in and help spread the [custom system] gospel," he said. "We even had Microsoft on once."

That is not Datel's and Piland's only marketing tool, though. Belmonte said it's not just the customer service, support and pricing she receives from Datel that keeps her happy with the company. "He brings me coffee once a week," she said. "I have a two-year-old at home, and I need the caffeine."