Storage Service Provider Summit, Part 2 - Industry Trend or Event

Computer Technology Review, Nov, 2000 by Mark Ferelli

Examining the new class of storage vendor

The first part of this article appeared in the October issue of CTR.

Editor's Note: Over the last year, a new concept was added to the storage solutions industry. This was the idea of the Storage Service Provider, a hybrid company which is both producer and consumer of storage products and a new class of services. The SSPs have enjoyed exposure in the trade press, but there has been much skimming and little delving.

To address this new class of storage vendor, Computer Technology Review convened a summit, a conference that included SSPs, a data center that acts as a colocation site, and a well known market research analyst. CTR plans for this summit to become an annual event, so that CTR's readers can be kept current on this new trend: storage services. Participants in this year's summit include:

SSPs: CreekPath Systems: Greg Mangold, vice president of sales and marketing. WorldStor: Steven Bishop, chief technology officer.

StorageWay: Dan Marshall, founder and vp sales; Rob Commins, director, product marketing.

Data/Co-location Center: Inflow: Dag Peak, director of product development; Mary Wagner, product manager for storage services.

Special Guest: Aberdeen Group: David Hill, research director, storage management.

Moderator: Mark Ferelli, Computer Technology Review.

The Issue Of Trust

Mark: I think I would like to take on the trust issue just a bit. The key issue for SSPs is being able to go into a customer and say they can trust their data to you. However, the IT manager's life and breath and being are tied to this data and not everybody is as fortunate as Inflow to have a Mary there that knows the way around mass storage. How do you go in and gain that trust?

Steve: We are basing our business understanding that this is the most significant objection we will see. I believe we are doing much more than what the typical customer would be doing in-house to protect their data. That is at all levels; network IT level security, storage network infrastructure security, personnel security, physical security, and process security. We start from the ground up securing all those aspects and documenting what we do in those areas to present that information and nine times out of ten they don't come close to doing what we are doing. If their in-house guy loses something, that guy loses his job maybe and goes and gets a job for more money somewhere else. If we lose their data, we are out of business. We have a much higher risk involved and responsibility involved in securing that data.

Greg: That is our objective right there. We need to continually prove that companies like us are going to do a much better job than the company can do in-house.

Dan: How do you instill that confidence? I think while we are going through the development of the SSP modeling it is very important that we pick partnerships with vendor suppliers. It would be very hard for me to go in and sell four 9s availability and the question comes up of what type of gear is it on. It would be difficult to sell that if I tell them SCSI. The partnerships you have in place help to validate your expertise and the fact that you can deliver the availability we do within our SLAs.

Mark: With so many fims that you partner with, storage is really not a core competency. How do you get over the hurdle? Inflow is an exception because they have a specialist worrying about the storage all the time. Mary, I am not picking on you, you are just rare.

Dag: To go in and sell availability based on the support from an Inflow or Exodus would be more challenging than going in and supporting availability from walking in with an EMC or HP or IBM. We have to go ahead and help the customer understand the availability of our product and the security of our product and the performance. You have to stand on the technology the vendors are utilizing from a storage perspective.

Greg: All the data centers are trying to develop expertise and some have more than others. All the data centers have a combination of technology people and business people. While we are pitching the technology and vendor brands to one level of that business we all need to keep track of the business opportunities to the financial side of the company. When you pick an EMC supplier, we will try to sell services on that equipment and there are two EMC sales guys calling on whatever account you name. There is not an account in the world that they don't have a guy calling on. You are competing against your own self on the technology logy basis. You compete and have leverage because they are in there saying how great their system is as a turnkey or buy in. Differentiation when it all shakes out even is when you go to the Compaqs and HPs will be margins on services offered and quality of services provided to the end user.

Steve: I think we all agree with that. I disagree with the statement that we are competing with our vendors in terms of a direct sales opportunity. I think that how you manage the relationship with that vendor and make sure that the business relationship is a win-win for all parties really counts. This is including the time to close the sale as opposed to closing a direct sale as well as getting paid the same commission if not even more commission to that rep.