I spent the last week in Australia visiting some of our customers and our business partners at Forum Group in Sydney. Our customer base in Australia continues to grow and we are now working with many different business segments. The folks at Forum Group started out as a customer of ours but we noticed that we were doing business with many of the same customers in closely related business segments, so it just makes sense to work together. Forum Group has NetApp equipment and we provide them support on their infrastructure and they also are using our SimplStor in their cloud offering for customers. Over the last few years Theo Popescu, the Forum Group CTO has become a friend of ours and a trusted business partner, he wanted to add to the discussion we have been having on our blogs about some of the things we are working on and our question and answers are below:
Question 1) What do you like about working with the Zerowait team and how does it help your customers?
Answer 1) In our modern world of online & self serve it can often be very difficult to find a partner that is willing to go the extra mile and be quick to respond when things go wrong. Zerowait do not only surpass expectations for Forum and our Australian customers but do so from the other side of the world. I don’t know of many partners where the President is so attentive and accessible as Mike is at Zerowait. The net result is our customers receive a premium level of solutions and support they otherwise may not receive elsewhere.
Question 2) How does SimplStor fit into your product offerings?
Answer 2) Customers always face an interesting challenge it’s time to review their need for disk storage, be it a green field implementation or an upgrade path from an EOL legacy system such as NetApp7. Usually they tend to side with the options they’re used to because it’s what they know. The adage “you don’t know what you don’t know” certainly rings true which is why when educated on the quality, functionality and most certainly the unrivaled cost of a SimplStor solution it quickly becomes the preferred option especially when coupled with renowned Zerowait support.
Question 3) Can you explain how your Flexible OPEX works? And how it helps customers who are migrating storage.
Answer 3) Let’s analyse the aspects of conducting a storage migration project. You have you legacy storage which until decommissioning will need to have support, capital outlay for the new hardware to be implemented, the migration which with a certainty will run twice as long to conduct then as planned due to unforeseen circumstances, professional services for assisting or conducting the entire migration which rise as the project endures delays, then finally support for the new platform ongoing.
There are variable costs associated each of these segments. What if there was a way to provide a plan that combined all of the aspects of the migration under an overarching umbrella at one single Flexible OPEX cost per month, is that something worth investigating?
Here’s how the new world migration looks under the Flexible OPEX model where hardware, software, professional services and support are included in a fixed monthly cost over a 5 year period. You receive support for your legacy storage whilst the migration plan is hatched. The hardware is delivered at the time as per the planned implementation which could be in the 1st, 5th or any years in between as delays to the project blow outs have no monetary impact. The entire migration has already been included as has the corresponding professional services whenever they are utilised. Once migration has been completed support is transferred to the new production equipment with decommissioning, removal and destruction conducted on the old. The real power is that at any stage the Flexible nature of our OPEX agreement means we are able to add or modify the equipment without penalty over the term because in reality if your business doesn’t change in 5 years you probably won’t have a business.
With noncapital outlay, cash flow is maximised and opportunity cost is minimised, professional services fees are fixed while support is maintained throughout. Forum and Zerowait, in partnership, have laid the tracks for the express train to storage migration, don’t get stuck with an all stops ticket.
