Four Reasons You Need a Storage-Focused VAR

Many VARs, or Value Added Resellers, offer a broad range of products and services across such solution areas as virtualization, networking, storage, asset management, data center infrastructure, etc. Most, however, are very aware of the solution areas they consider their “sweet spots”. Other solutions are offered in order to pick up ancillary business that is often the result of the “drag” created by their particular specialties. For instance I once had the CTO of a prominent VAR tell me that his storage business is almost entirely result of the drag from his virtualization business. In other words, storage isn’t a specialty for him.

Conversely, VARs who are focused in a particular solution segment can be quite a bit more valuable. At Southern Data Storage, the solution expertise is in storage and its closely related cousin, backup. Storage and backup used to be the sleepiest parts of the IT industry, but that is absolutely no longer the case. A blizzard of new storage and backup technologies, features and approaches are available, and it can get VERY confusing. Therefore, here are four reasons why you need a storage VAR:

1. Recognizing Contenders vs. Pretenders. New advances in storage and backup technologies have resulted in an explosion of marketing hype. Some legacy products – and some entire product lines – have been given a few feature tweaks (and sometimes entirely new names) in order to capitalize on the buzz surrounding terms such as “converged storage” or “cloud storage” or “cloud backup”. There is a cute name for this: racing stripes. Just as car manufacturers have been guilty of applying racing stripes and other frivolous features to produce so-called “new” models, more than a few of the major storage vendors have done similar things. A VAR who is a storage specialist can better assist you in seeing through the marketing hype to find the real business value, or lack thereof, in the blizzard of new storage and backup solutions on the market.
2. In a Word, Agility. This is related to the “Contenders vs. Pretenders” point above, but is important enough to stand on its own. A storage focused VAR, due to his or her solution specialty, will generally be able to spot new trends – and separate the Contenders from the Pretenders –  much faster than the more generalist VARs. It’s simple really;  with fewer solutions to think about, more attention can be paid to the latest trends. The benefit? Value. Real value. The storage and backup sectors have gone through a major cycle of better-faster-cheaper, and those who choose to implement soonest gain the most value from it.
3. The Death of “One Throat to Choke.” The theory behind “one throat to choke” (which I call OTTC) is that service levels improve by giving all your business to a single soup-to-nuts vendor. It has been promoted heavily by the largest IT industry vendors and has been extended to their VARs. There is only one problem: it’s nonsense. In actuality OTTC results in a lack of specialty in critical solution areas and is often exacerbated by the bureaucratic nature of the major vendors. The result: mediocre solutions and crappy customer support. Conversely, dealing with a specialist VAR, especially in solution areas as highly evolved – and business critical – as storage and backup can be markedly advantageous. Deep expertise combined with agile, responsive customer service can be critical, especially in those times when storage and backup resources are the most important – when things go wrong.
4. An Ecosystem of Experts: This is opposite of OTTC. Lest ye think that you are somehow making life more complicated by choosing to deal with multiple specialist vendors, Southern Data Storage works hard to maintain “ecosystem” relationships with specialists in other key IT solution specialties. When necessary we can work cooperatively to provide multi-discipline solutions. Customers benefit because they are dealing with experts in each discipline who are also known to each other and work well together. Result: smoother operations, fewer headaches, better service, and less finger-pointing when things go wrong.

In short, a storage-specialist VAR like Southern Data Storage can bring a greater depth of expertise, responsiveness and problem-solving skills to storage and backup, two of the most critical functional areas of your IT shop. We’d be delighted to discuss this topic with you further. For more info or to request a meeting, please go to http://www.southerndatastorage.com.