Astoundry Wants To Do Your Heavy Lifting With Offshore, Onshore Model
As Hanratty saw it, consulting services were in bad shape. In his experience, some services "had really lowered the clients' expectations to the point where the clients weren't expecting things on time and on budget," Hanratty said. "I thought that was backward."
In 2000 he created Astoundry (a mash-up of the words "astounding" and "foundry") to provide companies with a competent, full-service consulting firm able to offer technical solutions across a variety of industries.
Astoundry uses a hybrid model of U.S.-based project managers, who deal with VARs and their clients, and an outsourced, behind-the-scenes team of engineers located on the Scientific and Engineering University of Armenia campus in the capital city of Yerevan.
As a bonus, Astoundry uses the University as a talent pool. "If we see good people coming up through the university, we hire them," Hanratty said. He cites the low turnover rate of four percent as another example of the company's reliability.
Work is under way on Astoundry's new office in Yerevan, but until that time, Astoundry's 75 staff members are busy applying their expertise to solve technical challenges for companies the world over. "We don't sell anything--all we do is service," Hanratty explained. "We sell no hardware and software."
Hanratty said the value his company provides is the ability to do what he calls "the heavy lifting"--diving into a company's infrastructure to determine its technological needs and drafting reports on how technology upgrades and changes impact the bottom line.
"As a reseller, it's a me-too world out there," said George Orr, sales manager at Rolling Meadows, Ill.-based solution provider Relational Technology Solutions (formerly Relational, LLC).
Hanratty said that by advising clients on a concept solution as opposed to specific brands that can provide a solution, it frees VARs from setting up a deal only to see it snatched away by a competitor who offers a lower price, because Astoundry has earned the trust of the client.
By being so intricately involved with the technical issues of its clients, Astoundry can also quickly inform VARs of those clients' immediate needs. "We had a client that ran out of disk space and needed to close a sale immediately," Hanratty recalled. "If we weren't there talking with the reseller, they wouldn't have gotten that sale."
One of Astoundry's newer clients, Port Arthur, Texas-based Marine Fueling Services, needed to upgrade its accounting system with a new server and turned to Astoundry. Now the 50-year-old company talks with Astoundry about new software solutions.
"If I can use technology to improve my business and save time, I'm obviously very interested in that and I see how they can be helpful in doing that," said CEO Chris Bean.
Simultaneously working with VARs while consulting with Astoundry clients helps resellers in several ways. When a company is shown a business justification for making a hardware purchase, VARs are more easily able to offer a solution based on total ownership cost. "VARs call us and say, they have a client, this is their problem, we want you to come in and act as an independent advisor," Hanratty said. "It makes sense for them to go to their customers and say we've got a company that can fill in all these blanks."