UPDATED 11:00 EDT / JUNE 02 2014

Software-defined storage does more than keep the lights on | #IBMEdge

For the second year in a row, IBM has chosen GlassHouse, an IBM reseller out of Toronto, Ontario, as one of their “Winning Edge” award recipients. The Winning Edge Awards for Systems Storage are granted, said Robert Moniz, GlassHouse VP and General Manager, to companies that show “continued performance in the marketplace for selling storage” and who couple performance with “technical competency.”

 

Technical competency builds customer relationships

 

#IBMEdgeTechnical competency, Moniz told Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante, is “an area of business we take very seriously.” GlassHouse uses a methodology that places a high value on technical skill. This “deep technical bench” is partially due to the employees that make up GlassHouse, many of whom are former systems engineers: “our SEs are former IBM Redbook contributors, a lot of our sales staff are former SEs, our entire management team is made up of former SEs.” Since their ranks are filled with SEs, Moniz says, GlassHouse has a different approach to reselling IBM products.

  • Solutions built around client goals

“Customers can expect a very consultative, methodical, patient approach to understanding their requirements,” Moniz explains. GlassHouse builds “architectures and solutions” around what their customers “lines of business are trying to achieve.” They also, Moniz says, try to execute a “soft change,” which means preserving as much as they can of what the client already has: Glasshouse tries “to integrate what [the client needs] to do with what they have and add on any auxiliary equipment or solutions that they need to acquire.”

This consultative aspect of their business is partially the nature of the storage business, which, as Moniz says, “requires a lot of pre-sales technical support.” But there are some companies that GlassHouse works with that require additional consultation because “they’re a non-IBM infrastructure shop today. But they understand that we get that type of architecture and that we can help them minimize costs and increase performance or optimize or reduce square-footage or cooling — all of that.”

As a reseller with a consulting edge, GlassHouse positions themselves as “your advocate, your trusted advisor,” to their clients. Even though they are an IBM-only vendor, GlassHouse still helps customers “optimize how those other vendor’s products will sit on [IBM] storage.” And if an IBM product isn’t necessarily the right fit for a customer, GlassHouse will let them know and suggest another reseller.

  • Handling changing IBM offerings 

Responding to Vellante’s question around “getting pulled into specific application and workload areas of expertise,” Moniz said that SAP is changing “what they require their customers to do,” and therefore GlassHouse has needed to “work with our clients through some of those changes.” He added that they’d needed to perform similar support “on the server and the application side” with Oracle.

Miniman asked Moniz to expand on his experience with “virtualized HANA,” now supported by SAP, wondering “Is that a conversation you’re having with your customers?” Moniz replied that they do have HANA-centered conversations with their customers: “if a customer is heavily invested in HANA we’ll continue to work with them to protect those investments. If a customer has not yet embraced HANA but wants to perform due diligence on “how do I run my analytics on my SAP databases?” we’ll sit down and take them through it.”

 

Software-defined storage does more than keep the lights on

 

Wondering whether software-defined “buzz words” have become at last become “real dialogue,” Miniman questioned Moniz about the conversations he’s been having with customers and about the needs that software-defined storage fulfills for their business. Moniz explained that many of the software-defined storage conversations he’s been having with clients are “to set up the processes for defining that automation.” Automation allow clients to “free up resources” that were previously performing “key-whacking redundant tasks.” GlassHouse is helping their clients automate “just keeping the lights on,” that way, those clients are able to “take those higher-value resources and redeploy them back to line-of-business.”

  • Early wins and key applications 

Describing the applications that many of his customers currently use, Moniz said, “Today it’s really on-prem for the customer. We will manage a lot of back-office stuff for the client. Typically clients will still hold title to those assets and we just provide the care and feeding over a wire so they can redeploy those resources for more meaningful tasks.”

  • GlassHouse runs the gamut of customer storage needs

#IBMEdgeWhile many GlassHouse clients from diverse industries are dealing with similar problems —  Vellante listed a few: “they’re trying to cut costs, they’re trying to do more with less, they’re looking at new ways of doing things but they don’t want massive disruption –” but have different goals for storage.  Moniz gave two examples:

“I would say that a “Type B” personality insurance company is going to be very nervous about change. So in that type of situation, we’re going to be very sensitive to disruption. We will be very cognizant of what they’ve previously spent, whether there’s still book-value on those systems, how we can leverage frames and existing processors to maybe just introduce virtualization and optimization. Maybe it’s just services that they require, because they’ve got more than they can chew.”

But for a retail customer, storage is “going to be about acquiring something that they don’t currently have today to give them that edge. And that one is a bit more challenging because there’s so much out there to choose from.”

In either case, Moniz says, GlassHouse puts customer needs first and “works backwards from what they’re trying to achieve […].”

 

How public cloud fits into the GlassHouse portfolio

 

Responding to Vellante’s observations about the “cloud-first” craze in the United States, Moniz mentioned SoftLayer is a good fit for the GlassHouse portfolio because it is right line with what he predicts will be the overall trend in the cloud market: hybrid. The market he said, is already moving in that direction. Companies have diverse needs: “some off-prem, some public cloud, some on-prem private clouds, and then your discrete systems that run high-value workloads.”

One of the key features he considers important to the SoftLayer offering is that customers only need to use one vendor with a similar environment both on-prem and off-prem. “Success in any industry comes down to simplicity and packaging,” Moniz said. He predicts that “IBM will be very good at packaging this thing and making it very easy to access and deploy.”

  • SoftLayer vs. Amazon

When it comes to competing with Amazon, Moniz says, “the club in our bag would be SoftLayer.” If a client were to ask GlassHouse to “spin up a bunch of stuff on Amazon,” Moniz said his company figure out what the client was trying to accomplish: “We would get through a bunch gates determining, is that a fit for an off-prem cloud-based solution.” If they found that the client could do what they needed on SoftLayer, Moniz said, “typically it would come down to a pricing exercise between Amazon and SoftLayer.”

  • Who’s buying?

When it comes to who GlassHouse actually sells to, Moniz explains that it depends on the business, “We have relationships at the ground-level — the systems program level — right up to CIOs, VPs of lines of business.” As IT departments change, Moniz noted, “the budgets are shifting” and sometimes vendors need to walk on eggshells to maintain their relationships. “It’s part of our evolution,” he mused, “but typically we’re very strong in the data center, we’re very strong in the infrastructure at the CIO’s office and below.”


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