Last week I met my new, all time favorite “value added” reseller. Computacenter, based out of London is a partner to Storwize. More importantly, they actually do put the words “value added” back into the reseller business. The main reason, Computacenter is willing to pay their customers, real cash, if they don’t live up to the ROI numbers that are agreed upon by between them and their customer for a given solution. Today I am seeing a number of vendors talk about value and especially storage vendors talk about their 'guarantees' or 'get thin' programs. Now the ROI process is just that, a process, and it can be a difficult one at that. It is a negotiation of real costs in a datacenter from hardware and software to labor and utility costs. Also, let’s not forget every vendor, at least in the storage business, has their own ROI templates, however, when push comes to shove, they really are geared toward a successful outcome for the vendor’s product. Some of these vendors may even provide some type of ‘rebate’ in the event their solution doesn’t meet the agreed upon ROI. The reality is, these rebates are usually ‘paid back’ in the form of extra disk, free of charge if they don’t meet specific capacity requirements, or they will provide on-site consulting services, support or maintenance free of charge for a period of time.
The difference with Computacenter is, they will underwrite their ROI, year over year (for the term of the ROI), with cold, hard cash. I have heard of vendors ‘eating their own dog food’ but none really, I mean really putting their money where their mouth is. To me, this is the sign of a reseller who cares about their customers. Again, as with any typical ROI process and terms, they can be pretty detailed (I mean Computacenter is in the business of making money), but have two simple rules, 1) ensure that the terms are responsible, fair and accurate for the customer and the partner (it needs to be win-win) and 2) allow the customer enough flexibility within their environment to not restrict application or company success. If this is the case then everyone should win, right? It will be necessary to ensure the environment is properly architected, implemented, and most important, not changed in order to ensure a successful ROI over the term of the agreement, but wouldn’t any customer want additional help with architecture, deployment and service, given the limited resources these days? The architecture, deployment and support work by the reseller (Computacenter) will save on these resources. Also, since the ROI is true financial savings, with real cash back, end users can now actually hire more headcount to help focus on more strategic IT functions that help to make the business more profitable. How do you hire someone with ‘extra disk’? It truly is a win-win.
I came to find out about this program through Mathew Yeager, Practice Lead at CC for Storage and Protection. He told me about a project they have going on with a large financial institution in London where Computacenter is so confident with the Storwize solution, that if they don’t save the customer 50% of their storage, in their new fully virtualized environment, then they will pay the customer the difference between what they actually end up spending and the cost of the solution. Now to put this into perspective, their customer is a large multi-national financial institution in Scotland where if the customer invests $2.8M in a new virtualized solution, CC will underwrite approximately $3.2M year over year for the next 5 years. One word, “WOW”!
As Mathew told me, “There is an age old saying ‘No one ever got fired from buying <insert billion dollar vendor here>’! BUT, can you name someone who got promoted by spending all kinds of erroneous dollars on IT?” I have to agree with Mathew on this one. Given this type of underwriting, the question to any CFO is, “how do you go wrong with this type of relationship?”
It says a lot that they trust the Storwize solution that much to make this type of guarantee with ‘their’ customer. It is also because of this guarantee that I am proud to work with Computacenter and admire commitment to their business, people and customers.