DEMAND GENERATOR: Darren McBride, Sierra Computers
"Once we were in the account, by watching for opportunities, we discovered the client needed a lot more," said Darren McBride, president of the Reno, Nev.-based solution provider.
>> UPSIDE FOR THE VAR: Sierra's sales managers don't necessarily worry about the size of initial deals, instead they focus on gauging clients' interests throughout the life of a project, finding ways to extend the relationship.
>> THE CUSTOMER VIEW: Western Asbestos found a way to centralize its IT functions and believes it was able to start collecting claims earlier than anticipated because of the enabling technology provided by its solution provider.
That's not unusual. Much of Sierra's business comes from deepening its relationships with clients. "We don't concentrate too much on what the customer is initially buying, we concentrate on how many computers they have on the network to determine if it is a good fit for us," he said.
McBride credits Sean Howard, technical manager at Sierra, for expanding the deal with Western Asbestos. Howard scored the original deal on a recommendation from Jones Vargas, one of the oldest and most respected law firms in Nevada and a longtime, loyal Sierra client. After getting an appointment with the key decision makers at Western Asbestos, Sierra rapidly drafted a scope of work, got the approval and began coding three days later on a Microsoft Access database to track thousands of potential asbestos claims.
In subsequent meetings, it became clear that the client needed far more than database development work. So Howard specified a solution that included Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, power protection from American Power Conversion, eight ASUS computers customized by Sierra, a SonicWall firewall, wireless networking gear from Linksys and scanners from Fujitsu. To make the Microsoft Access database more robust and available via the Web, the project was expanded to include development with Macromedia Cold Fusion. Sierra also migrated the database back end to Microsoft SQL Server.
For the backup and disaster-recovery component, Sierra provided a solution from its own affiliate, Highly Reliable Systems. "We knew they would not be happy with tape backup because we've had too many bad experiences with small and midsize clients that use tape," McBride said.
Instead, Sierra installed a five-bay, 160-Gbyte hard-drive-based system that allows nightly backups to run unattended for up to a week at a time.
Chuck LaGrave, director of claims at Western Asbestos, said once Sierra took on the database job, the solution provider did an "excellent job pulling together what I would consider a variety of pieces of information in different formats into a centralized database.
"That opened up the door to more discussions on other services," LaGrave said.
Sierra has been a "critical partner" for Western Asbestos. "I don't think we would have met our exceedingly ambitious goals of starting to accept claims as early as we did if we had not had a locally experienced organization like Sierra," LaGrave said.
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