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Disruption ahead

Editorial Type: Interview     Date: 11-2014    Views: 2970      







In an increasingly cloud-centric world, resellers who are still focused on just 'selling boxes' will be left behind, as Sol-Tec Sales Director Lee Cox explains to Cloud Hosting editor David Tyler.

David Tyler: What would you say is the key element of the Sol-Tec proposition that makes you stand out in what is after all a very competitive market?

Lee Cox: I suppose you could say that Sol-Tec has always taken a slightly different approach to the market from most of the competition: we started out over 23 years ago, selling backup software - but even then we were conscious of selling a solution to a problem. When I joined the company just a couple of years later I brought a slightly different slant to the business because of my experience of the distribution channel. We went through a sustained period then - as a lot of resellers have done - of 'just' selling lots of kit. But again, we were always careful to ensure we were selling a bundle of value-add; a good example was that all of our PCs back then were being shipped with anti-theft options like tracking units. The thinking even then was: "Here's the box, but what can we put around that to make it different to what everybody else is offering?"

Over time customers began asking for support, so we built a support team, and as bigger clients also began to pick up on that we developed a consultancy business. That's developed now into a full-blown outsourced service desk offering. For many of our clients we are now effectively 'embedded into' their IT departments. We literally do everything for these businesses, looking after the servers, the network - in fact some clients don't have an IT department of their own. We also look after scheduled maintenance and manage their storage requirements, of course.

DT: The advent of the cloud has been a game-changer for the IT industry as a whole - how has Sol-Tec reacted?

LC: Very early on we started selling a hosted email service - this was before Office365, remember - as a way to stay cutting edge. These days we see Office365 as a good corporate model to follow, so a lot of our business at the moment is around supporting customers as they migrate toward the cloud. We've become experts in the technical side of those migration issues, whether users opt for a hybrid approach or go 'fully cloud'.

There is still a lot of doubt and uncertainty in customers' minds with products like Microsoft Azure and Office365. They are often unsure of how to get the most from these technologies, or how complementary platforms like SharePoint might impact on their business. We've made it our business to partner as strongly as we can with Microsoft so as to enhance our own expertise and at the same time be seen as a trusted partner.

DT: Is the idea for Sol-Tec to be 'jacks-of-all-trades' when it comes to selecting partners/vendors, or is it important to specialize?

LC: We've been very careful not to look like we're trying to follow a thousand different technology trends. Microsoft for instance is key for us, as are partners like Pure Storage. They are genuinely disruptive in their approach, turning the traditional way of 'doing storage' on its head. And we believe that Microsoft is doing a similar thing - it's not something that is limited only to relatively small or new companies.

What MS is doing with the Azure platform in terms of manageability and ease of use represents a fantastic opportunity for us: it provides us with a route to help our customers move most if not all of their infrastructure to the cloud. It's not going to be right for everybody, obviously. Where performance is critical, for instance, users might want to keep some things on-site - and of course we still have expertise in that sort of business as well!

DT: Are you seeing specific customer requirements that are better suited to cloud than others, or is it a panacea?

LC: An obvious good example is Disaster Recovery: it's so much easier to manage using the Azure platform. Everything is in the same place, it's easy to copy an Azure server as many times as you like. You can design a failover platform with a few clicks in a matter of minutes.

We had a customer just last week who came to us asking about deploying a new SQL box: we had it up and ready to go in under twenty minutes. This flexibility is very attractive to our customers - if they decided tomorrow that actually they didn't need that server, they could switch it off and they'd stop paying for it. That model has a lot of appeal for our clients.



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