Zerowait Corporation

Over the last week Zerowait held our Global Conference near Dallas,TX and we also had one of our customer training classes. It has been a great week!

Some more shots from the NetApp training class:

This week we had a conference call with an old customer that has moved on to a new company and  he told his new team about Zerowait and the outstanding service and support we provide to our NetApp  support customers. Suddenly there is a need for additional storage, and budget is tight at his new company so he recommended that it was time to call Zerowait.  Our  customer recognizes that high availability storage can provide years of service beyond the OEM’s End of Life, when you have a reliable service and support organization like Zerowait in your court.  The conversation went well, and it looks like we have added another customer to our list.

Building a global service company that provides individual attention to all of our customers has taken a long time, and the foundation of this company is a great staff that provides honest and dependable service and support that our global customers require.   Folks often ask me how we built a global company and found the business niche.  The truth is that it was our customers who asked us to help them, and by helping folks and treating them right the business grew one step at a time.  Our customers suggested that we build and productize our SimplStor product line. We did, and it is growing steadily in the Energy and Video FX market sectors.

We spoke to many people before we opened up in Europe and we were told that it was nearly impossible to run our type of company there.  We have been in Europe since 2006, and it is a great place to have a business.  When our customers asked us to open up in Australia, we were told by many people that it was too far away and you can’t be successful there.  Our Australian business has grown nicely and we are working on expansion in the region now.

A small business can make a big difference in the world but you need to keep a positive outlook.  As Mark Twain said “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you can become great.”  At the end of the month we are having our first Global Sales Conference in Dallas, TX. At the same time some of our customers will be in a training class during the conference. The class was scheduled at the suggestion of our customers.

Zerowait Training Helps NetApp Customers Reduce Storage Costs

Zerowait’s NetApp training class gives storage administrators the tools they need to optimize NetApp legacy equipment reducing the need for expensive system upgrades

When a student leaves our class they have targeted skills and knowledge that they can apply to their NetApp infrastructures.

Wilmington DE & Dallas, TX (PRWEB) May 16, 2012

As NetApp’s data storage solutions become more expensive, IT Departments are increasingly seeking to lower cost of ownership and extend the lifecycle of their legacy storage equipment. Improving the Return on Investment (ROI) of the expensive data storage often starts with an understanding of how to optimize the current storage infrastructure. Zerowait’s training can help.

“Over the last several years Zerowait’s customers have embraced our hands-on training, whether at their location or at our corporate headquarters,” said Mike Linett, President of Zerowait. “As we have grown, customers have asked us to offer classes in different regions of the county and at our Australian and UK offices. We decided that based on customer demand, we would have the class in Dallas at the same time as our Global Sales Conference–starting May 29, 2012. This way our customers can meet our teams from around the world.

Gary Lehr, PhD, Zerowait Senior engineer, will be leading this course. Gary says, “ I was a customer of Zerowait’s for over ten years while director of technical engineering at one of the largest global service providers, managing thousands of systems and petabytes of storage. With Zerowait’s help I was able to introduce NetApp to our international customers in the late 1990’s. We reduced the costs of management, service and support for our NetApp systems as they became viewed by the manufacturer as legacy equipment. I am excited to be teaching Zerowait’s customers ways to manage their NetApp equipment and reduce their costs of storage.”

Rob Robinson, Zerowait’s VP of Sales and Marketing agrees. “An educated client is our best customer,” he says. “When a student leaves our class they have targeted skills and knowledge that they can apply to their NetApp infrastructures. We’ve priced the class very competitively at only $1500, and as a bonus Zerowait offers a 10% discount on the next order after a class. This savings typically offsets the price of the class completely. In this global environment, with data availability critical to business success, Zerowait training provides our customers with the knowledge they need to succeed in the always on-line world.”

To learn more about Zerowait and our training programs go to http://www.zerowait.com/index.php/netapp/netapp-training

About Zerowait: Headquartered in Wilmington, Del., USA, and with offices around the world, Zerowait is the worldwide leader in independent service and support of NetApp filers. Zerowait solutions include off-lease fully licensed NetApp systems and the new Zerowait SimplStor line of single-name space archive storage. Storage administrators throughout the world rely on Zerowait to provide affordable solutions to the skyrocketing costs of data storage. http://www.zerowait.com

Over the last several years of providing practical, operational training to our NetApp customers there have been several times when we have been asked to hold a class in the Dallas area. We are scheduled to hold our first Dallas class at the end of May.

Our Dallas Three day NetApp training class is scheduled for  May 29th and we still  have a few seats open.

If you want to join the class, or would like to schedule a class on your location please give us a call to discuss your needs.

Yesterday I was visiting with customers around Baltimore and one of our customer’s offices overlooks the Constellation. It was a nice day and the view  of the ship was perfect. I had a good day of visiting customers and all of the folks  I visited are struggling with their costs of storage and storage growth issues.

The issue of resources, technology, and upgrade costs are  on everyone’s mind in the IT space.   Clearly corporate  budgeting is being effected by the uncertain  US tax environment and the increase in the costs of business that is due to hit US businesses  in January.  Uncertainty is driving many decision makers to be cautious and only purchase the  IT equipment that is  needed to get by.

Our third party NetApp support business is growing in companies that are purchasing new NetApp equipment, as well as with customers that are buying transferable licensed – off lease equipment, and our customers that are just expanding their storage on their Legacy filers. Zerowait support and equipment offers a high availability alternative for our customers with tight budgets.

Additionally, every one one of the customers I met was looking at affordable alternatives to NetApp storage and considering our SimplStor product line as the alternative they would select  because of Zerowait’s excellent service and support. For over 20 years we have been providing outstanding customer service to customers requiring high availability technology  services, and it has grown into a global business.

Over the last few weeks I have been working with several of our international clients in the energy, defense, and media sectors to help them solve some of their big data cost issues. Our customers are using RedHat throughout their enterprises and are looking for affordable big  storage solutions.

One of our customers sent us a link a few weeks ago about the updates to XFS and how it is going to be included in the next release of RedHat as a supported file system. The  video link below of Dave Chiner giving a talk provides a great overview of how the improved XFS can help our clients manage their large storage requirements.

Additionally, Redhat’s management  is  aggressively pushing storage development  as Jim Whitehurst – RedHat CEO – has said recently:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/27/i-would-like-to-work-at-red-hat/

“Open source is ultimately where all companies are heading,” Whitehurst stated flatly.

“…So far at Red Hat, my focus as been squarely on our datacenter business, trying to execute really well on our core offerings. I think the future is in the cloud and big data. Our acquisition of Gluster last year and the work we have done around these storage offerings gives us a huge opportunity — an opportunity that I think could actually be bigger than the Linux business.”

Our customers tell us  that they need a way of controlling their storage  costs while maintaining their high availability  storage equipment. After all, it was our NetApp support customers that helped us develop our SimplStor product line because they knew that we could provide them with enterprise level service and support for their hardware.

Yesterday I visited a large defense contractor and in addition to the NetApp support he was getting quotes on he wanted to know if our SimplStor products could help him with his large data archiving project without blowing his budget. It was an interesting conversation, and as with  so many of  our customers there was a recognition that Enterprise hardware support and Enterprise RedHat with a great file system  can provide an affordable high availability storage solution.

As regular readers of this blog know I travel a lot on business to see our global clients, and in the last three weeks I have been in Sydney, NSW; Australia, Dallas, TX; USA , Charlotte, NC; USA, our offices in Wilmington, DE; USA, and the last couple of days I have been in Toronto, ON; Canada.

A lot of the time I am pretty tired due to the time zones and I like to drink coffee. The Flat White that I get in Australia is absolutely the best coffee. Also, in Australia it seems that a lot of business meetings are in the coffee houses or the clubs over a Coopers beer. As you can imagine it is easy to stay hydrated while traveling to visit customers in Sydney, but there is the issue of drinking a lot of Flat White coffee and a lot of beer to contend with. Somehow business gets done, and Zerowait Corp. PTY in Australia is doing quite well.

In the USA, we just don’t have coffee as good as a Flat White. I like Newman’s Own for the Kuerig, and I drink a lot of it especially after I return from a trip to Sydney either in our Dallas, TX office or our Wilmington, DE Headquarters. I drink a lot of coffee in meetings in the USA also, but there are not as many meetings with beer as there are in Sydney. At home I like Sam Adams Cherry wheat on a hot day, or a Shiner Bock just about any time.

For the last couple of days I have been in the Toronto area visiting our customers. And when I am in downtown Toronto I often go to Jimmies Coffee. Today I went there with some customers and we ordered their Flat White. It is not as good as the Flat White I get in Sydney. At dinner with customers in Ontario I like to order the Rickards Red. For lunch in Toronto I like to go to Indian Restaurants, and they are really good here.

I have never done a statistical study of the business derived from meetings with coffee or meetings with beer, it might be an interesting project for a graduate student’s masters thesis. I think meeting personally with our customers helps Zerowait understand what our customers’ needs are and also helps me learn how we can help our customers accomplish their goals easier.

Over the last few years of traveling I have learned that folks around the world like to discuss business over coffee or beer, and that is one of the things that makes my travel schedule enjoyable. And I can dream that someday even the Airlines could make Sydney quality Flat White coffee.

Zerowait provides hardware support and transferable licensed NetApp filers to a lot of Federal, State, and Military organizations. The Federal government and Military, in particular, typically hold on to Enterprise storage equipment longer than the commercial market does. Therefore, Zerowait’s NetApp Legacy support business for government organizations is growing steadily. Zerowait can and does save the agencies tremendous amounts of money, but due to the complex procurement process it takes quite some time to acquire new business from the Government. Perhaps this new IT procurement initiative will make the process a little more efficient.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/74819.html

“Federal agencies will be moving significant portions of their annual IT spending to “commodity” type procurement vehicles by the end of 2012. As part of continuing reforms in IT acquisition and management, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has directed agencies to immediately begin the process of consolidating IT procurement, with a focus on shared service arrangements.

The initiative is designed to accelerate the adoption of more efficient private sector IT acquisition practices by federal agencies.

“The stovepiped and complex nature of the federal enterprise has led over the years to a proliferation of duplicative and low priority investments in information technology,” Jeffrey Zients, acting director of OMB, said in a March 31 memo.”

However, as Doug Gaines mentions in the article:

“OMB states boldly that the new annual portfolio review process will ‘ensure that any inertia, which would relegate the federal government to the status quo, be rooted out on a recurring basis.’ But the Clinger-Cohen law set out to address many of the same issues in 1996, and the pace of progress has been glacial in the following years,” Gaines noted.

“Perhaps growing budget austerity will be the catalyst for real change,” he said.

Zerowait has been providing outstanding service and support to Government agencies for most of our 23 years in business, over the last 15 years our business with Federal, Military, and State IT groups has grown to about 15% of our annual business. As budgets tighten the government organizations we deal with are keeping their equipment longer and are looking for affordable high reliability service and support. And they know they can depend on Zerowait’s affordable high availability alternative to expensive OEM service support programs.

Last week I was in North Carolina visiting customers and at one of my stops our client told me that his NetApp support quote for his 3020 cluster was over $11,000.00 which he thought was ridiculous. He heard about Zerowait from several peers and was interested by what he heard, and so he did some research. His organization is now a customer of ours.

During our conversation he wanted to know about our company, and was surprised to hear that just the week before I was visiting clients in Sydney, Australia. Since 2002 when Zerowait went into the independent service and support business at the request of our NetApp clients, we have grown into a global parts and service business. I believe that the best way to understand your clients’ requirements is to go on as many customer visits as you can. I have learned a lot over the years from visiting with our customers, and occasionally the discussions I have result in new products for our customers.

Our SimplStor products were developed based on the input and requests of our customers, and recently a few of our clients have asked us to provide support for other parts of their network infrastructures. Our HD Rail Kits were also developed based on customer input, and these have proven to be very handy for our customers with constantly growing infrastructures.

Zerowait’s customers know that they can depend on our team to come up with solutions to their problems. And we are helping our clients meet their goals from our offices in around the world.

I spent a good part of March in our Australian office near Sydney. During my  time there I visited several of our customers and friends. Our NetApp support business is well established and growing rapidly in Australia and several customers asked us if we could add support for other equipment to our hardware coverage and support business. Our Australian customers recognize that we provide honest and transparent service and support, and they would like us to maintain more of their systems.

Our internal systems which maintain our inventory of parts and service policies were all written in house, and by making some simple adaptations we can provide service and support for other hardware vendor’s products that our customers want to us to maintain.

Our  Australian customers  often use the term “ the tyranny of distance” to describe the problems they have with the delays in getting freight and the costs associated with deliveries over the vast distances to Australia and within their country.  They like that our global inventory system and service policies automatically track parts delivered from our depots so that their parts replenishment is seamless and quick.

In order to provide our global customers with the global service and support they need we built a highly integrated knowledge base to provide timely information for  our engineers, customers, and warehouse personnel. The only part of the replenishment process that Zerowait does not control is the international freight companies and customs. And no matter how hard we try to overcome the hurdles of international freight and customs, we end up with unexpected delays. Our integrated systems take this into account and we hold extra parts in our Sydney warehouse due to the delays caused by freight companies, customs, and the tyranny of distance.

As our company grows our customers around the world know they can depend on Zerowait to deliver on our promises and to uphold our commitments. Honesty and Transparency are  the most important factors in our growth, since most of our growth is from the referrals of our customers.