Ask companies who lag behind the digital transformation the reason for their reluctance, and they might tell you that cost is a factor. They don’t want to invest in new systems, technologies and services. But some say this is a woefully shortsighted view. Entering the Digital Age will not only improve performance and productivity in the long run, the initial expense may be recovered a lot sooner than some may think.

Aaron Coody, systems administrator at Scott Equipment Co., LLC, and Clint Parrish, enterprise IT architect at VSS, Inc., spoke to John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016. Coody gave the perspective of one company that decided to make the digital leap. “Most of our competitors — they still do everything by hand. But we wanted to sit there and say, ‘Hey, look, we’re coming into the 21st Century, and we’re going to give you the opportunity to do online business, to allow our technicians to do online tickets,” he said.

Coody said in order to achieve its goals, Scott Equipment had to scale out its storage environment.

Try before you buy

VSS was the company that helped Scott Equipment make the changes. “Part of our job is to build the best plan that we can to help them remediate their current problems,” said Parrish. “Because when you’re going to adopt a new technology, like a Cisco VersaStack, an IBM Storage, and so forth, you really need to get all your ducks in a row before you start ramping up your new technology to be able to take advantage of it.”

Parrish said that VMware allows it to test models in a virtualized environment before rolling them into production.

The best part of this story is that, according to Coody, thanks to the savings it has made with VersaStack, the expenses of the project have all washed out.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE