StorageTek Announces New U.S./Canada Field Organization and Channel Strategy to Capture Growth Markets and Expand Enterprise Business - Company Operations

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Feb 7, 2000

StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp.) Friday announced the restructuring of its U.S. and Canada sales and service organization, and the introduction of a simplified sales account and territory coverage model.

This was communicated yesterday in addition to a number of other far- reaching corporate initiatives, announced separately. The plan was unveiled last week to field sales and service personnel, as well as to key channel partners at the company's annual field Kickoff meeting, held in San Antonio, Texas. The initiative transforms StorageTek's U.S. and Canada strategy and structure from a primarily direct-sales model into an aggressive growth and channel-focused model. New approaches to market segmentation and a restructured field sales organization have been deployed to support new and existing products and services, including consulting and maintenance services offerings, aimed at Fortune 500 companies and the burgeoning growth market fueled by ebusiness storage requirements.

StorageTek's channel marketing program, providing valuable tools that reinforce the company's channel engagement process with a comprehensive model that extends from qualification through delivery, was also launched to partners last week. StorageTek intends to grow channel product sales in the U.S. and Canada dramatically in 2000. To achieve this goal, the structural re-alignment will better service new and existing customers at the end-user level, while continuing to enhance current value-added reseller (VAR), value-added distributor (VAD) and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partnerships. Channel partner engagement and support are key areas of focus under the new model and emphasis will be placed on recruiting selected new partners with specific areas of expertise.

"Managing and storing information is becoming increasingly important to businesses and organizations, and this trend will continue," said Susan Bailey, corporate vice president, U.S. and Canada sales and service, StorageTek. "The e-business movement and our collective evolution into a `digital civilization' have had a massive impact on the consumption of data storage. StorageTek has a renewed sense of competitiveness, with this new plan enabling us to deliver best in class storage solutions across all segments and in all operating environments. The result is that we are uniquely positioned to provide the architecture our customers need to manage their growth."

The field sales geographies -- Western, Central and Eastern -- have been restructured to more effectively service Fortune 500 customers with broad-based enterprise product and service requirements. These geographies will focus on establishing and building these strategic account relationships in the U.S. and Canada, and in major accounts within the Telecommunications and Federal segments.

Overlaying the geographies is the newly formed Growth Markets business unit that will serve small and medium-sized businesses whose storage needs are largely fulfilled through indirect channels of distribution. This group will also focus on companies whose storage needs have grown because of increased electronic commerce activities, as well as new dotcom startups with high data consumption and, consequently, higher storage requirements from inception.

As a part of re-aligning the sales organization, sales operations functions were also restructured to provide more control and efficiency in areas like sales planning and forecasting, performance metrics and analysis, sales force automation and pricing policies. Customer relationship management tools and other means to improve customer partnerships are also a focus area for the newly aligned organization. Existing and prospective accounts were evaluated through an extensive data analysis and stratification process, and mapped to geographic territories for account coverage. The overall design of the sales and service infrastructure was based on this analysis in order to minimize disruption to customers and simultaneously streamline coverage, eliminating redundancy and increasing accountability across the organization. The result is a simplified model with greater focus on growth and expanding into new market segments.

StorageTek is the preeminent provider of network storage. The company's strategy is to provide open, intelligent and integrated solutions that combine storage products, storage management software and storage services. StorageTek industry leading solutions help customers collect, move, store, share and protect all types of digital information on platforms ranging from laptops to enterprise servers. The company, with headquarters in Louisville, Colo., reported revenue of 2.3 billion in 1998. Information on StorageTek is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.storagetek.com or phone at 1-800-786-7835.