Alliance Technology Group

Back in the late 1990s, Hope Hayes was a successful EMC sales rep.

But an injury that kept her off her feet for an extended time got her involved with two small resellers she eventually united into a single solution provider, Alliance Technology Group, of which Hayes is president and owner.

Hayes has used her sales background with EMC, Sun Microsystems and OpenVision, now part of Veritas Software, to turn Alliance into a fast-growing storage solution provider.

Alliance doesn’t have a storage specialty per se. Instead, Hayes said, it is important to understand the full range of customer needs. “You have to know it all,” she said. “You have one part to do, but how can you do it without understanding the others?”

For Hayes, success comes down to the right people. Eight of Alliance’s 25 employees have been with the company at least five years, and a couple more will reach that tenure next year. Alliance has invested resources to get its personnel certified as needed, but most of their training has been on an informal basis. When it comes to hiring, Alliance looks at resumés differently. “Competitors look at certifications. We look at employment history—what they touched, what they experienced,” Hayes said.

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Looking ahead, Alliance will focus more on professional services, especially storage administration. “Many companies have a server administrator and a storage administrator, and they don’t work together,” Hayes said. “You have to understand both. For example, a server administrator knows servers, but not how to tune storage. If the storage is not tuned, the fastest server can run dog-slow.”